Humboldt's Cosmos

by Gerard Helferich

  The naturalists longed to watch Venus set over the decrepit castle, but their guide, parched with thirst and eager for his night’s rest, tried to hurry them along with tales of jaguars and rattlesnakes. Relenting, the Europeans allowed themselves to be led through a thicket of prickly pears to a nearby hut, where an Indian family received them graciously. After a supper of fish, plantains, and, most appreciated of all, excellent water, they slung their hammocks for the night.

  At dawn, Humboldt saw that they were in a cluster of tiny houses, the remains of a village that had once occupied the site. There had been a church, whose carcass was half buried in sand and brushwood. When the castle had been dismantled, nearly forty years before, most of the villagers had moved away. But a few families had stayed, and they now made their living catching fish, which they took to Cumaná to trade for plantains, coconuts, and cassava.

  In the village, they had been told, was a white shoemaker of Spanish descent. How could a cobbler support himself in a country where everyone went barefoot? Humboldt wondered. And indeed, when they came upon the man he was stringing his bow and sharpening his arrows to go hunting for birds. Still, the shoemaker received them with the self-conscious gravity of someone blessed with a rare talent. He was something of a know-it-all, and Humboldt wryly dubbed him “the sage of the plain.” After haranguing them on the manufacture of salt, the warning signs of earthquakes, the techniques of prospecting for gold and silver, the uses of various medicinal plants, the Bible, and the illusion of human greatness, the cobbler drew from a leather pouch a few very small opaque pearls of poor quality, which he insisted that the visitors accept. Refusing all payment, he instructed them simply to relate how a poor shoemaker of Araya, a white man of noble Castilian race, had given them something that in their own country was considered very precious. “I here acquit myself of the promise I made to this worthy man,” Humboldt duly concludes in the Personal Narrative.

  In the sixteenth century, Araya and the surrounding islands had been renowned for their pearls. The Spanish had found the native inhabitants bedecked with necklaces and bracelets made from them, and, perhaps not coincidentally, the peninsula had been one of the first New World territories to be colonized, with Indian and African slaves put to work diving to satisfy the European luxury market. But by the end of the sixteenth century, the pearl industry had declined, and by the 1630s it was defunct, a victim of overfishing, the Venetians’ introduction of fine artificial pearls, and the growing fashion for cut diamonds. No wonder the current inhabitants felt their best days were behind them.

  Humboldt, Bonpland, and their guide left the village the next morning and, crossing the arid hills nearby, detected the acrid odor of petroleum, carried on the wind from the coast. Gaining the source, they waded out eighty feet from shore and, standing on the sandy bottom in waist-deep water, located a circle about three feet in diameter, from which a transparent yellow fluid bubbled up and slicked the surface of the sea for a thousand feet. It would be another fifty-five years until the invention of the kerosene lamp gave the world its first practical use for petroleum and sixty years before the first oil well was drilled (in Pennsylvania). At the dawn of the nineteenth century, the odiferous liquid was still a curiosity, and not even the prescient Humboldt could have guessed that he was standing over one of the largest oil reserves on earth—which some distant day, after the invention of the internal combustion engine, would become more precious than all the pearls, gold, and silver the Spanish ever took out of the New World.

  That night, the travelers set out for Cumaná in a native fishing boat. The vessel was the best they could find, but as they left shore, Humboldt was disturbed to see that the little craft remained afloat only through the constant bailing of the fisherman’s son. It was a nerve-wracking nighttime sail, but eventually the boat pulled into port—which Humboldt took as testimony of the extreme serenity of the seas in this region.

  ON the fourth of September, the travelers began a second, longer excursion from Cumaná, this time south and east to the highlands inhabited by the Chayma Indians. To a naturalist, it was an intensely promising area, with a cool, delicious climate, mountains, caverns, and majestic forests of palms and tree ferns. Humboldt was also eager to get his first prolonged look at the native people, “lately nomadic, and still nearly in a state of nature, wild without being barbarous.”

  The only route available called for two demanding crossings of the coastal mountains, one to reach the interior missions and another to regain the gulf. Owing to the difficulty of the roads, the travelers pared their baggage down to the bare minimum—two mules’ worth, including food, a sextant, a dipping needle, a magnetometer, a few thermometers, a hygrometer, and some paper for drying plant specimens. Traveling southeast, they snaked along a narrow path on the bank of the Manzanares. At the Capuchin hospital of Divina Pastora, they turned northeast and entered a treeless plain where only cacti, spurge, portulaca, and other scrubby plants grew. After two hours more, they came to the foot of the mountains and abruptly found themselves in a magnificent forest, where enormous, vine-strewn trees towered above a floor of lush tropical plants bearing leaves several feet long.

  On this excursion through the highlands—and throughout his five-year journey—Humboldt was determined to document as many plants as possible, especially those new to science. No doubt this was partly a reaction to the intoxicating abundance of exotic species. But this impulse to collect and classify lay squarely in the mainstream of botany at the time, when the great voyages of discovery had introduced thousands of previously unknown plants to Europe. However, as with so much of Western science, this enterprise had actually begun in ancient Greece, with a student of Aristotle named Theophrastus. Considered the father of botany, Theophrastus was the author of Historia plantarum, which described thousands of plant species and divided them by size into trees, shrubs, undershrubs, and herbs. He had also been the first to distinguish between monocots (plants with one seed leaf) and dicots (plants with two seed leaves), which even today remain the two principal divisions of flowering plants. By the sixteenth century, though, European naturalists were having trouble identifying new plants according to the Greek system. As a result, botanists began to compile books called herbals, which named and categorized species based on a fresh look at the plants themselves. These efforts represented a step forward, though they were still suffused with superstition—such as the “doctrine of signatures,” which held that God had placed a mark on each plant to indicate its usefulness (heart-shaped leaves hinting that a plant was beneficial to that organ, for instance).

  The following century saw rudimentary advances in plant anatomy (such as the discovery of cells by Robert Hooke) and physiology (such as discoveries in plant respiration and reproduction). But the emphasis remained on identifying and classifying plants, as all those exotic species collected by explorers continued to land on naturalists’ worktables. In 1753, the great Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus published his Species plantarum, which described and classified most plants known at the time, and introduced the binomial (genus and species) system of classification still used today. Linnaeus’s method provided desperately needed standards, but its criteria for classification were somewhat arbitrary and not necessarily the most botanically significant. Linnaeus also considered species immutable and believed that he had discovered nothing less than God’s unchanging plan of creation. Ironically, then, though the Swede’s system is a cornerstone of modern botany, it can also be seen as the last hurrah of a rigid, outdated order that would soon give way to the more empirical spirit of nineteenth-century science.

  In 1789, just ten years before Humboldt sailed, Antoine-Laurent de Jussieu offered a refinement of Linnaeus’s system. The descendant of distinguished French botanists (his uncle Joseph, traveling with La Condamine in South America, had reportedly gone mad after the inadvertent destruction of his specimen collection), de Jussieu organized genera into broader categories called families. Not only did this render classific
ation infinitely easier and less arbitrary (most of de Jussieu’s families are still in use today), later, as the theory of evolution gained acceptance, similarities underlying genera and families would come to be seen as evidence of those plants’ descent from a mutual forbear.

  But On the Origin of Species was sixty years in the future. In 1799, botany was still immersed in the hunt for new species, and Humboldt was eager to add what he could to that trove of knowledge. And he had grander ambitions for his journey as well. Not content to deliver even thousands of new plants to Europe, he was intent on discovering “how the forces of nature interact upon one another and how the geographic environment influences plant and animal life.” He realized, though, that that underlying unity would reveal itself only through painstaking observation and measurement, collection, and classification. Therefore, he would first focus on the specific, which, besides its intrinsic value, would also allow him to tease out more general laws. Throughout the journey, de Jussieu’s system of families would be Humboldt’s constant guide as he sought to fit each new genus or species into the emerging pattern of nature.

  As the party climbed away from the coast, the flora began to change, and even assume an eerie familiarity. In fact, it improbably began to remind Humboldt of the marsh plants of northern Europe, thousands of miles away in a radically different climate. In the tropics, he realized, plants growing at altitude resemble vegetation found in temperate regions at lower elevations. Or, as he would later phrase it in Aspects of Nature, “The great elevation attained in several tropical countries . . . enables the inhabitants of the torrid zone—surrounded by palms, bananas, and the other beautiful forms proper to those latitudes—to behold also those vegetable forms which, demanding a cooler temperature, would seem to belong to other zones. . . . Thus it is given to man in those regions to behold without quitting his native land all the forms of vegetation dispersed over the globe, and all the shining worlds which stud the heavenly vault from pole to pole.”

  Humboldt also noted how the geology of the area influenced plant life and even human culture. Following a trail along the stream, he saw that the vegetation was more lush wherever the underlying limestone was topped with a layer of sandstone, which served to trap more water near the surface. In these areas they would also find Indian huts, surrounded by gardens of plantains, papaws, sugarcane, and maize. At first, Humboldt doubted that such small plots could feed a whole family, till he recalled that plantains produce twenty times as much food per acre as grain. But the tropical climate that generated this fecundity also limited human progress, he believed, by the very isolation and ease of living it afforded: The necessity of food, which in a harsher climate would have excited man to labor, was very simply fulfilled in this fertile soil and mild weather. “We may easily conceive why, in the midst of abundance, beneath the shade of the plantain and breadfruit tree, the intellectual faculties unfold themselves less rapidly than under a rigorous sky, in the region of wheat, where our race is engaged in a perpetual struggle with the elements . . . ,” he suggested. “Without neighbors, almost unconnected with the rest of mankind, each family of settlers forms a separate tribe. This insulated state arrests or retards the progress of civilization, which advances only in proportion as society becomes numerous, and its connections more intimate and multiplied. But, on the other hand, it is solitude that develops and strengthens in man the sentiment of liberty and independence; and gives birth to that noble pride of character which has at all times distinguished the Castilian race.” Thus does the physical environment shape not only the vegetation of a region, but also the character of the human settlers.

  As the party continued south, the soil became dry and sandy, and they ventured into a range of forbidding mountains isolating the coast from the savannahs and the rain forest beyond. True to its name, this so-called Imposible was nearly impenetrable. Still, the only road connecting the area to Cumaná twisted through the steep, barren terrain, and the inhabitants of the plains below were forced to send their maize, leather, cattle, and other produce over this rugged country to reach the markets in the capital. At the crest of the Imposible was a spectacular view of the entire peninsula, taking in pastures, the rocky coast, and the natural basin forming the port of Cumaná. In fact, the view was so striking, so unlikely, that it reminded Humboldt of the fanciful landscape that Leonardo da Vinci had created as the background for his Mona Lisa.

  The travelers slept at a military outpost atop the mountain, then, leaving before sunrise, began the harrowing descent down the other side, tracing a path fifteen inches wide and bordered by steep precipices. At the foot of the mountains, they reentered a dense wood webbed with rivers, where orange and papaw trees gave evidence of conucos, or Indian plantations, that had been abandoned. For hours, they walked in half-light under the vaulting forest canopy. The tree trunks were everywhere encrusted by a carpet of vines, orchids, figs, and other parasitic plants so intertwined that the excited botanists could scarcely distinguish the individual species. “It might be said,” Humboldt wrote, “that the earth, overloaded with plants, does not allow them space enough to unfold themselves. . . . By this singular assemblage, the forests, as well as the flanks of the rocks and mountains, enlarge the domains of organic nature.” From a great tree fern hung the incredible, baglike nests of the orioles, whose cries mingled overhead with the calls of parrots and macaws.

  Humboldt was overwhelmed by this first encounter with the rain forest, this realization of his boyhood dream to “travel in those distant lands which have been but rarely visited by Europeans.” Awed as he was by the profligacy of life there, the forest’s most startling feature was its staggering immensity. “When a traveler newly arrived from Europe penetrates for the first time into the forests of South America, he beholds nature under an unexpected aspect. He feels at every step that he is . . . on a vast continent where everything is gigantic—mountains, rivers, and the mass of vegetation,” he found. “If he feels strongly the beauty of picturesque scenery he can scarcely define the various emotions which crowd upon his mind; he can scarcely distinguish what most excites his admiration, the deep silence of those solitudes, the individual beauty and contrast of forms, or that vigor and freshness of vegetable life which characterize the climate of the tropics.”

  At the village of San Fernando, near the junction of the Manzanares and Lucasperez rivers, Humboldt visited his first mission in the Americas. Constructed of clay reinforced with vines, the neat huts of the hundred Chayma families were arranged on wide, straight streets. The church was located on the village’s main square, along with the priest’s house and a humble building used for lodging travelers known, as in all the Spanish colonies, by the grand name of “the King’s House.” The missionary was an aged Capuchin friar from Aragon, obese but hale. Sole representative of Church and Crown, he didn’t let his responsibilities weigh too heavily on him.

  “His extreme corpulency, his hilarity, the interest he took in battles and sieges, ill accorded with the ideas we form in northern countries of the melancholy reveries and contemplative life of the missionaries,” Humboldt noted. “Though extremely busy about a cow which was to be killed the next day, the old monk received us with kindness and allowed us to hang up our hammocks in a gallery of his house. Seated, without doing anything, the greater part of the day, in an armchair of red wood, he bitterly complained of what he called the indolence and ignorance of his countrymen.” The sight of the scientists’ instruments, books, and specimens drew a sarcastic smile, and their rotund host averred that of all the pleasures of life, none was comparable to a good piece of beef. “Thus does sensuality obtain ascendancy, where there is no occupation for the mind,” Humboldt cautioned.

  Three centuries earlier, Columbus had been the first to describe the New World’s native peoples, after encountering the Tainos on Hispañola. The Indians, he wrote his patron, Queen Isabella, were “very well built, with very handsome bodies and very good faces” and “very lovely” eyes. “They [had] the swe
etest voices in the world, and . . . [were] always smiling.” They were “simple,” “gentle,” “artless and generous.” “They love[d] their neighbors as themselves,” and showed “as much lovingness as though they would give their hearts.” They were a people ready to “be delivered and to be converted to our holy faith” but “by love rather than force.” More to the point, they were pliable—“so cowardly that a thousand of them would not face three [Spaniards],” making them “fitted to be ruled and set to work, to cultivate the land and to do all else that may be necessary.”

  Humboldt, being of a more scientific and humanitarian turn of mind, and having no need to convince his patrons of the economic or religious potential of the Indians, focused his first detailed portrait of the native peoples on their physical attributes rather than their perceived moral qualities. The description is lengthy and rather clinical, though not unflattering. Through the details, one can discern the obsessive observer, intent on capturing every data point for future study and comparison.

  The Chaymas, Humboldt wrote, were short, thickset, and muscular, with tawny skin, broad shoulders, a flat chest, plump belly, and well-rounded, fleshy limbs ending in large feet and delicate hands. Their foreheads were small, and it was said of a beautiful woman, “She is fat and has a narrow forehead.” The Chaymas had black, deep-set, almond-shaped eyes, which they had the habit of casting downward. Their cheekbones were high and their nose long and prominent, with broad nostrils. The jaw was wide, ending in a short, rounded chin. Their hair was dark and straight, and the men had very little beard. Humboldt didn’t find the women attractive, but the young girls had a soft, melancholy look that was appealing. The women carried their hair in two long braids and wore necklaces and bracelets made from shells, bird bones, and seeds. Overall, Humboldt noted, the Chaymas resembled the Mongol race, suggesting a possible genetic link between Asians and Native Americans.