From Chimborazo the party pushed farther south, into the valley of the upper Amazon. Then they were climbing again into the rarefied air of the Andes, traveling now, on occasion, along the “wonderful remains of the Inca Roads” and taking, as it happens, about the same route as the present-day Pan-American Highway. The Inca Road and the thought of the effort and ingenuity it represented left the two Europeans feeling strangely humbled. Nothing built by the Romans had ever struck Humboldt as so imposing, and at one point, according to his calculations, this road was at an elevation of thirteen thousand feet. At Paramo and Cajamarca they examined Inca ruins. No ignorant savages were these, he concluded.
He was immensely taken, too, by the giant condors that circled overhead, high above all the summits of the Andes. How was it possible—physiologically—he wondered, for a creature to fly in circles for hours in air so thin, then descend all at once to the level of the sea, “thus passing through all gradations of climate.”
Then, on a western slope of the Andes, they saw the sea. The sky brightened suddenly, as a sharp southwest wind came up, clearing the mist and revealing an immense bowl of very dark blue sky. The entire western slope of the cordillera, as far as the eye could carry, was spread at their feet. “Now for the first time,” he wrote, “we had our view of the Pacific. We saw it distinctly in the glitter of a vast light, an immeasurable expanse of ocean.” Humboldt was so excited that for once he forgot to take a barometric reading.
On October 23, 1802, they arrived at Lima, where they spent two uneventful months. The collections were carefully gone over and repacked; Humboldt made notes on the local use of guano, the fertilizing properties of which were still unknown in Europe. In late December they sailed north for Mexico, and it was during this voyage, as they skirted the shores of Peru, that Humboldt took soundings, temperature readings and the like, in that icy, north-flowing Pacific current so rich in marine organisms that now bears his name. He would insist always that he had simply studied it, never discovered it, that it had been known to sailors and fishermen for centuries; and on his own maps he would label it the Peruvian Current. He could protest as much as he liked, however. The Humboldt Current it would be, and ironically, it is probably the thing for which he is now best known.
They spent a year in Mexico, from March 1803, when they landed at Acapulco, until March 1804, when they sailed from Veracruz for Havana again. It had been a long time since Mexico was a wilderness, and there was little of the natural splendor and mystery of the Orinoco or of the Andes to entice the explorers. But Humboldt’s zest for the place seems to have been none the less for all that. He was seldom still. He worked mainly on a map that, once finished, would be the finest thing ever done on Mexico until then. So at variance and imperfect were most maps of the day that the position of Mexico City, for example, differed as much as three hundred miles from one map to another. His was not only geographically accurate, being based on astronomical observations, but would include quantities of political, economic, and ethnological information.
He also studied silver mining, climate, volcanic action, meteorological phenomena. And again he was absorbed in remnants of the pre-Columbian past. With Bonpland in tow, he took a day’s ride out to Teotihuacán and the two of them stood spellbound before that ancient temple city. He made measurements of the great pyramids and later sketched Aztec codices and the Aztec calendar stone. Humboldt was, in fact, the first European to sense the scale and greatness of America’s ancient civilizations, to take their religious traditions seriously, and his subsequent writings on the subject would open an entire new world for scholars, inspiring, in particular, such latter-day giants in the field as Stephens, who discovered the Maya temples of the Yucatan, and Prescott, author of The History of the Conquest of Mexico.
Humboldt and Bonpland stayed only a short while at Havana when they stopped there the second time. After gathering up the collections they had left for safekeeping, they sailed for Philadelphia, where Charles Willson Peale showed them about his amazing museum of natural history, set up in Independence Hall, where now stood, among numerous other curiosities, a mammoth, the first fossil skeleton ever mounted in America.
There was a banquet in Humboldt’s honor at Peale’s museum, attended by Alexander Wilson, William Bartram, and, among others, a young guest brought by Wilson, John Bachman, then just fourteen years old, who was to be Audubon’s great friend and collaborator (on the three-volume Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America). Then came the visit to Washington, followed by a brief trip with Jefferson to Monticello, where their conversations continued during more long walks in the gathering heat of the Virginia summer. A famous lifelong friendship had been founded.
On August 3, 1804, Humboldt and Bonpland arrived at Bordeaux, causing a great commotion, since their death by yellow fever had been widely reported some time earlier. They had been gone five years. In addition to all their instruments and Humboldt’s journals and record books, they had brought with them “forty-two boxes, containing an herbal of six thousand equinoctial plants, seeds, shells, insects, and what had hitherto never been brought to Europe, geological specimens from the Chimborazo, New Granada, and the banks of the river of the Amazons.” It was a very different kind of loot from the New World.
But the journals and the collections were only part of what had been accomplished, only a beginning. Humboldt would spend the next thirty-odd years and virtually all his personal fortune publishing thirty monumental volumes under the general title Voyages aux Régions Equinoctiales du Nouveau Continent, Fait Dans Les Années 1799 à 1804. These colossal works were issued in folio and quarto size and contained well over a thousand illustrations and maps, many of them hand-colored. Humboldt did most of the text, but others, specialists of one kind or another, were also enlisted, among them Georges de Cuvier, the zoologist. The books appeared between 1807 and 1839. The complete set cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $2,000. How much the entire enterprise cost is impossible to say, since Humboldt kept secret all his expenses, as well as the total number of books published. The one available figure is for paper, plates, and printing, which came to $226,000.
But Humboldt also produced Views of Nature (1807), Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain (1811), and the very popular Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent, which appeared in French first, then English, and in a variety of different editions starting in 1815. The Personal Narrative was a smashing publishing success and made his name known everywhere. The overall effect of his writing and the extent of his influence were enormous and in a few instances had some interesting consequences.
The Personal Narrative, to give one example, included a long, detailed discussion of a future ship canal connecting the Atlantic and Pacific somewhere on the Central American isthmus—the first such study ever presented in print. Humboldt, during his travels, had never set foot anywhere on the isthmus, and this he plainly acknowledged, but he was taken as the irrefutable voice of authority all the same. He named five likely routes for a canal, and of these he thought Nicaragua the most suitable, everything considered, with the result that his opinion and his name would be used to support one Nicaragua canal scheme after another throughout the rest of the nineteenth century and right up until the spring of 1902, when the United States Senate by an extremely narrow margin decided instead on Panama.
Some of what he wrote was nonsense, based on hearsay or wild guesswork. He was completely taken in by stories told in the Andes of live fish being spewed out of an erupting volcano. He reckoned the Rocky Mountains to be perhaps 3,500 feet high. But many of his calculations, such as the length of the Orinoco, were uncannily accurate. He also made some astonishing, educated guesses that put him years ahead of his time. It had long been thought, for example, that there is a difference between the levels of the Atlantic and the Pacific. The Pacific was believed to be as much as twenty feet higher, and this supposedly would cause overwhelming problems should a canal ever be opened between the
two oceans. But from his own observations, Humboldt was convinced there was no difference in levels—only in the size and timing of the tides. Not until the 1850s, during the surveying of the Panama Railroad, was the issue settled by American engineers. Humboldt was proven to be quite correct.
There are also passages in the Personal Narrative substantiating the idea that Humboldt must be ranked among the earliest ecologists. In his speculations on a tide-level canal he shows himself to be deeply and uniquely concerned about the effect of such a channel on the whole pattern of the great ocean currents. But even more pointed, more remarkable, considering when it was written, is something he wrote after examining a lake in Venezuela, a lake that had been mysteriously declining, even though it had no visible outlet. The answer to the riddle, Humboldt said, was not in the lake but in what man was doing to the surrounding countryside:
By felling trees that cover the tops and sides of the mountains, men in every climate prepare at once two calamities for future generations: the want of fuel and a scarcity of water…. When forests are destroyed, as they are everywhere in America by the European planters with an imprudent precipitation, the springs are entirely dried up or become less abundant. The beds of the rivers, remaining dry during a part of the year, are converted into torrents whenever great rains fall on the heights. The sward and moss disappear with the brushwood from the sides of the mountains, the waters falling in rain are no longer impeded in their course; and instead of slowly augmenting the level of the rivers by progressive filtrations, they furrow during heavy showers the sides of the hills, bear down the loosened soil, and form those sudden inundations that devastate the country. Hence it results that the destruction of the forests, the want of permanent springs, and the existence of torrents are three phenomena closely connected together.
Humboldt’s books were praised on both sides of the Atlantic. Louis Agassiz was to remark that a walk through the largest botanical garden would hardly be more impressive than an examination of the Humboldt plates. But the Spanish American odyssey had resulted in still more. Major contributions had been made to natural science, to man’s knowledge of the Earth and its life systems. Humboldt had been the first to recognize the essential relationships that unite the physical features of the planet, the laws of climate for which he originated the system of isothermal lines (his term) that has been accepted as a standard concept for so long that few remember who started it; the distribution of vegetation over the Earth according to climate and elevation (the basis of plant ecology). He had laid the foundations for modern descriptive geography. He had drawn the first geological sections (in Mexico). He had made vital observations concerning the Earth’s magnetism, volcanism, and the role it plays in mountain building. Perhaps most important of all, he and Bonpland had demonstrated how relatively little had been known of the richness and variety of life on Earth, the infinite abundance of life’s forms, and how infinitely much more there was to know.
Humboldt lived long enough to see most of his ideas become old hat, and he concluded toward the end that his chief contribution had been to influence younger men. The young Latin American intellectual Simon Bolívar had sought him out in Rome one year to talk about political freedom. John Charles Frémont, who regarded Humboldt as a god, had gone off exploring and sprinkled Humboldt’s name all over the map of Nevada. John Bachman would say that his own interest in natural history began with meeting Humboldt at the dinner at Peale’s museum. An intense young Englishman named Charles Lyell, who was to become the great geologist, wrote after a long interview, “There are few heroes who lose so little by being approached as Humboldt.”
Most impressive of all perhaps is the case of Louis Agassiz, who as a struggling young zoologist in Paris received from Humboldt not only encouragement and guidance, but a donation of a thousand francs to assist in the publication of his initial work on fishes. “How he examined me,” Agassiz was to write later, describing a dinner with Humboldt in a Paris restaurant, “and how much I learned in that short time! How to work, what to do, and what to avoid, how to live, how to distribute my time, what methods of study to pursue.”
In 1869, in Boston, on the 100th anniversary of Humboldt’s birth, Agassiz, by then America’s most renowned naturalist, would recount in a long speech the incredible life of his mentor, the monumental productivity right up until the end, the trip to the Urals in 1829, the historic series of lectures in Berlin, the friendship with Goethe, the new career in politics as an adviser to the Prussian king, the keen, relentless observation of the natural world that lasted more than seventy years. “But Humboldt is not only an observer,” Agassiz would declare, “not only a physicist, a geographer, a geologist of matchless power and erudition, he knows that nature has its attraction for the soul of man; that however uncultivated, man is impressed by the great phenomena amid which he lives; that he is dependent for his comforts and the progress of civilization upon the world that surrounds him.”
The final work, the master work, the grand summing up, was something called Cosmos. It was to contain all Humboldt knew—of art, nature, history, all branches of science—portraying as never before the grand harmonies of the Earth and universe. He wished to convey the excitement of science to the intelligent nonscientific reader. He had been thinking about such a work for fifty years. He could not accept what he called the narrow-minded, sentimental view that nature loses its magic, “the charm of its mysteries,” by a study of its forces.
The first of five volumes appeared in 1845, when Humboldt was seventy-six. (Jefferson by now had been in his grave at Monticello for nearly twenty years.) It was an even greater sensation than his Personal Narrative. By 1851, eighty thousand copies had been sold. Indeed, Cosmos was one of the publishing events of the age, like Uncle Tom’s Cabin. It stirred a whole new generation, in America particularly. It popularized natural science as nothing had before and made Humboldt a household word.
He was venerated in America as few Europeans have ever been. “I came to Berlin,” wrote Bayard Taylor, the American essayist, near the end of Humboldt’s life, “not to visit its museums and galleries, its operas, its theaters,…but for the sake of seeing and speaking with the world’s greatest living man—Alexander von Humboldt.” Emerson was to call him “one of those wonders of the world, like Aristotle…who appear from time to time, as if to show us the possibilities of the human mind.”
Humboldt died on May 6, 1859. He was in his ninetieth year and still at work, on the final volume of Cosmos. He had never returned to Spanish America, unlike Bonpland, who, after serving for a time as the head of the Empress Josephine’s gardens, left Paris for South America, where he finished out his days. But for all the years that had passed, for all the honors bestowed upon him, for all the changes he had seen, Humboldt never regarded their epic journey as anything other than the central experience of his life. Once, in the last year of his life, when there appeared to be very little left of the young man who had posed for Peale so long before, Humboldt sat for still one more, final portrait. He absolutely would not wear any of his decorations, he said, but then he quietly mentioned to the artist that it would be quite all right to include Chimborazo in the background.
CHAPTER TWO
The American Adventure of Louis Agassiz
THROUGHT HIS extraordinary career Louis Agassiz was a man of large plans and boundless energy, a spirit emboldened by noble undertakings. He was a pioneer, a worker. And these, it ought to be said at the start, were not the least of the reasons why he loomed so large in the estimate of our forebears and why so much that was painful—the charge of demagoguery, the bitterness over Darwin—would be forgotten in time, or at least left unsaid.
At the age of twenty-one, writing from Munich, where he was studying to become a medical doctor, he had declared to his father, a provincial Swiss pastor: “I wish it may be said of Louis Agassiz that he was the first naturalist of his time, a good citizen, and a good son, beloved of those who knew him. I feel in myself the strength of a wh
ole generation.” The letter was dated February 14, 1829, and that same year, still at the University of Munich, he had undertaken his first important work, a study of Brazilian fish, largely because, as he said, it was so immense a task. In Paris later, at the Museum of Natural History (the Jardin des Plantes), with the blessing and counsel of the great Georges Cuvier, he undertook his vast, illustrated Recherches sur les Poissons Fossiles, at a time when fewer than a dozen generic types of fossil fish had been named and he was all of twenty-four.
Cuvier, like others to come, warned against overwork. Alexander von Humboldt, who too had perceived amazing resources in the young man, cautioned against spreading oneself too thin. Having attained, with Humboldt’s help, a professorship of natural history at Neuchâtel, Switzerland, Agassiz suddenly had turned his attention to Alpine glaciers.
It was Agassiz, at age thirty-three, who first presented to the world the awesome vision of an ancient age of ice. Others had noted the movement of existing glaciers and the consequent disturbances to the landscape, but Agassiz pictured a time past when all of northern Europe lay buried beneath “a colossal ice field,” and thus, he contended, numerous geologic mysteries had at last been solved. His immediate plan was for extended, orderly glacial research, something entirely new.
Everything that he undertook had to be done on a grand, heroic scale. His glacial studies included a harrowing solo descent by rope 120 feet into one of the crystal blue “wells” of the glacier of Aar and a successful ascent of the Jungfrau. His publishing projects—the pioneering, two-volume Etudes sur les Glaciers, for example, which appeared in 1840—involved the combined efforts of a dozen or more artists, lithographers, and fellow naturalists, whom he took it upon himself to feed, house, finance, and inspirit with his own particular methods of field study. When debts mounted at his headquarters-home-laboratory at Neuchâtel, when his marriage became a shambles, the solution was an overseas expedition. He would go to the United States, enlarge his horizons, meet everyone who mattered, add to his glacial studies, resolve the financial crises with a series of public lectures—all on his own and all in no more than a few months.
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