The ship followed Columbus’s route, going first to the Canary Islands, and though it was Humboldt’s intention to commence his scientific discovery of the New World at Cuba, the Spanish captain, after an outbreak of typhoid fever on board, decided to put the two explorers ashore at Cumaná, on the coast of present-day Venezuela, or New Granada, as it was then known.
They landed, bag and baggage, on July 16. Their gear included forty-odd scientific instruments, the most versatile and finest available at the time and just the sort of thing Thomas Jefferson would have found fascinating. Included were a tiny, two-inch sextant (a so-called snuffbox sextant), compasses, a microscope, barometers and thermometers that had been standardized with those of the Paris observatory before departure, three different kinds of electrometers, a device for measuring the specific gravity of seawater, telescopes, a theodolite, a Leyden jar, an instrument by which the blueness of the sky could be determined, a large and cumbersome magnetometer, and a rain gauge. Their excitement was enormous. No botanist, no naturalist or scientist of any kind, had ever been there before them. Everything was new, even the stars in the sky. “We are here in a divine country,” Humboldt wrote to his brother. “What trees, Coconut trees, fifty to sixty feet high, Poinciana pulcherrima, with a foot-high bouquet of magnificent, bright-red flowers; pisang and a host of trees with enormous leaves and scented flowers, as big as the palm of a hand, of which we knew nothing…And what colors in birds, fish, even crayfish (sky blue and yellow)! We rush around like the demented; in the first three days we were quite unable to classify anything; we pick up one object to throw it away for the next. Bonpland keeps telling me that he will go mad if the wonders do not cease soon.”
And then they were on the move. For three months they explored and mapped the coastal plain, collecting some sixteen hundred plants—palms, orchids, grasses, bamboos—among which they were able to identify six hundred new species. They witnessed a total eclipse, an earthquake, and, on a night in November, a spectacular meteor shower that went on for hours. They paddled up the Apure River to its confluence with the Orinoco and there commenced what was to be their major effort: they would trace the Orinoco to its source, something no one had done before, and establish that there is a connection, by the Rio Negro, between the Orinoco and the Amazon.
In all—on the Apure, the Orinoco, the Atabapo, the Negro, and Casiquiare—they spent seventy-five days in open boats or canoes, traveling an estimated 6,443 miles through one of the most difficult and little-known places on Earth. Sometimes, on the Casiquiare, for example, they could make almost no headway against the current, they and their Indian guides rowing strenuously for fourteen hours to go all of nine miles. The smothering humidity and torrential rains destroyed most of their provisions. For weeks they lived on bananas and ants, or an occasional fried monkey.
They went as far as Esmeralda, a tiny mosquito-infested village, which Humboldt put on his map and which, curiously, remains on most every map of South America to this day despite the fact that there is no longer a single trace of the place. By September 1, 1800, when they again reached Cumaná, they had beheld, examined, sketched, collected, and classified more plants than any botanist before them (some twelve thousand, by their count). They had gathered rock samples, fishes and reptiles placed in phials, the skins of animals—enough in fact to keep Humboldt occupied for the rest of his life. Yet they had been barely able to collect a tenth of what they had seen, and the humidity and insects had destroyed more than a third of what they had in their plant boxes.
They themselves, miraculously, held up very well. For two such thoroughly inexperienced, ill-prepared young Europeans to have plunged ahead as they did, knowing nothing of life in the jungle, virtually unequipped by modern standards, had been both amazingly presumptuous and reckless. Bonpland did not even know how to swim. Yet they withstood the broiling climate and every other kind of tropical discomfort with little more to protect them than their own “cheerful character,” as Humboldt noted. “With some gaiety of temper,” he said, “with feelings of mutual good will, and with a vivid taste for the majestic grandeur of these vast valleys of rivers, travelers easily supported evils that become habitual.” The mosquitoes he described as being an atmosphere unto themselves, covering the face, the hands, filling the nostrils. Invariably, he said, they “occasion coughing and sneezing whenever any attempt is made to speak in the open air”—terrible punishment for someone who so loved to talk.
To avoid the suffocating heat, he and Bonpland often started the day at two in the morning. Their only salvation from the mosquitoes was to bury themselves in sand.
Toward the end of their journey back down the Orinoco, both men came down with typhoid fever. Bonpland very nearly died, but Humboldt, who had been troubled by ill health most of his life, made a rapid recovery and except for that one instance remained perfectly fit throughout, healthier than at any time in his life. He seemed made for the tropics. The days were never long enough. His spirits soared. This for him was life at its fullest and best. “I could not possibly have been placed in circumstances more highly favorable for study and exploration,” he wrote to his brother. “I am free from the distractions constantly arising in civilized life from social claims. Nature offers unceasingly the most novel and fascinating objects for learning.”
He believed, this brilliant, determined young man being eaten alive by mosquitoes, that there is a harmony of nature, that man is a part of that harmony, and that if he himself could observe things closely enough, collect enough—if he knew enough—then the forces that determine that harmony would become apparent.
Nothing seems to have escaped his notice. His physical energy was boundless—incredible really. Literally everything seems to have interested him. He sketched, he made astronomical observations, magnetic observations. He gathered up rocks and minerals and Indian artifacts. Above all, he kept the most copious notes imaginable—on tides, soils, petroleum, chocolate, rubber; on missionaries; on the physique of the Carib Indian, the anatomy of shellfish; on turtle eggs, howling monkeys, alligators (one found sunning itself on a sandbank on the Orinoco measured twenty-two feet); on vampire bats and poison darts and electric eels (wonder of wonders); on the nighttime cacophony of the jungle and the sudden silence imposed by the roar of the jaguar (an observation that would intrigue Audubon); on a tribe of Indians, the Otomaco, that overcame annual seasons of famine by eating a particular kind of dirt; on a dark, ugly nocturnal bird called the guacharo (the oilbird), a bird about the size of a chicken, which he encountered in screeching hordes inside a gloomy grotto; on the ravages of termites; on an exotic tree that gave milk (it was actually an Artocarpus, which had been brought to America by the Spanish only a score of years earlier); on the great grass fires that lit up the night on the Ilanos, the sweeping plains that reach southward from Caracas; on Indian legends, Indian diet, Indian apathy, Indian languages. (W. H. Hudson, the great English author whose classic Green Mansions is set in the same general locale, would tell a story that Humboldt acquired a parrot from which he was able to produce the vocabulary of an extinct tribe, and that Humboldt later took the bird back to Paris, where it became something of a sensation. Humboldt makes no mention of such a bird in his own writings, but he did include the vocabulary in question in his discussion of comparative native tongues.)
Few Europeans had ever responded with such fervor to an equatorial wilderness as Alexander von Humboldt. Sir Walter Raleigh, two hundred years earlier, on his own famous and abortive expedition up the Orinoco, wrote that he had never seen a more beautiful country and described “all fair green grass, deer crossing our path, the birds toward evening singing on every side a thousand different tunes, herons of white, crimson, and carnation perching on the riverside…” Humboldt had read every word Raleigh had written, and his response was no less to a world that had changed not in the slightest in all the intervening time. Often he-found himself emotionally overwhelmed by his surroundings, and his notebook entries were set down with a
depth of feeling that had little to do with science. There was, for example, the moment on April 15 when he and his party first reached the mouth of the Apure and beheld the Orinoco:
In leaving the Rio Apure we found ourselves in a country presenting a totally different aspect. An immense plain of water stretched before us like a lake, as far as we could see. White-topped waves rose to the height of several feet, from the conflict of the breeze and the current. The air resounded no longer with the piercing cries of herons, flamingos, and spoonbills, crossing in long files from one shore to the other…All nature appeared less animated. Scarcely could we discover in the hollows of the waves a few large crocodiles, cutting obliquely by the help of their long tails the surface of the agitated waters. The horizon was bounded by a zone of forests, which nowhere reached so far as the bed of the river. A vast beach, constantly parched by the heat of the sun, desert and bare as the shores of the sea, resembled at a distance, from the effect of the mirage, pools of stagnant water. These sandy shores, far from fixing limits of the river, render them uncertain, by enlarging or contracting them alternately, according to the variable action of the solar rays.
In these scattered features of the landscape, in this character of solitude and greatness, we recognized the course of the Orinoco, one of the most majestic rivers of the New World.
Or there was this extraordinary description of the jungle at midday:
How vivid is the impression produced by the calm of nature, at noon, in these burning climates! The beasts of the forests retire to the thickets; the birds hide themselves beneath the foliage of the trees, or in the crevices of the rocks. Yet, amidst this apparent silence, when we lend an attentive ear, we hear a dull vibration, a continual murmur, a hum of insects, filling, if you may use the expression, all the lower strata of the air. Nothing is better fitted to make man feel the extent and power of organic life. Myriads of insects creep upon the soil, and flutter round the plants parched by the heat of the sun. A confused noise issues from every bush, from the decayed trunks of trees, from the clefts of rocks, and from the ground undermined by lizards [and] millipedes…. These are so many voices proclaiming to us that all nature breathes; and that under a thousand different forms life is diffused throughout the cracked and dusty soil, as well as the bosom of the waters, and in the air that circulates around us.
“This aspect of animated nature,” he would add, “in which man is nothing, has something in it strange and sad.”
It was such passages that would so stir the soul of the nineteenth century, when they appeared in Humboldt’s Personal Narrative of the expedition.
Darwin would confide that Humboldt’s descriptions of the tropics, read over and over again during his youth, had inspired his entire career. Darwin also liked Humboldt’s account of an earthquake at Caracas enough to have lifted some of it, pretty much intact, for his Voyage of the Beagle.
From Venezuela, Humboldt and Bonpland sailed for Cuba, arriving at Havana and the comforts of civilization in November of 1800. Humboldt wandered about Havana’s botanical garden, made more maps (the first accurate maps of Cuba), and observed with sinking heart the institution of slavery (“no doubt the greatest of all evils that afflict humanity”). He and Bonpland also divided up their collections three ways, shipping one part to France, another to Germany, and leaving the third with friends in Havana. Their anxiety over the safety of these treasures was very great indeed, and one gets the impression that Humboldt now had certain misgivings about their own chances of survival. “It is really quite uncertain, almost unlikely,” he wrote, “that both of us, Bonpland and myself, will ever return alive.”
The following spring they sailed for the coast of present-day Colombia, to the mouth of the Magdalena, by which, for the next fifty-odd days, they headed south again, deep inland for hundreds of miles against the current, as far as an outpost called Honda. Before them stood the cordillera of the Andes. They left the river and went overland to Bogotá, where a brightly dressed cavalcade of distinguished citizens rode out to escort them into town.
All told they spent nearly two years in Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru. From Bogotá they went over the Andes on foot, picking the more difficult of two possible routes. They were in the Andes, crossing and recrossing, from September 1801 until October 1802, and they must have made a picturesque caravan, with their guides and mules and scientific instruments. Mountains were measured, valleys sounded, the distribution of vegetation traced on windswept upland slopes. Humboldt was struck by the distinct variations in plant life, according to elevation. The vegetation on the mountains was stratified, he found, and that stratification, he concluded, was dependent on soil, temperature, and weather conditions. There were vertical zones, in other words, and these were characterized at a glance by their plant life. It was a new concept and an extremely important one. As a latter-day biographer was to write, “He began to see what nobody had understood clearly before him: that life’s forms and their grouping with one another are conditioned by physical factors in their environment, that atmospheric and geologic conditions need to be known if we are to learn the meaning behind organic life. As in his student days he had described rocks and minerals in relation to plants, he now realized more fully that to classify and identify counted for little unless you understood how to relate such information to integrated natural processes.”
He would be called the second Columbus. He had rediscovered America, it would be said. He was also seeing relationships and interrelationships between the Earth and life on Earth in a way that others before him had failed to do. So it would be perfectly fitting also to say that he was among the first ecologists.
They arrived at Quito, Ecuador, on January 6, 1802, and spent the next several months sorting out the new collections acquired along the way. In May, Humboldt and an Indian whose name is unknown climbed an active volcano called Pichincha, something only one man had done before as near as Humboldt could determine. Then on June 9, 1802, he, Bonpland, a number of Indians, and a young Spanish naturalist named Carlos Montufar, who had joined the expedition in Quito, set out to climb Chimborazo, the extinct, snow-capped volcano, elevation 20,561 feet, the highest mountain in Ecuador and then thought to be the highest mountain anywhere on Earth.
Humboldt and Bonpland had by now been in the mountains long enough to know what they were about and to be in exceptional physical condition. They were very likely the finest mountaineers in the world, since mountaineering as a sport and the whole philosophical concept of mountain “conquering” had yet to dawn on the nineteenth-century mind. But again, as on the Orinoco, they set off with little in the way of equipment as we know it, no special clothing, and with little or no knowledge of the mountain itself. Yet “by dint of extreme exertion and considerable patience” they very nearly made it all the way to the top.
How Humboldt and his companions went up, the route they took, is not at all clear from his account. But in many places, he writes, the ridge was no wider than eight or ten inches. On their left a snow-covered precipice shone like glass, on their right “a fearful abyss” dropped away a thousand feet or more. “At certain places where it was very steep, we were obliged to use both hands and feet, and the edges of the rock were so sharp that we were painfully cut, especially on our hands.” Much of the time they were shrouded in mist so thick they were unable even to see their own feet. Then all at once the air would clear for an instant and the dome-shaped summit would stand out before them, gleaming in the sunshine. “What a grand and solemn spectacle! The very sight of it renewed our strength.”
At 15,000 feet Bonpland captured a butterfly. At 15,600 feet the Indians, with one exception, refused to go any farther. At 16,600 feet Humboldt spotted an ordinary housefly. Above the snow line, at about 16,900 feet, rock lichens were the only sign of life. The next reading was taken at 17,300 feet, at a spot where the ridge was just barely wide enough to set up the barometer and two of them could stand side by side in safety.
They were stopped finally b
y an impassable ravine. Nauseated by the thin air, they were all so dizzy they could barely stand. Their lips and gums were bleeding. The time, Humboldt says, was an hour after noon. Again the barometer was set up. The temperature, they found, was three degrees below freezing, which both Humboldt and Bonpland, “from our long residence in the tropics,” found “quite benumbing.” The altitude where they stood was 19,286 feet, higher than anyone had ever been before, even in a balloon.
They had attained the top of the world, they thought. For Humboldt it was a supreme, indescribable moment. Nearly thirty years later, in 1828, when the surpassing magnitude of the Himalayas, long a subject of much conjecture, was verified by the first reliable instrument surveys, Humboldt was noticeably stunned. To a friend he wrote, “All my life I prided myself on the fact that of all mortals I had reached the highest point on Earth.”
Chimborazo itself would not be climbed for another seventy-eight years. In 1880, Edward Whymper, the British mountaineer and artist, the first man to climb the Matterhorn (in 1865), would reach the top of Chimborazo, following what he figured to be Humboldt’s route. That Humboldt had come as far as he did, Whymper found extraordinary. Darwin, after a brief hike in the Chilean Andes, at an elevation of about 13,000 feet, would write that it was “incomprehensible” to him how Humboldt had done it.
Humboldt and the others in his party descended from Chimborazo in a great hurry—the first 3,600 feet in all of an hour, according to Humboldt, a claim Edward Whymper would declare preposterous. And like our own men on the moon, they busily gathered up all the rocks they could carry. “We foresaw that in Europe,” Humboldt said, “we should frequently be asked for a fragment from Chimborazo.” Whether he had such a memento with him when he arrived at the White House is not known.
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