The Invention of Nature

20

The Greatest Man Since the Deluge

IN BERLIN, IN the year after the publication of Cosmos’s second volume, Humboldt’s precarious balancing act between his liberal political views and his duties at the Prussian court was getting increasingly difficult. It became almost impossible when, in spring 1848, Europe erupted into unrest. After decades of reactionary politics, a wave of revolutions swept across the continent.

When economic decline and the suppression of political gatherings sparked violent protests in Paris, a terrified King Louis Philippe abdicated on 26 February, and escaped to Britain. Two days later, the French declared the Second Republic and within weeks more revolutions rippled through Italy, Denmark, Hungary and Belgium, among others. In Vienna the conservative Chancellor of State, Prince von Metternich, tried and failed to control uprisings in which students and the working classes had joined forces. On 13 March Metternich resigned and he too fled to London. Two days later the Austrian emperor, Ferdinand I, promised his people a constitution. Rulers across Europe panicked.

As newspapers reported the revolts in Europe that spring, Prussians read the articles aloud to each other in Berlin’s coffee houses. In Munich, Cologne, Leipzig, Weimar and dozens of other German cities and states people rose against their rulers. They were demanding a united Germany, a national parliament and a constitution. In March the King of Bavaria abdicated and the Grand Duke of Baden bowed to the demands of his people and promised freedom of the press and a parliament. In Berlin protesters rallied too, calling for reforms, but the Prussian king, Friedrich Wilhelm IV, was not willing to give up that easily and readied his troops. When 20,000 people gathered to listen to rousing speeches, the king ordered his soldiers to march through the streets of Berlin and to guard his castle.

Prussia’s liberals had long been disappointed by their new king. Humboldt, like so many others, had hoped that Friedrich Wilhelm IV’s accession would have heralded the end of absolutism. In early 1841, during the first months of the new king’s reign, Humboldt had told a friend that he was an enlightened ruler who ‘only had to get rid of a few medieval beliefs’, but he had been wrong. Two years later Humboldt had confessed to the same friend that Friedrich Wilhelm IV ‘does just what he likes’. He adored architecture and all he seemed to care about were schemes for new magnificent buildings, grand parks and great collections of art. When it came to ‘earthly matters’ such as foreign policies, the Prussian people or the economy, he ‘hardly gives them a thought,’ Humboldt complained.

When the king had opened the first ever Prussian parliament in Berlin in April 1847, hopes for reform had been dashed immediately. As people called for a constitution, Friedrich Wilhelm IV had left no doubt that he would never agree. In his opening speech, he had told the delegates that a king ruled by divine right, and never by popular will. Prussia was not going to be a constitutional monarchy. Two months later parliament was dissolved; nothing had been achieved.

In spring 1848, and inspired by the revolutions across Europe, the Prussian people had finally had enough. On 18 March, the revolutionaries in Berlin rolled barrels into the streets, and piled up boxes, planks and bricks to build barricades. They dug up cobblestones and carried them on to the roofs, preparing themselves for a fight. As day turned into evening, the battle began. Stones and tiles were hurled from the rooftops and the first gunshots ricocheted through the streets. Humboldt was at home in his flat in Oranienburger Straße and as the sound of the soldiers’ drums echoed across the city he, like many others, didn’t sleep. Women brought food, wine and coffee to the revolutionaries as the fighting continued throughout the night. Several hundred men died but the king’s troops failed to gain control. That night, Friedrich Wilhelm IV collapsed on a chair and moaned, ‘Oh Lord, oh Lord, have you abandoned me completely?’

Humboldt believed that reforms were essential but disliked rioting mobs and brutal police intervention – he had envisaged an earlier, slower and therefore more peaceful change. Like many other liberals, he longed to see a united Germany but hoped it would be governed by consent and parliament, rather than by blood and fear. Now, as hundreds died in the streets of Berlin, the seventy-eight-year-old Humboldt found himself caught between the lines.

As the revolutionaries in Berlin took control of the city, a frightened Friedrich Wilhelm IV conceded and promised a constitution and a national parliament. On 19 March he agreed to withdraw his troops. That night the streets of Berlin were illuminated and the people celebrated their victory. Instead of gunshots, there was singing and jubilation. On 21 March, only three days after the fighting had begun, the king displayed his defeat symbolically by riding through Berlin draped in the black, red and gold colours of the revolutionaries.¹ Back at the palace where crowds had gathered, the king appeared on the balcony. Humboldt stood behind him in silence and bowed to the people below. The next day Humboldt ignored his obligations to the king and marched at the head of the funeral procession for the fallen revolutionaries.

Friedrich Wilhelm IV had never minded his chamberlain’s revolutionary leanings. He appreciated Humboldt’s knowledge and avoided their ‘differences in political opinions’. Others were less easy with Humboldt’s position. He was called an ‘ultraliberal’ by a Prussian thinker and a ‘revolutionist in court favour’ by one minister, while the king’s brother, Prince William (later Emperor William I) thought Humboldt a threat to the existing order.

Humboldt was used to manoeuvring around different political views. Twenty-five years earlier in Paris, he had smoothly circumnavigated reactionary and revolutionary lines in France without ever really risking his position. ‘He is well aware that while he gets too liberal,’ Charles Lyell had written, ‘he is in no danger of losing the station and the advantages which his birth ensures for him.’

In private, Humboldt criticized European rulers with his usual sarcasm. When Queen Victoria had invited him during one of her visits to Germany, he mocked that she had fed him ‘hard pork chops and cold chicken’ for breakfast as well as displaying complete ‘philosophical abstinence’. After meeting the Crown Prince of Württemberg and the future kings of Denmark, England and Bavaria at Friedrich Wilhelm IV’s palace Sanssouci, Humboldt described them to a friend as a group of heirs apparent that consisted of ‘a spineless pale one, a drunken Icelander, a blind political fanatic and an obstinate feeble-witted’. This, Humboldt joked, was the ‘future of the monarchical world’.

Some admired Humboldt’s ability to serve a royal master while maintaining the ‘courage to have his own opinion’. The King of Hanover, Ernst August I, however, remarked that Humboldt was ‘always the same, always republican, and always in the antechamber of the palace’. But it was probably Humboldt’s ability to inhabit both these worlds that allowed him so much freedom. Otherwise, as he admitted himself, he might have been thrown out of the country, for being ‘a revolutionary and the author of the godless Cosmos’.

As Humboldt watched the revolutions in the German states unfold, there was a brief moment when reform seemed possible but it was over almost as quickly as it had begun. The German states decided to appoint a National Assembly to discuss the future of a united Germany but by the end of May 1848, a little more than two months after the first gunshot had been fired in Berlin, Humboldt wasn’t sure if he was more frustrated about the king, the Prussian ministers or the delegates of the National Assembly that had convened in Frankfurt.

Even those who conceded that reforms were necessary couldn’t agree what this new Germany should be comprised of. Humboldt believed that a united Germany should be based on the principles of federalism. Some power should remain with the different states, he explained, without ignoring the ‘organism and the unity of the whole’ – underlining his argument by using the same terminology as he did when talking about nature.

There were those who favoured a union for purely economic reasons – envisaging a Germany without tariffs and trade barriers – but also nationalists who glorified a shared and romanticized Germanic past. Even if they were to agree, there were different opinions on where the borders should lie and which states were to be included. Some proposed a greater Germany (Grossdeutschland) that included Austria, while others preferred a smaller nation (Kleindeutschland) led by Prussia. These seemingly endless disagreements made for messy negotiations, as arguments were put forward, then overturned and discussions stalled. Meanwhile the more conservative forces had time to regroup.

By spring 1849, a year after the revolts, all the revolutionaries’ gains were repudiated. The prospects, Humboldt thought, were gloomy. When the National Assembly in Frankfurt – after much back and forth – finally decided to offer the imperial crown to Friedrich Wilhelm IV so that he could lead a constitutional monarchy of a united Germany, they were squarely rebutted. The king, who only a year earlier had worn the revolutionary German tricolour in fear of the mob, now felt confident enough to decline the offer. The delegates did not have a real crown to give, Friedrich Wilhelm IV declared, because only God was able to do so. This crown was one of ‘dirt and clay’, he told one of the delegates, and not a ‘diadem of the divine right of kings’. It was ‘a dog collar’, he fumed, with which the people wanted to chain him to the revolution. Germany was far from being a united nation, and in May 1849 the delegates of the National Assembly returned home with little to show for their efforts.

Humboldt was deeply disappointed with revolutions and revolutionaries. During his lifetime the Americans had declared independence, yet they continued to spread what he called the ‘pest of slavery’. In the months before the 1848 events in Europe, Humboldt had followed news of the war that the United States had waged with Mexico – shocked, as he said, by America’s imperial behaviour which reminded him of ‘the old Spanish Conquista’. As a young man he had witnessed the French Revolution but also Napoleon crown himself emperor. Later, he had watched Simón Bolívar liberate the South American colonies from Spanish tyranny, only then to see ‘El Libertador’ declare himself dictator. And now his own country had failed miserably. At the age of eighty, he wrote in November 1849, he was reduced to the ‘worn-out hope’ that the people’s desire for reforms had not disappeared for ever. Though it may seem ‘to be asleep’ periodically, he still hoped that their wish for change was in fact ‘eternal as the electromagnetic storm which sparkles in the sun’. Perhaps the next generation would succeed.

As so often before, he now buried himself in work to escape these ‘endless oscillations’. When one delegate from the Frankfurt National Assembly asked Humboldt how he could possibly work through such turbulent times, he stoically replied that he had seen so many revolutions during his long life that the novelty and excitement were wearing off. Instead he concentrated on finishing Cosmos.

When Humboldt had published the second volume of Cosmos in 1847 – which he had originally intended as the final one – he had quickly realized that he had yet more to say. Unlike the first two, though, the third volume would be a more specialized tome about ‘cosmical phaenomena’, ranging from the stars and planets to the velocity of light and comets. As the sciences advanced, Humboldt struggled to be a ‘master of the materials’ but he never had problems admitting when he failed to understand a new theory. Determined to include all the latest discoveries, he simply asked others to explain them to him, urging speed because at his age he was running out of time – ‘those half dead are riding fast,’ he said. Cosmos was like a ‘goblin on his shoulder’.

On the back of the success of the first two volumes of Cosmos, Humboldt also published a new and extended edition of his favourite book, Views of Nature – first in German and then, in quick succession, two competing English editions. There was also a new but unauthorized English translation of Personal Narrative. And in order to make some extra money, Humboldt tried, albeit unsuccessfully, to sell the idea of a ‘Micro-Cosmos’ – a more affordable and shorter one-volume digest of Cosmos – to his German publisher.

In December 1850 Humboldt published the first half of the third volume of Cosmos, and a year later the other half. In the introduction he wrote that ‘it remains for the third and last volume of my work to supply some of the deficiencies of the earlier ones.’ But no sooner had he written that, than he started the fourth volume, this time focusing on the earth, covering geomagnetism, volcanoes and earthquakes. It seemed as if he might never stop.

Age had not slowed him. Besides his writing and his duties at court, Humboldt also welcomed a never-ending string of visitors. One was Simón Bolívar’s former aide-de-camp, General Daniel O’Leary, who called at Humboldt’s Berlin apartment in April 1853. The two men spent an afternoon reminiscing about the revolution and Bolívar who had died of tuberculosis in 1830. By now Humboldt was so famous that it had also become a rite of passage for Americans to visit the old man. One American travel writer said that he had come to Berlin not to see museums and galleries but ‘for the sake of seeing and speaking with the world’s greatest living man’.²

Humboldt also continued to assist young scientists, artists and explorers, often helping them financially despite his own debts. The Swiss geologist and palaeontologist Louis Agassiz, who emigrated to the United States, profited several times from Humboldt’s ‘usual benevolence’, for example. On another occasion Humboldt gave a young mathematician a hundred thalers and also organized free meals at the university for the royal coffee maker’s son. He brought artists to the king’s attention and encouraged the director of the Neues Museum in Berlin to purchase paintings and drawings. Humboldt told a friend that, since he had no family of his own, these young men were like his children.

As the mathematician Friedrich Gauß said, the zeal with which Humboldt helped and encouraged others was ‘one of the most wonderful jewels in Humboldt’s crown’. It also meant that Humboldt ruled over the destinies of scientists across the world. Becoming one of Humboldt’s protégés could make one’s career. It was even rumoured that he now controlled the outcome of elections at the Académie des Sciences in Paris, with candidates first auditioning at Humboldt’s Berlin apartment before they went to the Académie. A letter of recommendation from Humboldt could determine their future, and those who opposed him came to fear his sharp tongue. Humboldt had studied venomous snakes in South America ‘and learned a lot from them’, one young scientist claimed.

Despite the occasional sneer, Humboldt was mostly generous, and explorers, in particular, profited. He encouraged his old acquaintance and Darwin’s friend, the botanist Joseph Dalton Hooker, to travel to the Himalaya, and used his London contacts to convince the British government to finance the expedition – as well as equipping Hooker with copious instructions on what to measure, observe and collect. A few years later, in 1854, Humboldt helped three German brothers, Hermann, Rudolph and Adolf Schlagintweit – the ‘shamrock’, as he nicknamed them – to travel to India and the Himalaya where they were to study the earth’s magnetic fields. These explorers became Humboldt’s small army of researchers, providing the global data he needed to complete Cosmos. Although he had accepted that he was too old to see the Himalaya himself, his failure to climb those great mountains remained his greatest disappointment – ‘nothing in my life has filled me with a more intense regret.’

He also encouraged artists to travel to the remote corners of the globe, helping them to secure funding, suggesting routes and sometimes complaining when they failed to follow his recommendations. His instructions were exact and detailed. One German artist was equipped with a long list of plants that Humboldt had asked him to paint. He was to depict ‘real landscapes’, Humboldt wrote, rather than idealized scenes as artists had done for the past centuries. He even described where exactly the painter should position himself on a mountain in order to capture the best view.

He wrote hundreds of letters of recommendation. And whenever a letter of support from Humboldt arrived at its destination, the ‘business of deciphering’ began. His handwriting – impossible ‘microscopic-hieroglyphic lines’, as he himself admitted – had always been appalling but with age it deteriorated further. Letters were passed between friends, with each one decrypting another word, phrase or sentence. Even when magnifying glasses were applied to his tiny scrawl, it often took days to work out what Humboldt had written.

In return Humboldt received even more letters. In the mid-1850s, he estimated that 2,500 to 3,000 letters arrived each year. His apartment in Oranienburger Straße, he complained, had become a trading place for addresses. He didn’t mind the scientific letters but he was pestered by what he called his ‘ludicrous correspondence’ – midwives and schoolteachers who hoped for royal medals, for example, or autograph hunters and even a group of women who pursued his ‘conversion’ to their particular religious denomination. He received enquiries about hot-air balloons, requests for help with emigration and ‘offers to nurse me’.

Some letters, though, brought him joy, and in particular those that arrived from his old travelling companion Aimé Bonpland who had never returned to Europe after his departure to South America in 1816. After an almost ten-year imprisonment in Paraguay, Bonpland had suddenly been released in 1831 but had decided to remain in his adopted home. Now in his early eighties, Bonpland farmed some land in Argentina near the border with Paraguay. There he lived in rural simplicity, growing fruit trees and going on occasional plant hunting trips.

The two old men corresponded about plants, politics and friends. Humboldt sent his latest books and informed Bonpland about political events in Europe. Life at the Prussian court had not broken his liberal ideals, he assured Bonpland, he still believed in freedom and equality. As both men grew older, their letters became increasingly tender, reminding each other of their long friendship and shared adventures. There was not a week, Humboldt wrote, when he didn’t think of Bonpland. They felt even more drawn to each other as time passed and their mutual friends died one after another. ‘We survive,’ Humboldt wrote after three of their scientific colleagues – including his close friend Arago – had died within three months, ‘but, alas, the immensity of the ocean separates us.’ Bonpland was also longing to see him. How much one needed a close friend to share the ‘secret feelings of one’s heart’, he wrote. In 1854, aged eighty-one, Bonpland was still talking about visiting Europe to embrace Humboldt. Then, in May 1858, Bonpland died in Paraguay, his name almost forgotten back home in France.

Aimé Bonpland (Illustration Credit 20.1)

Meanwhile Humboldt had become the most famous scientist of his age, not just in Europe but across the world. His portrait was placed in the Great Exhibition in London and also hung in palaces as remote as that of the King of Siam in Bangkok. His birthday was celebrated as far away as Hong Kong and one American journalist claimed: ‘Ask any schoolboy who Humboldt is, and the answer will be given.’

The US Secretary of War, John B. Floyd, sent Humboldt nine North American maps that showed all the different towns, counties, mountains and rivers that were named after him. His name, Floyd wrote, was a ‘household word’ throughout the country. In the past it had even been suggested that the Rocky Mountains should be renamed ‘Humboldt Andes’ – and by now several counties and towns, a river, bays, lakes and mountains in the United States carried his name, as did a hotel in San Francisco and the Humboldt Times newspaper in Eureka, California. Half flattered and half embarrassed, Humboldt quipped when he heard that yet another river had been named after him that he was 350 miles long and only had a few tributaries – but ‘I am full of fish,’ he said. There were so many ships that were named after him that he declared them his ‘naval power’.

Newspapers across the world monitored the health and activities of the ageing scientist. When rumours spread that he was ill and an anatomist from Dresden requested his skull, Humboldt jokingly replied that ‘I need my head for a little while longer, but later I would be only too happy to oblige.’ A female admirer asked if Humboldt could send her a telegraph when he was about to die so that she could rush to his deathbed to close his eyes. With such fame also came gossip, and Humboldt was not pleased when French newspapers reported that he had had an affair with the ‘ugly baroness Berzelius’, the widow of the Swedish chemist Jöns Jacob Berzelius. It was not entirely clear whether he was more offended by the idea of having had an affair or by the assumption that he could have chosen someone so unattractive.

In his mid-eighties, and feeling like a ‘half-petrified curiosity’, Humboldt remained interested in everything new. For all his love of nature, he was fascinated by the possibilities of technology. He questioned visitors about their journeys on steamboats and was amazed that it took only ten days to travel from Europe to Boston or Philadelphia. Railways, steamships and telegraphs ‘made space shrink’, he declared. For decades he had also been trying to convince his North and South American friends that a canal across the narrow isthmus of Panama would prove an important trade route and a viable engineering project. As early as 1804, during his visit to the United States, he had sent suggestions to James Madison, and later he had persuaded Bolívar to have the area surveyed by two engineers. He continued to write about the canal for the rest of his life.

Humboldt’s admiration for telegraphs, for example, was also so widely known that one acquaintance dispatched to him from America a small section of a cable – ‘a piece of Sub-Atlantic Telegraph’. For two decades Humboldt corresponded with inventor Samuel Morse, after seeing his telegraphic apparatus in Paris in the 1830s. In 1856 Morse, who also developed the Morse code, wrote to Humboldt to report on his experiments regarding a subterranean line between Ireland and Newfoundland. Humboldt’s interest was unsurprising since a communication line between Europe and America would have allowed him to get instant answers from scientists on the other side of the Atlantic about a missing fact for Cosmos.³

Despite all the attention, Humboldt often felt removed from his contemporaries. Loneliness had been his loyal companion throughout his life. Neighbours reported that they saw the old man on the street, feeding the sparrows in the early morning hours, and that a solitary light flickered from the window of his study deep into the night as he worked on the fourth volume of Cosmos. Humboldt still liked to walk every day, and could be seen with his head bowed, slowly meandering in the shadow of the great lime trees of the grand avenue of Unter den Linden in Berlin. And whenever he stayed with the king in the palace in Potsdam, Humboldt liked to wander up the little hill – ‘our Potsdam Chimborazo’ as he called it – to the observatory there.

The famous boulevard Unter den Linden – with the university and the Academy of Sciences to the right (Illustration Credit 20.2)

When Charles Lyell visited Berlin in 1856, shortly before Humboldt’s eighty-seventh birthday, the British geologist reported that he found him just as ‘I knew him more than thirty years ago, quite up to all that is going on in many departments’. Humboldt was still quick and sharp, he had few wrinkles and his white hair was full. There was ‘nothing flabby about the face’, another visitor remarked. Though he had become ‘meagre with age’, Humboldt’s whole body was animated when he was talking and people forgot how old he was. There was still ‘all the fire and spirit’ of a man of thirty in Humboldt, one American said. He remained as restless as he had been as a young man. Many noticed how impossible it was for Humboldt just to sit. One moment he was standing at his shelves searching for a book, and at another bending over a table to roll out some drawings. He was still able to stand for eight hours if he had to, he boasted. His only concession to age was the admission that he was no longer agile enough to climb the ladder to reach for a book from the top shelf in his study.

Humboldt still lived in his rented apartment in Oranienburger Straße and his finances remained precarious. He didn’t even possess a complete set of his own books because it was too expensive. Humboldt was living above his means but continued to support young scientists. By the 10th of the month he had usually run out of money and sometimes had to borrow from his devoted servant Johann Seifert, who had been in Humboldt’s service for three decades. Seifert had accompanied Humboldt to Russia and now ran the household at Oranienburger Straße together with his wife.

Most visitors were surprised by the simplicity of Humboldt’s living arrangements: an apartment in a plain house not far from the university that his brother Wilhelm had founded. Whenever visitors arrived, they were welcomed by Seifert. He would take them to the second-floor flat where they would walk through a room filled with stuffed birds, rock specimens and other natural history objects, then on through the library and into the study where the walls were lined with yet more bookcases. The rooms overflowed with manuscripts and drawings, scientific instruments and more stuffed animals, as well as folios filled with pressed plants, rolled-up maps, busts, portraits and even a pet chameleon. There was a ‘magnificent’ leopard skin on the plain wooden floor. A parrot interrupted conversations when it shouted Humboldt’s most common instruction to his servant: ‘Much sugar, much coffee, Mr Seifert.’ Boxes cluttered the floor and the desk was surrounded by piles of books. A globe stood on one of the side tables in the library, and whenever Humboldt talked about a particular mountain, river or town he would get up and spin it.

Humboldt hated the cold and kept his apartment at an almost unbearable level of tropical heat, which his visitors quietly suffered. When conversing with foreigners, Humboldt spoke in several languages at the same time, switching within a sentence between German, French, Spanish and English. Although he was losing his hearing, he had lost none of his wit. First comes deafness, he joked, and then ‘imbecility’. The only reason for his ‘celebrity’, he told an acquaintance, was because he had lived to such an old age. Many visitors commented on his boyish humour, such as his much repeated joke about his chameleon which was like ‘many clerics’, he said, in its ability to look with one eye to the heavens and with the other to the earth.

He advised travellers where they should go, suggested books to read and people to meet. He talked about science, nature, art and politics, never tiring of asking those who came from the United States about slavery and the oppression of Native Americans. It was a ‘stain’ on the American nation, he said.⁴ He was particularly furious when a pro-slavery southerner published an English edition of his Political Essay on the Island of Cuba, in 1856, in which all his criticism of slavery had been edited out. Outraged, Humboldt issued a press release that was published in newspapers across the United States, denouncing the edition and declaring that the deleted sections were the most important in the book.

Most visitors were impressed at how alert the old man remained, with one recalling how an ‘uninterrupted stream of the richest knowledge’ poured out of Humboldt. But all this attention drained his strength. It didn’t help that he was now receiving up to 4,000 letters a year and still writing 2,000 himself, feeling ‘unrelentingly persecuted by my own correspondence’. Luckily, his constitution had been remarkably strong in the past decades. He had suffered only from the occasional stomach complaint, colds and an uncomfortably itchy skin rash.

In early September 1856, just days before his eighty-seventh birthday, he told a friend that he was becoming weaker. Two months later, during a visit to an exhibition in Potsdam, he nearly got seriously injured when a painting fell off the wall and crashed on to him – luckily his sturdy top hat took most of the impact. Then, during the night of 25 February 1857, his servant Johann Seifert heard a noise and rose to find Humboldt lying on the floor. Seifert called the doctor who came rushing to the apartment. Humboldt had had a minor stroke and the doctor announced that there was not much hope of recovery. Meanwhile the patient was recording all his symptoms with his usual meticulousness: temporary paralysis, pulse unchanged, sight preserved and so on. For the next few weeks Humboldt was confined to bed which he hated. Being ‘much unoccupied in my bed’, he wrote in March, increased his ‘sadness and discontent with the world’.

To everybody’s surprise Humboldt did get better, although he never quite regained his full strength. The ‘machinery’, he said, was ‘rusty, at my age’. Friends commented that his walking had become unsteady but out of pride and vanity he refused to use a stick. In July 1857 Friedrich Wilhelm IV had a stroke that left him partially paralysed and unable to rule – the king’s brother Wilhelm became regent – and with that Humboldt could finally retire from his official position at court. He continued to visit Friedrich Wilhelm IV, but wasn’t expected to be there all the time.

In December the fourth volume of Cosmos, which focused on the earth and carried the rather cumbersome subtitle ‘Special Results of Observation in the Domain of Telluric Phenomena’, finally rolled off the printing press. It was a dense scientific book with little similarity to Humboldt’s earlier publications. It was still printed as an edition of 15,000 but the sales were nothing like those of the first two volumes which had appealed to a more general readership. But Humboldt nevertheless felt compelled to add another volume – a continuation, as he explained, with yet more information about the earth and the distribution of plants. The writing of the fifth volume was a race against death, he admitted, as he bombarded the librarian at the royal library with constant requests for books. But it was all getting to be a bit much. With his short-term memory now declining, Humboldt found that he was constantly searching through his notes or mislaying books.

Humboldt in 1857 (Illustration Credit 20.3)

That year, when two of the three Schlagintweit brothers returned from their Himalaya expedition, they were shocked to see just how old Humboldt had become. They were excited to tell him that they had verified his controversial hypothesis about the different heights of the line of permanent snow on the northern and southern slopes of the Himalaya. To their surprise, though, Humboldt insisted that he had never said such a thing. To prove that he had indeed come up with the theory, the brothers went to his study and pulled from the shelves Humboldt’s own essay on the subject that he had written in 1820. With tears in their eyes, they realized that Humboldt simply could not remember.

At the same time Humboldt continued to be ‘unmercifully tormented’ by the volume of letters which had now reached almost 5,000 a year, but he refused any help. He disliked private secretaries, he announced, because dictated letters were too ‘formal and business-like’. In December 1858 he was again confined to bed – this time with flu, feeling ill and miserable.

In February 1859 Humboldt had recovered enough to join seventy Americans in Berlin to celebrate George Washington’s birthday. He was still weak but determined to finish the fifth volume of Cosmos. Finally, on 15 March 1859, six months before his ninetieth birthday, Humboldt placed an advertisement in the newspapers: ‘Labouring under extreme depression of spirits, the result of a correspondence which daily increases’, he was asking the world ‘to try and persuade the people of the two continents not to be so busy about me’. He begged the world to allow him to ‘enjoy some leisure, and have time to work’. A month later, on 19 April, he dispatched the manuscript of the fifth volume of Cosmos to his publisher. Two days later, Humboldt collapsed.

When his health didn’t improve the newspapers in Berlin began to publish daily bulletins: on 2 May it was reported that Humboldt was ‘very weak’, the next day that his condition was ‘in a high degree doubtful’, then ‘critical’ with violent coughing fits and breathing difficulties, and by 5 May that his weakness was ‘increasing’. On the morning of 6 May 1859 it was announced that the strength of the patient was failing ‘from hour to hour’. That afternoon, at 2.30 p.m., Humboldt opened his eyes one more time as the sun caressed the walls of his bedroom and uttered his last words: ‘How glorious these sunbeams are! They seem to call Earth to the Heavens!’ He was eighty-nine when he died.

The shock rippled across the world, from the European capitals to the United States, from Panama City and Lima to small towns in South Africa. ‘The great, good and venerated Humboldt is no more!’ wrote the United States ambassador to Prussia in a dispatch to the State Department in Washington, DC, which took more than ten days to arrive in America. A telegraph from Berlin reached London’s newsrooms only hours after Humboldt had died, announcing that ‘Berlin is plunged in sorrow’. On the same day, but unaware of the events in Germany, Charles Darwin wrote from his home in Kent to his publisher in London informing him that he was going to send the first six chapters of Origin of Species shortly. In perfect reverse synchronization, as Humboldt had slowly declined, Darwin had been speeding up, finishing the manuscript of the book that would shake the scientific world.

Two days after his death, English newspapers ran long obituaries and reports about Humboldt. The first line of a long article in The Times in London simply stated: ‘Alexander von Humboldt is dead’. On the same day, as the British picked up their newspapers and read about Humboldt’s death, hundreds of people in New York were queuing to see a magnificent painting that had been inspired by him: The Heart of the Andes, by the young American painter Frederic Edwin Church.

The painting was so sensational that long lines of keen visitors snaked around the block, waiting for hours to pay a 25 cent entrance fee to see the five-by-ten-foot canvas that depicted the Andes in all their glory. The river rapids in the centre of the painting were so realistic that people could almost feel the spray of the water. Trees, leaves and flowers were all rendered so accurately that botanists were able to identify them precisely, while the snow-capped mountains stood majestically in the background. More than any other painter Church had answered Humboldt’s appeal to unite art and science. He admired Humboldt so much that he had followed his hero’s route through South America on foot and mules.

The Heart of the Andes combined beauty with the most meticulous geological, botanical and scientific detail – it was Humboldt’s concept of interconnectedness writ large on canvas. The painting transported the viewer into the wilderness of South America. Church was, the New York Times declared, the ‘artistic Humboldt of the new world’. On 9 May, and unaware that Humboldt had died three days earlier, Church wrote to a friend that he planned to send the painting to Berlin to show the old man the ‘scenery which delighted his eyes sixty years ago’.

The next morning in Germany, tens of thousands of mourners followed Humboldt’s state funeral procession from his apartment along Unter den Linden to Berlin Cathedral. Black flags fluttered in the wind and the streets were lined with people. The king’s horses pulled the hearse with the simple oak coffin which was decorated with two wreaths and escorted by students who carried palm leaves. It was the grandest funeral that the citizens of Berlin had ever seen for a private individual. University professors and members of the Academy of the Sciences came, as did soldiers, diplomats and politicians. There were craftsmen, tradesmen, shopkeepers, artists, poets, actors and writers. As the hearse slowly progressed, Humboldt’s relatives and their families followed with his servant Johann Seifert. The line of mourners stretched for a mile. Church bells rang through the streets and the royal family waited in Berlin Cathedral for the final goodbyes. That night the coffin was brought to Tegel where Humboldt was buried in the family cemetery.

The Humboldt family grave at Schloss Tegel (Illustration Credit 20.4)

When the steamer that carried the news of Humboldt’s death reached the United States in mid-May, thinkers, artists and scientists alike grieved. It was as if he had ‘lost a friend’, Frederic Edwin Church said. One of Humboldt’s former protégés, the scientist Louis Agassiz, delivered a eulogy to the Academy of Art and Sciences in Boston during which he claimed that every child in America’s schools had its mind fed ‘from the labors of Humboldt’s brain’. On 19 May 1859 newspapers across America reported the death of the man whom many called the ‘most remarkable’ ever born. They had been lucky to have lived in what they now called the ‘age of Humboldt’.

For the next few decades Humboldt’s reputation continued to loom large. On 14 September 1869 tens of thousands of people celebrated the centennial of his birth with festivities around the globe – in New York and Berlin, in Mexico City and Adelaide, and countless others. More than twenty years after Humboldt’s death, Darwin still called him the ‘greatest scientific traveller who ever lived’. Darwin never stopped using Humboldt’s books. In 1881, aged seventy-two, he picked up the third volume of Personal Narrative once again. When he was done, Darwin wrote ‘April 3rd 1882 finished’ on the back cover. Sixteen days later, on 19 April, he too was dead.

Darwin was not alone in admiring Humboldt’s works. Humboldt had scattered the ‘seeds’ from which new sciences grew, one German scientist claimed. Humboldt’s concept of nature also spread across disciplines – into the arts and literature. His ideas seeped into the poems of Walt Whitman and into the novels of Jules Verne. Aldous Huxley referred to Humboldt’s Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain in his own travel book, Beyond the Mexique Bay, in 1934, and in the mid-twentieth century his name appeared in the poems of Ezra Pound and Erich Fried. One hundred and thirty years after Humboldt’s death, the Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez resurrected him in The General in his Labyrinth, his fictionalized account of the last days of Simón Bolívar.

For many, Humboldt was, as the Prussian king Friedrich Wilhelm IV had said, simply ‘the greatest man since the Deluge’.

¹ The origin of the German colours black, red and gold is not entirely clear but a particularly independently minded group of Prussian soldiers who had fought against Napoleon’s army between 1813 and 1815 had worn black uniforms with red facings and golden brass buttons. Later, when radical student fraternities were banned in many German states, the colours became a symbol for the fight for unity and liberty. The 1848 revolutionaries used them widely and the colours would later be adopted for the German flag.

² Humboldt liked Americans and always welcomed them warmly. ‘To be an American was an almost certain passport to his presence,’ one visitor recalled. There was a saying in Berlin that the liberal Humboldt would rather receive an American than a prince.

³ Only two years later, in August 1858, the first telegraphic message between England and the United States was exchanged through the first transatlantic cable – but within a month the cable failed. It would take until 1866 to lay a new working line.

⁴ There was nothing Humboldt could do about the United States, but he succeeded in getting a law passed that freed slaves the moment they set foot on Prussian soil – one of his few political achievements. The draft bill was completed in November 1856, and was passed into law in March 1857.