Humboldt arrived at Freiberg in June. Determined to make the most of his limited time there, he immersed himself in his studies, including geology, surveying, and mathematics, with a dedication that bordered on obsession—six hours in the morning for practical study underground, lectures all afternoon, and either plant collecting in the woods or studying in his room all evening. Under this grueling schedule, he fell behind in his correspondence, neglected friends and family, even begged off Wilhelm’s wedding. He’d never been so busy in his life, and his less-than-robust health suffered as a consequence.
Wilhelm and his new wife, Caroline, grew concerned about him. They also found him self-centered and overly ambitious. Caroline confessed that at times she feared for her brother-in-law’s sanity. It was a concern Humboldt shared. “I work so hard,” he wrote, “yet for all my efforts I realized how much needs to be done. . . . I am frightfully busy, so that I cannot spare myself. There is a drive in me that, at times, makes me feel as though I am losing my mind.” Now that he’d finally begun to train in earnest for his life’s work, Humboldt determined that family ties, friendship, nothing, would deter him. And despite—or perhaps because of—the overwhelming workload, he was very happy at Freiberg.
Nine months after matriculation, at the age of twenty-three, Humboldt completed his studies at the Mining Academy. A week later he was appointed, at his own request, inspector of mines for Bayreuth and the Fichtel Mountains, a geologically rich but badly neglected area where a number of different ores were mined, ranging from coal to gold. Seizing this opportunity to put his geology training into practice, Humboldt became an outstanding mine inspector, winning the confidence of the men, dramatically increasing production, inventing safety equipment such as a new type of lamp and a gas mask, and even financing out of his own salary the country’s first training program for miners. He also had the opportunity to travel widely through Prussia and neighboring states on official business, which provided important field experience for a would-be scientific explorer.
In addition to his work for the Ministry of Mines, Humboldt somehow also found time to continue his investigations in the life sciences. One of his papers on plant distribution, “Freiberg Flora,” won him a gold medal from the elector of Saxony and recognition from scholars across Europe. A cornerstone of the science known today as plant geography, the paper exhorted naturalists to give up their obsession with nomenclature and categorization (an obsession Humboldt had shared as a boy) and instead to study plants in all their complexity and diversity as they appear in nature. “Observations of individual parts of trees or grass is by no means to be considered plant geography,” he’d written in the paper; “rather plant geography traces the connections and relations by which all plants are bound together among themselves.” It was to discuss his own studies of plants that Goethe (himself a former inspector of mines), sought out Humboldt, and the two would remain close friends until the older man’s death in 1832.
Around this time, inspired by Italian physician Luigi Galvani’s research on “animal electricity,” Humboldt began extensive experiments on nerve conduction, testing the effects of electrical impulses on himself and on animals. When this work was finally published—in two volumes detailing four thousand separate experiments—it created a sensation among European scientists. Published in 1797, the research still stands out as an important early effort in the field.
In January 1794 Humboldt was promoted to counselor of mines, and in February 1795 he was offered the position of director of mines in Silesia. But he had long ago determined that his ambitions lay elsewhere. “I am considering a complete change in my mode of life,” he wrote in declining the promotion, “and I intend to withdraw from any official position with the state.” He’d never planned to make a career with the ministry, he’d explained, only to get practical experience in geology in order to prepare for his true calling in scientific exploration. “As I have a deep conviction that such an expedition is highly important for increasing our knowledge of geology and physical science,” he continued, “I am exceedingly eager to devote my energies immediately to this end.” Yet the government was loath to lose its rising star in Industry and Mines, and Minister of State Hardenburg intervened personally to persuade Humboldt to accept the post of counselor at the Upper Court of Mines, with the proviso that he be permitted time off for travel. On those terms, Humboldt agreed to put off his resignation until February 1797.
It’s not clear how Humboldt planned to finance his explorations or to reconcile his mother to his abrupt abandonment of a promising career. But in the event, he didn’t have to. Frau Humboldt had been suffering horribly from breast cancer, and in the autumn of 1796 Alexander received word that she’d taken a turn for the worse. He rushed home to Berlin and was at her side when she died that November, at age fifty-five. He didn’t feel stricken at her passing, he wrote later, but composed, since her agony had finally come to an end. In fact, he seems to have taken his mother’s death with a sangfroid bordering on coldness. “My heart could not have been much pained by this event,” he explained, “for we were always strangers to each other.” His unhappy childhood memories didn’t vanish with his mother’s death, and for months afterward she appeared to him in dreams.
Under the terms of their mother’s will, Wilhelm inherited Tegel, and Alexander inherited Ringenwalde. The brothers suddenly found themselves wealthy men, and Alexander’s annual income was now six times his previous salary. Finally out from under his mother’s financial and emotional shadow, he was free at last to plan his future without regard for anyone else’s expectations. He completed his work with the ministry, as agreed, then traveled with Wilhelm and Caroline and their two small children first to Dresden and then to Vienna, with the idea of spending the winter in Italy. But when the outbreak of war made that impossible, Wilhelm and his family went on to Paris, while Alexander took off for the Tyrolean Alps with a friend from Freiberg, the brilliant but eccentric geologist Leopold von Buch.
“I was so pleased to see him,” Humboldt wrote. “He is brilliant and an excellent observer but his manners—as if he came from the moon. . . . I have taken him with me to see people but it did not turn out well. Usually he puts on his glasses and goes and studies the cracks in the stove tiles on which he is dead keen, or he slinks round the walls like a hedgehog and looks at the skirting board. On his own he is an interesting and charming person—a treasure of knowledge from which I profit.” Von Buch would later propose one of the most important scientific hypotheses of the nineteenth century, the theory of “craters of elevation,” which suggested that mountains were formed when trapped gasses and molten rock caused the earth’s crust to swell like a blister; volcanoes supposedly resulted when the blister popped. Adopted by both Humboldt and Darwin, the theory would become the main precept of volcano science for the next four decades.
That winter in the Tyrol, Humboldt took advantage of the opportunity to build his constitution and to practice his astronomical, topographical, and meteorological measuring skills, all in preparation for a career in scientific exploration. His and von Buch’s measurements also resulted in many corrections to the maps of the region, including the exact latitude of Salzburg. Finally, in spring 1798, he arrived in Paris.
Paris was reclaiming its place as the cultural and intellectual capital of the world, and thanks to Caroline’s salons and to his own growing reputation as a naturalist, Alexander had the opportunity to meet many prominent scientists of the day, including the zoologist Georges Cuvier, the chemist Claude-Louis Berthollet, and the astronomer Pierre-Simon Laplace (who taught Humboldt his new method of finding altitude by measuring changes in barometric pressure, a technique he would use countless times on his travels). He was invited to lecture at the Institut de France on nitrogen gas and on the applications of chemistry to agriculture, and, in light of his research on nerve conductivity, his opinion was solicited on the subject of galvanism. He lived with Wilhelm and Caroline during this period, but, utterly immune to
Caroline’s efforts to domesticate him, he barely stopped in for meals between visits to the observatory and the Jardin des Plantes.
Paris was an exciting, revelatory interlude, but he never forgot the reason he’d gone there—to find a voyage of scientific discovery. The search had consumed nearly a year. First the aged, eccentric Lord Bristol offered him a place on his voyage to Egypt. Though Humboldt hadn’t contemplated a journey to the Near East, he accepted, and planned to extend his travels afterward through Syria and Palestine. But the expedition was canceled after Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt, and Bristol, an Englishman, was arrested for alleged intrigues against the French.
Then Humboldt’s boyhood hero, the great Louis-Antoine de Bougainville, invited Humboldt to join his new circumnavigation via South America, the South Pacific, Africa, and perhaps even the South Pole. Humboldt quickly accepted, but the Directoire first replaced the seventy-one-year-old Bougainville with the younger but less impressive Nicolas Baudin, then postponed the expedition for a year on account of the war—not to mention the lack of three hundred thousand livres. After that, Humboldt nearly despaired of escaping lovely, civilized Paris.
But at least one good thing had come of all that waiting in the French capital: He had met Aimé Bonpland. Four years younger than Humboldt, Bonpland was the son of a surgeon from La Rochelle. Having trained as a physician, he was now in the city to study botany and zoology, and he had also been chosen for the Baudin expedition. Tall, with dark good looks, Bonpland was clever and outgoing and shared Humboldt’s progressive views on science and politics.
After the postponement of Baudin’s voyage, Humboldt and Bonpland resolved to find another expedition together. They traveled to Marseilles, where they were to join a voyage to Algiers led by the Swedish consul, a Mr. Skiöldebrand. But after waiting in vain for two months in the French port, they discovered that their ship, the frigate Jaramas, had been caught in a storm off the coast of Portugal and had been forced into Cadiz to refit. Rather than wait in Marseilles till spring for the ship to be repaired, Humboldt and Bonpland arranged passage on a small vessel bound for Tunis.
But they canceled their passage at the last minute, after discovering that they and their gear would be forced to share the great cabin with livestock. Not that they minded the discomfort, but they feared for the safety of their precious instruments. Later they learned that the setback had actually been a near escape: About the same time, the North African tribes had launched a rebellion against their new French masters and were imprisoning everyone disembarking from a French port; if Humboldt and Bonpland had followed through on their plans, they would have journeyed no farther than a Tunisian prison.
Finally, the pair traveled to Spain, hoping to find passage to Africa the following spring, when, they believed, the political climate would have improved. (Never one to waste an opportunity, during the six-week journey to Madrid, Humboldt took detailed barometric measurements—at night, to avoid the jeers of hostile townfolk—which showed for the first time that the interior of Spain is a large plateau instead of a valley, as had been previously believed.)
In Madrid, Humboldt hit on an even more ambitious scheme. When the Prussian envoy showed no interest in his idea, Humboldt paid a call on Baron Philippe von Forell, Saxony’s minister to the Spanish court, whose brother was an acquaintance of Humboldt in Germany. Keenly interested in the sciences, Forell was aware of Humboldt’s recent publications on nerve conductivity, and now he was favorably impressed by the young man’s energy and intelligence. He arranged for Humboldt to be presented at court, where King Charles IV himself endorsed the young Prussian’s proposition. It was left to the Spanish foreign minister, Mariano Luis de Urquijo, to manage the details. Fantastic though it seemed, Humboldt was charged by the Crown with making the first extensive scientific exploration of Spanish America.
At the time, Spain’s vast New World holdings sprawled across North America from San Francisco to St. Louis and southward to the southern tip of Argentina, taking in California, Texas, Florida, Mexico, Cuba, the Caribbean, and all of Central and South America except for Brazil (which belonged to Portugal) and neighboring Guiana (which between 1781 and 1803 changed hands among Holland, France, and Great Britain before ending up with the latter). There was no pretense that this vast empire existed for any purpose but to enrich the mother country. Spain sought to control all trade from its American colonies, and though slavery of the Indians had been abolished by this time, slaves were still imported from Africa to work the plantations. In some places, Native Americans still lived in virtual bondage thanks to an onerous system of peonage that kept them in perpetual debt to the hacienda owners. Although the slaves and Indians were treated with barbaric cruelty, they generally lacked the power to threaten the established order. However, the Creoles, the ninety-five percent of the white population who were born in the New World of supposedly pure Spanish descent, were growing increasingly restive under their colonial masters.
Over the next few months, as he and Bonpland prepared for the expedition, Humboldt lay in bed many a night, unable to sleep, mulling the incredible opportunity that had been given him. He understood that Spain’s principal interest was hardly the advancement of the sciences. The Spanish economy had become dependent on New World gold and silver, and with Humboldt’s experience in mineralogy, Madrid was hoping he’d unearth new riches in their American colonies. And as long as he wasn’t a spy for Britain, what did the Crown have to lose? After all, Humboldt was financing the expedition, including Bonpland’s share, out of his inheritance.
Their royal passports gave Humboldt and Bonpland (who was listed as Humboldt’s secretary) passage on all His Majesty’s vessels and total freedom of movement in the Spanish colonies, and authorized him “to freely use his physical and geodesical instruments . . . [to] make astronomical observations, measure the height of mountains, collect whatever grew on the ground, and carry out any task that might advance the Sciences.” It also called on colonial officials to assist him in any way they could. It was an extraordinary document.
Over the past three centuries, the Spanish government had allowed six scientific missions into their extensive New World colonies. But never had a traveler been given greater concessions, and never had the Spanish government placed more confidence in a foreigner. In fact, with few exceptions, Spain’s policy—based on a strong tradition of xenophobia, the demands of state security, the need to maintain the colonial trading monopoly, and a desire to protect the purity of the Catholic faith—had for hundreds of years been to bar non-Spaniards from their New World colonies altogether.
Not only was Humboldt a foreigner, he was a Protestant. Over centuries of warfare against the Muslim Moors, Spanish Catholicism had taken on a vehemence not seen elsewhere in Europe, giving rise to such outrages as the Inquisition. But by the end of the eighteenth century, such attitudes seemed increasingly irrelevant, as Europe and even America began to forge a new international community of philosophers, scholars, and scientists. In these changing times, a more liberal attitude could prevail, making it possible to grant Humboldt an unrestricted passport to Spain’s New World colonies.
The last time a non-Spanish scientist had been granted entrée to Spain’s American territories was more than sixty years before, when Charles-Marie de la Condamine went to Quito in 1735 to measure the shape of the earth. Some years before, the great British physicist Isaac Newton had suggested that the earth was oblate, that is, slightly flattened at the poles and slightly bulging toward the equator. He argued that, since the planet spins faster at the equator than at the poles (just as a wheel spins faster at the circumference than at the hub), the extra speed must produce greater centrifugal force, which should be sufficient to create a measurable distortion. However, the Italian-born French astronomer Giovanni Cassini, using a different logic, countered that the planet was instead a perfect sphere. With two prominent scientists from rival powers involved, the issue soon mushroomed from a question of scientific principle to a m
atter of national prestige. There were important practical considerations as well—if the earth were oblate, the astronomical tables that mariners used for navigation would have to be recomputed to take the deformation into account.
The only way to resolve the issue was to measure identical arcs of longitude in two different parts of the globe, then compare them. If the arc closer to the equator were longer, Newton’s hypothesis would be confirmed; if the arcs were equal in length, Cassini would be vindicated. Eager to defend their country’s honor, Paris dispatched two expeditions. One traveled far north to the snows of French-controlled Lapland, while the other (by special permission of Madrid, which had been indebted to France for help in the War of the Spanish Succession) journeyed far south to the mountains outside Quito (present-day Ecuador). For seven arduous years, La Condamine and his team made painstaking astronomical sightings and hammered reference marks into the ground. But hampered by local resistance and the rugged terrain, the South American party fell behind schedule.
Eventually, La Condamine received a letter from the Académie des Sciences that the issue had been settled without him: After the Lapland expedition’s return, their data had been compared to measurements already made right in France. Much to the annoyance of the French, Newton had been proved correct: The earth was indeed oblate. After years of painstaking work so far from home, La Condamine was naturally dispirited to hear that the question had been resolved with data collected in his own country. But he persisted, knowing that his measurements, being made closer to the equator, would yield a more precise result than those taken farther north. Ultimately, it was determined that a degree of arc measured 110,600 meters in Lapland, versus 111,900 in Ecuador.
His assignment finally completed, La Condamine decided to return home by sailing east down the Amazon River, whose full length had been previously traveled by only three other explorers, none in the past century and never by a scientist. On his river journey, from July to September 1743, he made cursory studies of the geography, plant life, and native peoples of the vast region. On his return, he also introduced to Europe the antifever drug quinine, the nerve poison curare, and rubber (which he named latex from the Spanish leche, in reference to its milky appearance). Ultimately, in fact, it was his two-month sail down the river more than his seven years of onerous geodesic work that elevated La Condamine to international celebrity. Though he never returned to South America, for many years his name was synonymous with the Amazon, and until Humboldt’s journey nearly seventy years later, the Frenchman was recognized as the individual who had done the most to excite popular interest in that part of the world.
Humboldt's Cosmos Page 4