Humboldt had planned to trek eastward along the Paria Peninsula, but at the mission of Catuaro he learned that the rains had washed out the roads there. Not wanting to risk losing the plant specimens they had already gathered, the travelers decided to take the forest trail to Cariaco, on the coast, where they could find a boat back to Cumaná. The corregidor, or governor, of the region dispatched three Indians to clear the path of vines and branches. And, to Humboldt’s annoyance, the missionary insisted on accompanying them, as he was on his way to Cariaco on the coast to give last rites to a black man who had been condemned to death for his part in an unsuccessful slave rebellion the year before. En route, the rest of the party was subjected to the missionary’s tirades on the innate wickedness of the blacks, the necessity of the slave trade, and the benefits that the slaves derived from their bondage among the Christians. Humboldt, of course, demurred. Though Spanish laws were “less harsh than some other nations’,” he wrote, “such is the state of the negroes, that justice, far from efficaciously protecting them during their lives, cannot even punish acts of barbarity which cause their death.”
The descent through the forest of Catuaro was no better than the Baxada del Purgatorio, especially over the slippery, wet clay of the Saca Manteca (Lard Sack). Finally, they reached Cariaco, set on the gulf in a broad plain and surrounded by plantations. Notorious for its fevers, Cariaco had nevertheless grown rapidly in recent years, to over six thousand people, as a result of the colony’s liberalized trade policy. Cotton was the primary crop, having supplanted coconut, which was still grown for its oil (Humboldt called coconut the “olive” of the tropics). Early the next morning, the travelers boarded a narrow canoe the Spanish called a lancha to cross the Gulf of Cariaco to Cumaná. They followed the River Carenicuar, which cut a line straight as a canal through the surrounding plantations. On the banks of the river, Indian women were washing their laundry with soapberry, whose rubbery fruit produces a thick lather; since the coming of the missions, the small, round fruits were also used for rosary beads.
In the gulf, the waves were high and the winds contrary. Rain began to fall in torrents, and thunder rolled very near. Flocks of flamingos, egrets, and cormorants sought shelter, while the pelicans continued to fish, oblivious to the storm. Though Cumaná lay only thirty-six nautical miles across the gulf, the lancha was forced to pull into a small farm on the lightly settled south shore. After dark the rain abated, and sailing all night, the travelers finally arrived in Cumaná the following morning.
BESIDES giving Humboldt his first glimpse of the South American rain forest, this excursion to the country of the Chayma offered him his first extensive contact with the New World’s native peoples. Numbering about seven million by 1800, the Indians of South America and the Caribbean had fared miserably at the hands of the supposedly civilized Europeans, and Humboldt was deeply moved by their fate. It was in this region that Columbus had first spied terra firma, and by the beginning of the sixteenth century the coastal Indians had already fallen victim to slaving expeditions. Devastated by violence, cultural dislocation, and European diseases, the native peoples had suffered horribly, their civilization had collapsed, and their population had dwindled. With the arrival of the missionaries, the Church had pushed through laws that, though hardly enlightened by our standards, did protect the Indians from some of the worst depredations. Perhaps motivated by a desire to please their new masters and a belief that their own gods had failed to protect them, the Indians had adopted the white man’s religion, at least superficially. And thus the Chaymas, like native peoples throughout the Americas, had been absorbed, village by village, into Spain’s vast network of missions, stretching thousands of miles from California to the tip of South America.
It’s difficult to exaggerate the crucial role played by the missions in the New World—or, for that matter, the influence exerted by the Catholic Church in both Spain and its overseas empire. In the fifteenth century, as King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella had consolidated power in the Spanish monarchy, they had incorporated the Church into the apparatus of state. As an intimate partner of the Crown, the Church—though not without its own internal rivalries and conflicts—controlled tremendous wealth at home and abroad and, along with other institutions such as the university and the crafts guilds, even convened its own courts, which operated outside secular law. In fact, the Spanish monarchs (among whose ceremonial titles was “Most Catholic King”) derived their very authority to colonize the New Continent from Pope Alexander VI, whose 1493 Bull of Demarcation, amended by the Treaty of Tordesillas the following year, had divided the Americas between Spain and Portugal (first along a north-south line drawn 100 leagues west of the Azores and Cape Verdes, then along a line another 260 leagues farther west, or 46 degrees west longitude, slicing through the eastern hump of South America). In many areas of the New World, the clerics were better organized and more plentiful than the secular officials, and by the time of Humboldt’s journey, the Church’s property in the Americas was worth more than that of the Crown itself. As the foundation stones of this vast enterprise, the missionaries were charged not only with propagating the faith and introducing rudimentary education but also with exercising political control over the native peoples. In their far-flung districts, they were confessor, teacher, governor, judge; their power was absolute, divinely granted and royally sanctioned. In fact, it was the missionaries, rather than the bureaucrats or the soldiers, who from the beginning had been entrusted with disseminating Spanish culture throughout the New World.
Though the missions had imposed a semblance of peace, by gathering the Indians into artificial settlements they had also sapped the native people of their independence. “By subjecting to invariable rules even the slightest actions of their domestic life . . . ,” Humboldt wrote, “[the Indians] have been rendered stupid by the effort to render them obedient. Their subsistence is in general more certain, and their habits more pacific, but subject to the constraint and the dull monotony of the government of the Missions, they show by their gloomy and reserved looks that they have not sacrificed their liberty to their repose without regret.” Conquered by the sword, the Indians had been subdued by the Cross.
The Spanish believed that they were carrying civilization to the native peoples, but Humboldt didn’t see the results in such simple terms. All Indians not subjected to European rule were commonly supposed to be nomadic hunters, but in fact agriculture had been practiced in the Americas long before the arrival of the Europeans. The Indians of the forest, settled in villages, ruled by chiefs and raising plantains, cassava, and other crops, were, Humboldt argued, “scarcely more barbarous than the naked Indians of the Missions, who have been taught to make the sign of the cross.” Moreover, as Humboldt witnessed during the catechism lesson at Caripe, the padres tended to overestimate the effect of their teachings. “The reduced [missionized] Indian is often as little of a Christian as the independent Indian is of an idolater,” he notes. “Both, alike occupied by the wants of the moment, betray a marked indifference for religious sentiments, and a secret tendency to the worship of nature and her powers.”
Though the missionaries had debased the native culture, they had not succeeded in obliterating it. The Indians maintained their own language, and they showed an independent spirit and a reverence for tradition that the Spanish had not been able to expunge. “The missionaries may have prohibited the Indians from following certain practices and observing certain ceremonies,” Humboldt noted; “they may have prevented them from painting their skin, from making incisions on their chins, noses, and cheeks; they may have destroyed among the great mass of the people superstitious ideas, mysteriously transmitted from father to son in certain families; but it has been easier for them to proscribe customs and efface remembrances, than to substitute new ideas in the place of the old ones.” By failing to educate the Indians to the secular aspects of European civilization, the Spanish had not given the native peoples the tools to raise themselves up.
Indeed, the Spanish had stripped native culture of far more than they had replaced. The monotonous way of life imposed on the mission Indians wasn’t likely to inspire the industry and exertion seen in independent Indians, yet the resulting inactivity was taken for idleness and lack of intelligence. Thus the Europeans had created a cultural vacuum—which they then cited as evidence of their own supposed superiority. On the contrary, Humboldt suggested that the Indians that the Spanish considered “savages” were in fact the descendants of a highly advanced civilization. If Europe had surpassed the New Continent, he argued, it wasn’t due to any barbarity or inherent inferiority on the part of the native cultures. Rather, their current condition was the tragic result of degradation from a state of high civilization—a debasement the Spanish had done little to ameliorate.
This was a novel, even outlandish, notion at the time, but Humboldt’s later exposure to the Inca, Aztec, and other ancient civilizations would only confirm his view. Though Creoles such as Francisco Clavijero had studied pre-Conquest indigenous peoples, Humboldt was the first European scholar of his stature to investigate these cultures—their history, architecture, language, religion—to recognize in them “those family features by which the ancient unity of our species is manifested.”
Four: Caracas
IN Cumaná, Humboldt began choosing instruments, engaging guides, and otherwise preparing for the expedition into the Orinoco and Amazon basins. He intended to leave at the end of October, after an eclipse of the sun that he was keen to observe from the coast, where viewing conditions were apt to be better.
The evening of October 27, the day before the eclipse, was overcast. The nightly breeze never arose, and the humidity was stifling. For the past two weeks, the weather had been unseasonably hot, and a strange reddish-brown haze had spread over the sky, sometimes waning to reveal the craters of the moon and other times waxing to conceal all but the brightest stars. The phenomenon alarmed the locals, who considered the haze and stillness an infallible omen of disaster.
At about eight o’clock on the evening of the 27th, Humboldt and Bonpland went, as usual, down to the gulf to take the air and to mark the time of high tide. As they crossed the beach between the Indian suburb and the embarcadero, Humboldt suddenly became aware of footsteps in the sand behind them. Turning, he was startled to see a tall, half-naked Indian brandishing a macana, a bulbous club made of palm wood. Dodging to the left, Humboldt managed to avoid the blow. Bonpland, taken unawares, wasn’t so fortunate. The club caught him above the right temple, and he collapsed on the ground. The clout had knocked off the Frenchman’s hat, and instead of pressing the attack, the assailant inexplicably went after it. Humboldt rushed to his friend’s side and helped him to his feet. Having lost the element of surprise, the Indian ran toward a thicket of cacti and mangrove. But he slipped in the loose sand, and Bonpland, galvanized by pain and anger, was the first to reach him. As he threw his arms around the Indian, the man drew a long knife. Alone, unarmed, a mile and a half from the nearest house, the two Europeans were seriously outmatched. But just then a group of Spanish merchants, who also happened to be strolling the beach, came to their aid. Outnumbered, the assailant fled through the cacti with the white men in pursuit. After a long chase, the Indian tired and took shelter in a cowshed, where he ultimately surrendered.
Taken into custody, the attacker told the authorities that he was from the area around Lake Maracaibo, in northwestern Venezuela, and had served on a privateer out of Santo Domingo. In fact, he was not a full Indian but what was called a zambo, with a mixture of Indian and black blood. As historian William Lytle Schurz points out, such mixed-bloods were “considered to be the one insoluble—and completely undesirable—ingredient in the racial melting pot of the colonies. Bitter and truculent, and spurned by the two peoples responsible for his hybrid soul, as well as by the Spaniard, he was a hopeless pariah and a potential enemy of the society that would have none of him.” Having quarreled with his captain, the man had been put ashore at Cumaná when the ship left port. But what was the motive for the attack? Why, after knocking Bonpland down, was he content with stealing only a hat? The authorities questioned him in his prison cell, but the man’s answers were confused. Sometimes he seemed to imply that he had meant to rob them; other times he claimed he’d flown into a rage on hearing them speak French, the language of his erstwhile captain.
Humboldt helped Bonpland back to their house. During the night, he contracted a fever, and Humboldt sat up with him. Even so, the Prussian was out on the patio at five o’clock the next morning, preparing for the eclipse. The day was clear, and he had an unobstructed view. “Being endowed with great energy and fortitude, and possessing that cheerful disposition which is one of the most precious gifts of nature,” Bonpland also insisted on working as usual that day. Still, he became lightheaded whenever he bent over, and it was obvious that he was in no condition for an arduous journey through the rain forest. The travelers had no choice but to postpone their expedition into the Amazon and to wait in Cumaná in the hope that his symptoms would clear.
A few days later, on the night of November 3-4, the strange red mist that had been hanging over the city grew so dense that the moon disappeared save for a smudge in the sky. The next day, about two in the afternoon, heavy black clouds enveloped the inland mountains, and at four o’clock, a hollow, sporadic thunder was heard, seemingly coming from a great height. A few minutes later there was a violent gust of wind, followed by great drops of rain. At 4:12, the precise moment of the loudest peals of thunder, Cumaná was struck by an earthquake. Bonpland, hunched over a table of plant specimens, was nearly thrown to the floor. Humboldt, lying in a hammock, began to sway from the strong shock. Still, he didn’t lose his scientific detachment. The quake ran north to south, he noted, and didn’t seem to be a rolling motion, but a powerful up-and-down jolt. Another shock followed fifteen seconds later. People ran into the street, screaming.
For the rest of the afternoon, the sky remained cloudy and deadly calm. The sunset that evening was spectacular, with golden clouds parting near the horizon to reveal an indigo sky and a huge, distorted sun throwing off rainbow-hued rays. At nine o’clock, there was a smaller aftershock, accompanied by more subterranean rumblings.
The townspeople attributed the earthquake, the underground thunder, and the odd red mist all to the eclipse the week before. The tremor hadn’t done great damage, but the people were still traumatized by the earthquake that had leveled the city just twenty-two months before. That evening they collected in the zócalo, afraid to return to their homes, and Humboldt and Bonpland were frequently interrupted by people wanting to know whether their instruments predicted another quake. There was great alarm the following day, when again at two in the afternoon, there was a violent gust of wind, followed by thunder and a few drops of rain. The phenomenon repeated itself at the same hour for the next week, to the continuing distress of the population.
A few years later, an unidentified Chilean tried to describe to British naval captain Basil Hall the psychological power of the temblores. “These earthquakes are very awful. . . . Before we hear the sound, or, at least, are fully conscious of hearing it, we are made sensible, I do not well know how, that something uncommon is going to happen: everything seems to change colour; our thoughts are chained irrevocably down; the whole world appears to be in disorder; all nature looks different from what it was wont to do; we feel quite subdued and overwhelmed by some invisible power, beyond human control or comprehension,” he explained. “Then comes the horrible sound, distinctly heard; and, immediately, the solid earth is all in motion, waving to and fro, like the surface of the sea. Depend upon it, Sir, a severe earthquake is enough to shake the firmest mind.”
The temblor at Cumaná was the first Humboldt experienced, and though relatively minor, it left a profound impression. Many years later, he wrote in Cosmos, “We are accustomed from early childhood to draw a contrast between the mobility of water and the immobility of the soil on which we
tread. . . . When, therefore, we suddenly feel the ground move beneath us, a mysterious and natural force, with which we are previously unacquainted, is revealed. . . . A moment destroys the illusion of a whole life; our deceptive faith in the repose of nature vanishes, and we feel transported, as it were, into a realm of unknown destructive forces. . . . We no longer trust the ground on which we stand.”
The aftershocks gradually subsided. On November 7, the strange red mist vanished, and the sky took on the brilliant blue often seen after a violent storm. That night, Humboldt set his telescope on one of the satellites of Jupiter, and the planet’s atmospheric belts appeared more distinct than he had ever seen them before. Viewing conditions remained superb for the next several days, and he took advantage of the extraordinary clarity to measure the comparative brightness of various stars.
In the early hours of November 12, Bonpland happened to get up for a breath of air, when he noticed a meteor shower in the eastern sky. He awakened Humboldt, and the two went out onto the patio to watch. There were no clouds, and for the next four hours thousands of white streaks traced in a north-to-south pattern. The extraordinary storm gradually diminished after four o’clock, but was still visible even a quarter hour after sunrise. The meteors didn’t go unnoticed by the townspeople, who customarily arose at four to prepare for morning mass. Coming on the heels of the temblor, the meteor storm wasn’t a matter of indifference to the locals, who recalled that the great earthquake of 1766 had been preceded by a similar shower.
Humboldt's Cosmos Page 11