Humboldt's Cosmos

by Gerard Helferich

  Approaching Cumaná on July 15, the Pizarro came upon a low island covered with shimmering sand. The depth of the water continued to drop, and when the soundings reached only three fathoms (eighteen feet), the captain was forced to lower the anchor. Spying two canoes in the distance, the Spaniards fired a cannon as a signal for them to approach, but instead the Indians paddled away to the west. The crew hoisted the Spanish flag and fired the cannon again, and this time the boats cautiously neared. As they came closer, Humboldt had his first glimpse of the Native Americans: “In each canoe there were eighteen Guayqueria Indians, naked to the waist, and of very tall stature. They had the appearance of great muscular strength, and the color of their skin was something between brown and copper. Seen at a distance, standing motionless, and projected on the horizon, they might have been taken for statues of bronze.” The captain hailed them in Spanish, and the Indians came on board.

  Members of the Guayaquí tribe, they had, according to an apocryphal story, gotten their name from Christopher Columbus. Supposedly, when the first Spanish explorers encountered a group spearfishing and asked them to identify themselves, the Indians, thinking the Europeans were pointing to their tackle, answered, “Guaike,” or “spear.” In any event, the tribe had long been loyal to Spain. This band was on their way from Cumaná to the cedar forests beyond Cape San José to gather wood.

  The sandy, uninhabited island in front of the ship was called Coche, the Indians said, and lay south of the island of Margaretta. British ships frequented the southern channel, and the Pizarro wouldn’t run aground as long as it steered in that direction. The canoes were loaded with plantains, armadillo, calabash (a gourd used for making drinking vessels), and other products of the land, and the Indians made the captain a gift of some coconuts and fish. It was agreed that the master of the dugouts, a man named Carlos del Pino, would stay aboard the Pizarro as pilot.

  Toward evening, the Pizarro lifted anchor and steered west, following del Pino’s directions toward the channel. The ship passed the small desert island of Cubagua, where, shortly after Columbus’s landing, Spain had founded a town called New Cádiz. Luxurious homes had been built for the planters, and the island had become famous for its pearl fisheries. But it was now deserted and forlorn, with no trace of its previous prosperity.

  Before long, Humboldt spied in the distance the mountains of Cape Macanao, on the western side of Margaretta. With the wind light, the captain decided to wait till morning to approach. On deck, Humboldt spent part of his last night on the Pizarro quizzing del Pino in Spanish about the fantastic plants and animals of his country, including crocodiles, boas, electric eels, and jaguars. “Nothing is so exciting to a naturalist,” he wrote, “than to hear the wonders of a country he is about to explore.” Humboldt was impressed with del Pino’s sagacity and disposition, and that night they forged a friendship that would serve the expedition well. In fact, del Pino would later guide Humboldt and Bonpland through the Orinoco Basin, some of the most remote and dangerous jungle in the world. And thus, Humboldt recorded, “By a fortunate chance, the first Indian we met on arrival was the man whose acquaintance became the most useful to us in the course of our researches.”

  At dawn on July 16, Humboldt and Bonpland had their first glimpse of the verdant mainland, bristling with palms, cacao trees, and all manner of exotic flora. The Pizarro anchored in port at nine A.M., forty-one days out of La Coruña.

  Three: Cumaná

  THE sky was azure, the sun dazzling. Beyond the harbor, the coastline lay green and lush, and in the distance, half veiled in mist, soared the mountains of New Andalusia. From the rail of the Pizarro, Humboldt struggled to take it all in—the chalky hills, the picturesque castle, the towering palms, the cacti, mimosas, tamarinds, the pelicans, egrets, flamingos. It was a landscape worthy of a long ocean voyage. “The splendor of the day,” Humboldt wrote, “the vivid coloring of the vegetable world, the forms of the plants, the varied plumage of the birds, everything was stamped with the grand character of nature in the equinoctial regions.” After all the years of dreaming and preparing, he must have felt a rush of incredulity that this day had finally arrived.

  A mile inland, shrouded in tropical foliage, lay Cumaná. Set on a fertile delta between the Manzanares and Santa Catalina rivers, Cumaná was capital of the autonomous capitanía general of the same name, which, under the byzantine Spanish system, was included in the province of New Andalusia, which in turn was part of the Viceroyalty of New Granada. Nominally ruled from Bogotá, New Granada took in the huge swath of territory including present-day Venezuela, Colombia, Panama, and Ecuador.

  Cumaná had been founded in 1523, making it the oldest continuous European settlement in South America. Columbus, on his third voyage in 1498, was the first European to spy these green shores, and was sufficiently enchanted to christen the nearby Gulf of Paria, Tierra de Gracia, or Land of Grace. The following year, the Spaniard Alonso de Ojeda (perhaps mischievously) dubbed the country Venezuela, or Little Venice, because the Indians’ houses around Lake Maracaibo, built on stilts, supposedly called to mind that grand city. Originally calling their capital Nueva Toledo, the Spanish later reverted to the Indian term for the place, Cumaná. But the name proved easier to appropriate than the land. The native Caribs (from whose name derives the word cannibal, as well as Caribbean) resisted fiercely, and English pirates, including Francis Drake, Henry Morgan, and William Hawkins, prowled the coast for the better part of the next two centuries. At the time of Humboldt’s arrival, Cumaná was still half entombed in debris from a catastrophic earthquake two years before.

  As soon as the Pizarro dropped anchor, the passengers fled the infected ship. The ill among them began their long convalescence, but even on land, the fever would claim a second victim—an eighteen-year-old black servant from Guinea, who fell into dementia and succumbed despite the scrupulous attentions of his elderly master. Accompanied by Carlos del Pino, Humboldt and Bonpland set out for town, crossing the stifling plain known as El Salado (The Salty) that stretched between the coast and the capital. On the way—before they had even unpacked their bags—they collected their first botanical specimen from the New World, a species of mangrove (Avicennia tomentosa) common along the South American shoreline.

  On the outskirts of Cumaná the trio came to the Indian settlement, whose small houses, freshly rebuilt after the earthquake, were laid out in a neat grid. In town, the travelers presented their passports to the governor, Vicente Emparán, who gave them a cordial welcome. As it happened, Don Vicente was interested in scientific matters himself, descending from a seafaring family and having been a naval captain before assuming his current post. In fact, two of his brothers had been involved in a bizarre and tragic incident in the war with Britain. Commanding different Spanish warships, the brothers had come upon each other one night outside the port of Cádiz, near Gibraltar. Each mistaking the other for a British vessel, the two ships had battled all night, till both were eventually sunk. The two brothers, so the story went, had finally recognized each other just moments before expiring.

  In Cumaná, Humboldt rented a big, airy house well situated for astronomical and meteorological observations. For the next few weeks, he and Bonpland busied themselves testing their instruments and inspecting the damage from the earthquake. Although they tried to work methodically, they were overwhelmed by the incredible richness of life in the tropics. “We are here in a divine country,” Humboldt wrote his brother. “Wonderful plants; electric eels, jaguars, armadillos, monkeys, parrots; and many, many, real, half-savage Indians, a handsome and interesting race. . . . What trees! . . . 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.”

  Darwin, landing in Brazil in 1832, had a similar reaction, colored by his reading of his predecessor. “Humbo
ldt’s glorious descriptions are and will for ever be unparalleled; but even he with his dark blue skies and the rare union of poetry with science which he so strongly displays when writing on tropical scenery, with all this falls far short of the truth,” he averred. “The delight one experiences in such times bewilders the mind; if the eye attempts to follow the flights of a gaudy butterfly, it is arrested by some strange tree of fruit; if watching an insect one forgets it in the stranger flower it is crawling over; if turning to admire the splendor of the scenery, the individual character of the foreground fixes the attention. The mind is a chaos of delight, out of which a world of future and more quiet pleasure will arise. I am at present fit only to read Humboldt; he like another sun illuminates everything I behold.”

  Yielding to this botanical seduction, Humboldt and Bonpland plunged into the nearby plains to gather the first of what would be tens of thousands of plant specimens shipped back to Europe. Some of the most challenging collecting took place in the nearly impenetrable thickets of cacti that the locals called tunales; more than once the pair were caught unawares by the brief tropical twilight and had to rush to extricate themselves before the rattlers and coral snakes emerged from their dens for their evening’s hunting.

  As the visitors flitted from telescope to microscope and back again, their intense activity attracted the curiosity of the residents, who started dropping in to have a look through the instruments themselves. With these human interruptions now piled on top of the myriad natural distractions—plus the rainy winter weather—it was nearly three weeks before Humboldt could begin a regular schedule of astronomical observations. But when the clouds finally cleared, what a profound beauty they revealed. “How can I describe to you the beauty of the sky . . . ?” he wrote. “Venus plays here the role of the moon. It shows big, luminous haloes, two degrees in diameter, of the most beautiful rainbow colors even when the air is completely pure and sky quite blue. I believe that here the stars offer the most magnificent spectacle.” Eventually, he was able to place the town at 10 degrees, 27 minutes, and 52 seconds of latitude and 66 degrees, 30 minutes, and 2 seconds of longitude—half a degree, or nearly thirty-five miles, farther north than the previous best measurements had located it. In fact, for three centuries, Humboldt discovered, the entire continent of South America had been positioned too far south on the world’s maps, as dead-reckoning mariners, misled by strong currents out of the Caribbean, had overestimated the distance to terra firma.

  Humboldt and Bonpland’s quarters afforded an unwelcome view of another spectacle, less natural and less innocent than astronomical and meteorological phenomena: The house was located on the same covered square as Cumaná’s bustling slave market. Spain had been importing African slaves to their New World colonies since the beginning of the sixteenth century, after it had become apparent that the native population could never provide enough labor for the Europeans’ ever-expanding mines and plantations. Though the slave trade had peaked in the eighteenth century, it wouldn’t cease for another seventy years, by which time more than eight million Africans would have been transported against their will to South America and the Caribbean (the great majority to non-Spanish colonies), constituting more than eighty percent of all slaves introduced to the New World.

  Every morning at the market in Cumaná, young African men aged fifteen to twenty would be forced to rub their bodies with coconut oil to make their black skin gleam. Then prospective buyers would shoulder their way through the captives, examining their teeth and sometimes searing their purchases with a branding iron. The market was Humboldt’s first direct experience of slavery, and it incited him to fury. “This,” he seethed, “is the treatment bestowed on those ‘who [in the words of French moralist Jean de La Bruyère] save other men the labor of sowing, tilling, and reaping.’” Of the rapacious, supposedly Christian Europeans, he demanded rhetorically, “What are the duties of humanity, national honor, or the laws of their country, to men stimulated by the speculations of sordid interest?”

  TILL their forced landing at Cumaná, Humboldt had no plan to explore South America. But now that fate had placed him on the verge of one of the globe’s most magnificent—and scientifically uninvestigated—regions, he characteristically embraced the new circumstances. Beyond the coast, beyond the great savannahs to the south, lay the world’s premier river system and rain forest. And though a few Europeans had ventured into the Amazon, none had ever lingered to study it in depth. There was a wealth of botanical specimens begging to be discovered, and exotic creatures waiting to be captured. Rocks and minerals to collect and the rivers to be traced on the world’s maps. A vast, seething web of life waiting to reveal its secrets.

  And not only was the Amazon a sublime temptation for the naturalist, it was the subject of one of the great geographic controversies of the day. On his journey downriver in 1743, La Condamine had heard stories of a natural canal, the Casiquiare River, that supposedly connected the Río Negro to the Amazon via the Orinoco. Such a natural junction between two great river systems exists nowhere else on earth, and when La Condamine reported what he had heard, European scientists rejected the idea as either absurd rumor or Spanish propaganda. “This is not the first time that what is positive fact has been thought fabulous, that the spirit of criticism has been pushed too far, and that this communication has been treated as chimerical by those who ought to have been better informed,” La Condamine fumed. As late as 1798, the French geographer Philippe Buache refused to include the river on his new map and even added a dismissive note: “The long supposed communication between the Orinoco and the Amazon is a monstrous error in geography. . . .”

  The controversy was not a strictly scientific one. There were also important economic and strategic issues at stake, since such a communication would greatly facilitate settlement, trade, and political and military control over a huge territory. Humboldt decided that, in addition to all the other scientific investigations to be made, the resolution of this pressing geographic question would be the focus of his expedition through the Amazon. His pulse must have quickened as he realized the unique opportunity that had been handed him—thanks to the bit of infected louse feces that had provoked the typhus epidemic on board the Pizarro.

  There was just one impediment to this scheme. The rainy season had begun, making travel to the interior impossible, and it would be months before the weather would clear. Not wanting to be holed up in Cumaná all that time, the travelers made two excursions along the coast, which in themselves yielded a wealth of scientific information and insight.

  The first, and shorter, of these excursions began on August 19, to the rugged peninsula of Araya, which, jutting north of Cumaná, was celebrated for its ruined castle, saltworks, and pearl fisheries. At two o’clock in the morning, Humboldt and Bonpland embarked with their guide in a large canoe on the Río Manzanares, south of the city, near the Indian suburb. Though the plains along the coast were arid and dusty, this region, then as now, was home to dairy farms and plantations. The riverbanks were pleasantly shaded with mimosas, ceibas, and other huge trees, and in the daytime the local children played in the cool, clear water. In the evening, their parents would join them, setting up chairs in the river and sitting for hours in their light clothing, smoking cigars, chatting about the weather, and gossiping about the supposed extravagances of the ladies of Caracas and Havana. Ignoring the small, apparently harmless local crocodiles, the bathers would occasionally be startled by a mischievous dolphin spouting water.

  This night, fireflies swarmed in the trees lining the river. Passing plantations, the travelers saw bonfires kindled by the African workers; it was early Monday morning, and the slaves, determined to drain every vestige of enjoyment from their one day of leisure, were dancing to the bittersweet music of a guitar. Jaguar skins were spread in the bottom of the canoe, but the night was unseasonably cool, and the Europeans, already accustomed to the tropical climate, found it too cold to sleep.

  At eight o’clock Tuesday morning
, the canoe landed at the tip of the peninsula. The largest known salt deposits in the world had been discovered here by the Spanish in 1499, and at a time when the mineral was still the principal method of food preservation, the works had once excited the jealousy of the English, Dutch, and other colonial powers. But now the salt pits were guarded only by a forlorn battery of three guns, plus the house of the inspector and the huts of a few Indian fishermen. In fact, there was a sense of faded glory about the entire peninsula, and the inhabitants spoke wistfully about the splendors of days gone by. In 1726, the same rare hurricane that had destroyed the Spanish fort had transformed the salt lake into an arm of the sea, making it useless for salt production. Afterward, new pits had been dug in the nearby hills. Eight inches deep and up to nearly an acre in size, the pits were filled with a mix of rain and seawater, which left behind the salt deposits as it evaporated.

  The party set out for the ruined Spanish fort, Castillo de Santiago, several miles away. The going was slow, with Humboldt stopping often to make detailed geological observations. As night overtook them, the party was navigating a slender path hemmed in by the sea on one side and a vertical rock wall on the other. Worse yet, the incoming tide was narrowing the trail at every step. Moving as quickly as the half-light would allow, the travelers finally gained the demolished castle, built of coral and once boasting sixteen guns. Rising on a barren mountain, overgrown with agave, cactus, and mimosas, the fort was “lugubrious and romantic” in the twilight, with a primordial character. To Humboldt, it bore “less resemblance to the works of man, than to those masses of rock which were ruptured at the early revolutions of the globe.” The ruins still stand today.