By now the current was tugging the ship southeast toward Gibraltar and the Canary Islands. The Pizarro passed Cape St. Vincent, the southwest tip of Portugal, where in the fifteenth century Prince Henry the Navigator had seen off Europe’s first great voyages of discovery. Born in Oporto in 1394, the third son of John I, Henry had led Portugal’s army to victory over the Moors at Ceuta in North Africa—marking the beginning of Portugal’s overseas expansion—then, at the age of twenty-one, had retired to Sagres, on Cape St. Vincent. With the intertwined goals of eliminating Arab middlemen from the spice trade, promulgating Christianity, and advancing geographical knowledge, the young, reclusive prince had assembled an international team of scholars and engineers and had established Europe’s foremost observatory and school of navigation. Working furiously, never marrying, Henry had directed his experts in improving nautical instruments, devising more accurate charts, and, by adapting the design of the Arab dhow to the requirements of Atlantic sailing, developing the Portuguese caravel, which, with its big hull and lateen rig, had the range, speed, maneuverability, and cost-efficiency to become the ideal ship of discovery.
It had taken Henry’s crews nineteen years to pass the psychological barrier of Cape Bojador, the jut of the Sahara beyond which lay the “Sea of Darkness,” in which white men supposedly turned black, and by the time Henry died in 1460, his caravels had ventured only a third of the way down the African coast. Yet the prince’s innovations and single-mindedness had generated a momentum that survived him. By 1488, Bartolomeu Dias had managed to round the Cape of Good Hope, and just ten years later, Vasco da Gama had sailed all the way to India. In the interim, Christopher Columbus had persuaded Portugal’s rival Spain to attempt a western route to the spice lands of the East, and, commanding caravels, had “discovered” a whole New World. Without both Henry and Columbus, Humboldt knew, he and Bonpland would never be embarked on their own journey of exploration. But at a distance of 240 nautical miles they couldn’t make out Cape St. Vincent to the east, only some sea swallows and a few dolphins following the Pizarro.
Over the next several days, the mysteries of the open ocean continued to reveal themselves. On the eleventh, the ship encountered a huge school of jellyfish. “The vessel was almost becalmed,” Humboldt wrote, “but the mollusca were borne towards the southeast with a rapidity four times greater than the current. Their passage lasted nearly three-quarters of an hour. We then perceived but a few scattered individuals, following the crowd at a distance as if tired with their journey.”
In the evenings they “were never weary of admiring the beauty of the nights; nothing can be compared to the transparency and serenity of an African sky.” Many years later, Humboldt would recall those nights in a wistful frame of mind: “All who possess an ordinary degree of mental activity, and delight to create to themselves an inner world of thought, must be penetrated with the sublime image of the infinite when gazing around them on the vast and boundless sea, when involuntarily the glance is attracted to the distant horizon, where air and water blend together, and the stars continually rise and set before the eyes of the mariner. This contemplation of the eternal play of the elements is clouded, like every human joy, by a touch of sadness and of longing.”
ON June 16, at five o’clock in the afternoon, the lookout sighted the Canaries, off the coast of Africa. In ancient times, when they were believed to be the western limit of the earth, the Canaries had been known as the Fortunatae Insulae, “Fortunate Islands.” Rediscovered by the Portuguese in 1341, they had been granted to Spain by papal bull three years later. Now they were the usual first port of call for Spanish vessels en route to the New World. The captain had orders to lay over so that Humboldt and Bonpland could climb the volcano on Tenerife. But a delay longer than four or five days would be impossible, he reminded them, on account of the English blockade.
First to come into view was the foreboding, lava-encrusted island of Lanzarote. That night, Humboldt and Bonpland sat on the afterdeck, admiring how the moon, just a few degrees above the horizon, shone silver on the volcano’s ash-covered flanks. The night was beautifully serene and cool, and the sea was sparkling with phosphorescence. Then, after midnight, great black clouds obscured the moon, and they could spy fishermen’s torches onshore. The two sat up into the wee hours: Their first glimpse of these islands off the African coast had likely left them too excited for sleep.
The next morning was foggy, and the ship picked its way through the islands of Alegrana and Montaña Clara, taking soundings the entire way. The small islands north of Lanzarote reminded Humboldt of the Rhine near Bonn, which he had visited with Georg Forster nearly a decade before.
On June 17, the Pizarro passed the western shore of the island of Lanzarote, which was black, parched, and devoid of vegetation. Rising above this otherworldly landscape was the island’s volcano, Timanfaya. With a rounded, not entirely conical top, the volcano seemed quiet enough that day, though it had erupted violently some seven decades before, destroying nine villages with lava and earthquakes.
As the ship made its way down the western side of the island, the captain thought he saw a castle on the coast. Hoisting the Spanish flag in salute, he sent a boat to inquire about English ships in the area. But as the launch approached shore, the landing party discovered that the castle was just a tall rock and that the land wasn’t a continuation of Lanzarote at all but part of the small neighboring island of Graciosa. Although Graciosa had a large bay, its volcanic earth was barren, and the island was uninhabited. Despite the desolation, Humboldt was moved by the rugged and wild beauty of the place. In the background, beyond the bleak shoreline, the cultivated fields on Lanzarote provided a less somber, more domestic perspective at sunset. “In the narrow pass between two hills, crowned with scattered tufts of trees, marks of cultivation were visible. The last rays of the sun gilded the grain for the sickle. Even the desert is animated wherever we can discover a trace of the industry of man.”
The wind dropped, and rather than return the way they had come, the captain decided to maneuver out of the bay by tacking between the nearby island of Clara and a protruding, twenty-foot-high mass of lava known as West Rock but marked on the old charts “Hell.” Around midnight, an infernal current gripped the Pizarro and propelled it directly toward the crag. In the light wind, the frigate no longer obeyed the helm, and for the second time in a fortnight, the ship seemed destined for disaster. All night the crew worked the sails, struggling to hold the vessel off the outcropping. Finally, toward morning, the wind freshened and the ship was able to negotiate the channel, past the rock named for the place where unlucky sailors were consigned by these treacherous waters.
The next day was hazy, but that evening the company sighted Grand Canary, the island that was the granary of the archipelago. The wind picked up, and by the morning of the nineteenth the fog was so thick they had to drop anchor. When the mist lifted, the first rays of sunlight caught the distant top of el Pico del Teide, Tenerife’s volcano, thought in ancient times to be the highest mountain in the world. (By 1799, Chimborazo in the Andes was believed to hold that honor.) Humboldt and Bonpland rushed to the bow for a glimpse of the peak they had come to challenge. The 12,200-foot active volcano was snowless at this time of year, they saw, and terminated in a piton, or sugarloaf, with a small, truncated cone. The flanks were formed by black lava, with lush vegetation in some places, barren rock in others.
They didn’t have long to admire the view. As the mist dissipated, it also exposed four English warships very near the Pizarro’s stern. Apparently the enemies had passed unnoticed in the fog. But, luckily, the Pizarro was now under the guns of the Spanish fort, and the British squadron dared approach no closer. The corvette sailed on.
Horatio Nelson, the great British admiral, had attacked that same fort just two years before. In July 1797, Nelson came to Tenerife in search of a Spanish treasure ship rumored to be anchored here. Late on the night of July 24, the British attempted an amphibious assault on Santa Cl
ara, but the landing party was greeted by withering cannon fire from the fort. As Nelson stepped from his longboat onto shore, he was shot through the right elbow. His stepson Josiah Nisbet ferried him back to his flagship, the Theseus, where the limb was amputated just beneath the shoulder. Although some of Nelson’s men did manage to hold part of the town for a time, the assault was a disaster, with 153 English killed and 105 wounded, and Nelson limped back to England certain that his career was over. But only a year later he would become a national hero after his brilliant rout of the French at Abukir Bay, also known as the Battle of the Nile.
From the deck of the Pizarro, Humboldt took in the coastal town of Santa Clara. The village was neat, with dazzlingly white, windowless houses set on a narrow beach under a wall of black rock. But it also was breathlessly hot and devoid of vegetation, and Humboldt pronounced it gloomy.
As he disembarked, Humboldt noticed that, after two weeks of fresh sea air, the once familiar smells of animals and vegetation and even the earth itself came as an overpowering assault to the senses. Still, he and Bonpland were elated to be taking their first steps on non-European soil. As Colonel Armiagra, the commander of the local infantry regiment, showed them around his garden, they gaped at bananas, papaws, colorful poincianas, and other plants they had previously seen growing only in hothouses.
Before dawn on June 20, the two men set out with guides and mules for the port city of La Orotava, on the western flank of the volcano. Wearing his customary open-necked shirt, loose striped trousers, short jacket, high black hat, and tall boots with the tops turned over, Humboldt followed the guide over a tortuous, upward-leading road with a stream running along one side. Not long after, they passed through the town of San Cristóbal, which clung to a basalt ridge forming a broad girdle around the Peak of Tenerife. Stopping to examine rocks along the way—to the growing impatience of their guides—they eventually came to lovely La Laguna, capital of Tenerife.
Built on a small plain and protected by a forested hill, the town of nine thousand people was surrounded by gardens and by windmills for grinding grain. There were also small chapels, called ermitas in Spanish, that were erected on little hills and encircled by evergreens. The town, with its very old, solidly built houses, was pleasantly cool, and Humboldt felt that from its streets Tenerife seemed a happy, peaceful place. “No abode appeared to me more fitted to dissipate melancholy, and restore peace to the perturbed mind, than that of Tenerife or Madeira,” he wrote. “These advantages are the effect not of the beauty of the site and the purity of the air alone: the moral feeling is no longer harrowed up by the sight of slavery, the presence of which is so revolting in the West Indies, and in every other place to which European colonists have conveyed what they call their civilization and their industry.”
As the climbing party left La Laguna, the landscape was filled with a profusion of exotic plant species, and Humboldt delighted in them all—date and coconut palms, orange trees, vines, ferns, myrtles, cypresses. Cactus and agaves formed hedges to mark the property boundaries. The Canaries deserved their ancient name of Fortunate Islands, he wrote: “I own that I have never beheld a prospect more varied, more attractive, more harmonious in the distribution of the masses of verdure and of rocks, than the western coast of Tenerife.” Yet, he reminded himself, although the indigenous people weren’t slaves, they were nevertheless suffering in an artificial poverty, with the land concentrated in the hands of a few wealthy planters. In addition, the volcano that had created all this beauty could easily destroy it again. “Happy the country, where man has no distrust of the soil on which he lives!” Humboldt concluded.
They passed through the town of Juan de la Rambla, whose rising hills were cultivated like a garden, followed by the pleasant hamlets of Victoria and Matanza. Its name meaning “Slaughter” in Spanish, Matanza was the site where the native people had temporarily turned back the Spanish conquest in the fifteenth century. On the outskirts of La Orotava, the party stopped at the botanical garden, where they met Monsieur LeGros, the French vice-consul. Many years before, LeGros had left France with Captain Baudin, bound for the West Indies. En route they had been shipwrecked at Tenerife, and declining to be rescued, M. LeGros had been living contentedly on the island ever since. He had climbed el Pico del Teide many times, and he now agreed to show them the way.
The next morning, June 21, the party set out for the peak, whose top was shrouded in mist. Besides M. LeGros and the porters, they were accompanied by M. Lalande (secretary to the French consul), and an English gardener from the botanical garden. Passing through the steep, seemingly deserted streets of La Orotava, Humboldt found the houses solidly built but thought the place a dreary town, like Santa Clara. The foliage was spectacular, though, and they walked for a time atop an aqueduct covered with fine ferns. In the gardens, they found it odd to see fruit trees from northern Europe mixed with tropical species such as orange, pomegranate, and date. They also stopped to admire an ancient, renowned specimen of dragon tree, sixty feet tall and fifty feet around the trunk. A species of slow-growing tropical evergreen, the dragon tree had many branches divided like candelabra, with tufts of leaves sprouting from the end of each. Yet this extraordinary specimen also presented a mystery, the first of many riddles of plant distribution that Humboldt would encounter over the course of his journey. The tree is native to the West Indies, and never grows wild in Africa. So how did it come to be cultivated on the Canaries and neighboring islands? (This particular specimen, which still grows today, was the same one that Darwin later longed to see on the voyage of the Beagle. But, although the ship called at Tenerife, a quarantine prevented him from going ashore.)
Leaving Orotava, a narrow, stony path led through a lovely forest of chestnut trees. At a place called Monteverde, amid a mixture of brambles, laurels, and heaths, the party filled their canteens at a spring and admired the magnificent view of the sea. Next came a region of ferns, whose roots, M. LeGros explained, the natives ground to powder and mixed with barley meal into a conglomeration called gofio, which they ate for sustenance. Humboldt was disturbed that the practice was necessary in a country of such natural abundance.
Next they entered a wood of junipers and firs that had been severely damaged by a hurricane. There was a narrow pass between two basalt hills, then the great plain known as Spartium, after the species of broom plants growing there. After this, the lush vegetation of the lower elevations dropped away. For two and a half hours they crossed the Llano del Retama, a vast, hot, desolate sea of sand punctuated by the tufts of the retama, a nine-foot-tall flowering shrub, with only a few goats and rabbits to break the solitude. The plain was littered with blocks of obsidian ejected from the volcano, and the pumice dust, kicked up as they walked, was suffocating.
After the Llano del Retama the men passed through a series of narrow ravines, then, at about eight thousand feet, came to the Estancia de los Ingleses (“English Halt”). Consisting of two inclined boulders offering some protection from the wind, the Estancia was the traditional place for climbers (who were generally Englishmen) to rest for the night before going on to the summit. As darkness came, the peak above them was covered with clouds, and there was a strong northerly wind that exposed the moon on and off, giving spectacular, intermittent views of the volcano. The temperature dropped to just above freezing, and having no tents or cloaks, the men tried to rig a windscreen by tying cloths together, but the makeshift mess blew too close to the fire and burned. The wind drove the woodsmoke toward them, making it hard to breathe. Despite the uncomfortable night, Humboldt was exhilarated. “We had never spent a night on a point so elevated. . . . The view of the volcano threw a majestic character over the nocturnal scenery. Sometimes the peak was entirely hidden from our eyes by the fog, at other times it broke upon us in terrific proximity; and, like an enormous pyramid, threw its shadow over the clouds rolling beneath our feet.”
At three A.M., the party packed their gear and started for the summit, lighting the way with torches. Ascendin
g the steep northeast face, they came after two hours to a small plateau known as Alta Vista, where in the winter workers called neveros (from the Spanish word for “snow”) collected ice and snow to sell in the villages. Above this plain was the bleak Malpays (“Badlands”), covered with fragments of lava and totally devoid of vegetation. Just below the winter snow line was a cavern forming a kind of natural icehouse. As they left this ice-filled cave, the sun broke the horizon. During the night, they saw, a layer of fleecy clouds had collected beneath them, concealing the sea and shimmering in the thin light like a field of snow, with the other islands jutting through like rocks in a snow-covered pasture.
Pausing here, the climbers saw a strange optical effect. Seven or eight degrees above the horizon, luminous points appeared in the sky, first traveling vertically, then horizontally, like rockets thrown into the air. At first they thought the volcano on Lanzarote was erupting, but after about eight minutes, when the fireworks abruptly stopped, they concluded that the points of light were stars, distorted by the mingling of layers of air of different temperatures and densities near where the sun was about to rise.
The ascent across the Malpays was steep, and the footing was treacherous, with blocks of lava constantly rolling out from under their feet. The porters, who had tried to persuade the party to turn back at the English Halt the night before, became more phlegmatic as the party advanced. They insisted on sitting down to rest every ten minutes, and when they thought they weren’t being watched, they threw away the specimens of obsidian and pumice they had been charged with carrying. Eventually it became evident that none of them had ever been to the summit of the volcano.
Humboldt's Cosmos Page 6