Humboldt's Cosmos

by Gerard Helferich

  For the rest of their journey, Humboldt would inquire about the storm and discover that it had been visible throughout Latin America. On his return to Europe, he would be astounded to learn that the massive meteor shower of 1799, now famous in the annals of astronomy, had been observed over nearly a million square miles, as far away as Greenland and his native Germany. These November meteor storms are now known as the Leonids, because they seem to originate in the constellation Leo. In fact, Humboldt’s detailed observation of the storm of 1799 helped to demonstrate the regularity of meteor showers, and he was the first to suggest that they are caused by the earth passing through the orbiting debris fields of ancient comets—which we now know to be the case.

  By the middle of November, Bonpland’s symptoms had improved enough that he and Humboldt thought it safe to leave Cumaná for Caracas, the capital. After the end of the rainy season, they planned to strike out from there, across the vast plains known as the Llanos, toward the Amazon. On the sixteenth, at eight in the evening, they sailed for La Guaira, 180 miles to the west, which then, as now, was the seaport for Caracas and the principal port of Venezuela. Their vessel was a thirty-foot trader, low to the water, with an enormous triangular sail. Though these seas could be rough, the Indian pilots were skilled, and they navigated, like their forebears, without benefit of chart or compass. In any event, the alternative to sailing would have been a difficult, four-day journey over an arduous road through fever-infested territory.

  Humboldt was leaving with some regret. “We quitted the shore of Cumaná as if it had long been our home,” he wrote. “This was the first land we had trodden in a zone, towards which my thoughts had been directed from earliest youth. There is a powerful charm in the impression produced by the scenery and climate of these regions; and after an abode of a few months we seemed to have lived there during a long succession of years . . . ,” he found. “In the lower regions of both Indies, everything in nature appears new and marvelous. In the open plains and amid the gloom of forests, almost all the remembrances of Europe are effaced. . . . Cumaná and its dusty soil are still more frequently present to my imagination, than all the wonders of the Cordilleras [Andes]. Beneath the bright sky of the south, the light, and the magic of the aerial hues, embellish a land almost destitute of vegetation.” Moreover, the “sun does not merely enlighten, it colors the objects, and wraps them in a thin vapor, which, without changing the transparency of the air, renders its tints more harmonious, softens the effects of the light, and diffuses over nature a placid calm, which is reflected in our souls.”

  A few days after their departure, Humboldt later learned, the man who had attacked them managed to escape from jail. Far from being outraged at this supposed miscarriage of justice, Humboldt was relieved. Neither he nor Bonpland seems to have harbored any ill will toward their assailant, who clearly was suffering from some type of derangement. In fact, they worried for the man, since at that time and place, an accused could be held for as long as eight years before even facing trial. Still, one wonders whether the “escape” was engineered by the local authorities, who, after the departure of their distinguished European guests, were just as happy to forget the whole incident.

  As their boat passed the mouth of the Río Manzanares outside Cumaná, the evening breeze raised gentle waves on the Gulf of Cariaco. The moon hadn’t risen yet, and the Milky Way was reflected in the placid sea. Castle San Antonio peeked out from behind the coconut palms, and the torches of the native fishermen twinkled onshore. As the trader approached Cape Arenas, a pod of dolphins frolicked alongside, leaving a swirl of phosphorescence in their wake. From midnight to dawn, the boat drifted amid the barren, geologically tortured Caracas Islands. In the morning, it anchored in the crocodile-infested harbor of New Barcelona, a busy port of trade with Cuba, especially for beef. Humboldt took the opportunity to fix the town’s latitude and longitude and to scramble up to the nearby fort to take in the scenery and do some geologizing. The boat hoisted sail again at noon and by late in the day had reached the Piritu Islands, which rose only eight or nine inches above sea level. The islands were covered with grass and wildflowers, and except for the huge red sun setting behind them, Humboldt would have sworn he was gazing out on a European meadow.

  By dawn they had made such good progress that it seemed they’d be in La Guaira by dusk. But, fearing privateers working the area, the Indian pilot dropped anchor in the little harbor of Higuerote to await the shelter of night. This part of the coast had a reputation as being unhealthy, and judging from the condition of the inhabitants, Humboldt was inclined to agree. Since popular opinion blamed the insalubrity on the mangrove thickets guarding the shore, Humboldt collected some of the wood for later analysis. In experiments at Caracas, he’d discover that the yellowish-brown tint to the water around mangroves was due to the leaching of tannin and that moistened mangrove bark absorbed oxygen from the air.

  The road from Higuerote to Caracas was wild and prone to flooding. But though Bonpland still suffered sporadic dizziness from his injury, he was determined to disembark and prospect for new plant specimens. Humboldt must have been concerned when his friend insisted on taking the overland route, but he himself had no choice but to stay on board and safeguard the instruments. At dusk the trader set sail into choppy seas and contrary winds, and by sunrise on November 21 they had rounded Cape Codera. The coast here was wild and picturesque, dominated by perpendicular mountains three or four thousand feet high. But the land was also green and fresh, and the valleys were cultivated with sugarcane, corn, and coconut palms. The tallest of the mountains were Niguatar and the double-domed Silla (“Saddle”) de Caracas, jutting into the sky like snowless Alps.

  With its back to the steep rock wall, the town of La Guaira reminded Humboldt of Santa Cruz on Tenerife—stifling, solitary, dreary. In fact, analyzing the detailed readings taken by a Spanish physician, Humboldt pronounced the port one of the hottest places on earth. With about seven thousand residents, the town consisted of just two streets running parallel to shore. Though the waters were rough, the anchorage bad, and the tides inconvenient, La Guaira had grown into an important hub for transporting coconuts to market. With the waves precluding the use of mules, free blacks would wade into the shark-infested waters up to their waists, lugging their heavy loads. No one ever seemed to be attacked, a fact they attributed to the bishop having given his benediction to the fish.

  For the past two years, La Guaira had been suffering from an epidemic of yellow fever (called vómito negro in Spanish, after the dark blood clots spit up in severe cases), characterized by a high temperature, jaundice, and vomiting. Humboldt puzzled over the possible causes. The epidemic seemed to have begun with the arrival of more ships from northern Europe; did the vessels bring the disease, or were the arriving Europeans just more susceptible? It also seemed to have coincided with flooding of the nearby Río de la Guaira; had the resulting pools of stagnant water released some pestilential miasma? The disease scarcely ever penetrated into the cooler mountains, and it was widely considered to be, as Humboldt said, “developed by a corrupted air, destroyed by cold, conveyed from place to place in garments, and attached to the walls of houses.” The fever was generally thought to be contagious, yet outbreaks didn’t spread from quarter to quarter of the city, as one would expect in that case. And its progress didn’t seem to increase with contact or decrease with quarantine. The disease was confined mainly to shore, where epidemics seemed to break out during the hot season, then die down during cooler weather. Despite all this data, Humboldt was stymied. “The more I reflect on this subject,” he admitted, “the more mysterious it appears to me. . . .”

  But the remarkable thing here isn’t Humboldt’s failure to solve the riddle; it’s the accuracy of his description. All the clues are present—the stagnant water, the outbreak in warm weather and improvement with cooler temperatures, the lack of infection at sea and in the mountains—but Humboldt was lacking the vital context that would tie them all together. To do
this he would have to have made his journey sixty years later—after Louis Pasteur had proven the preposterous idea that human health could be affected by creatures too small to be seen by the naked eye—to have known that diseases such as yellow fever are not caused by unhealthy air but by tiny parasitic organisms called germs. And it wouldn’t be until 1881 that Cuban physician Carlos Juan Finlay would suggest that yellow fever is caused by a virus transmitted by a mosquito, which, yes, is “conveyed from place to place in garments, and attached to the walls of houses.”

  Warned not to spend the night at La Guaira because of the epidemic, Humboldt continued on to nearby Maiquetía. The road to Caracas was good, and the next day a five-hour uphill walk through an area renowned in Europe and North America for its spectacular vistas brought Humboldt to the capital city. Bonpland didn’t fare so well, arriving four days later, after slogging along the flooded road from Higuerote. But his health had held up, and his specimen cases were packed, including several plants previously unknown to science, such as Brownea racemosa (a scarlet flower resembling a rose) and Bauhinia ferruginea (a small tree with large pale flowers).

  Whereas La Guaira suffered in constant summer, Caracas enjoyed perpetual spring, owing to its elevation of about three thousand feet. Named after the Caracas Indians, the city had been founded in 1567, only to be sacked by the English buccaneer Francis Drake in 1595. Built on a precipitous slope along a narrow valley, the city had about forty thousand residents, eight churches, five monasteries, and a fine stone bridge. The streets were wide and straight and set out in a grid, like most of Spain’s New World cities. The houses were spacious, though Humboldt feared they were built a bit high for this earthquake-prone country. He and Bonpland rented a large, pleasant house with a view of the surrounding landscape to wait out the rains. It would be another four months before the dry season would begin.

  With the mountains pressing in on it, Caracas was a gloomy place, particularly in these cool, rainy months. At this time of year, the mornings would be clear, but toward evening wisps of vapor would form over the peaks, then gather into big, fleecy clouds. Again a pang of homesickness crept into Humboldt’s journal. “Beneath this misty sky, I could scarcely imagine myself to be in . . . the torrid zone,” he wrote, “but rather in the north of Germany, among the pines and larches that cover the mountains of the Harz.”

  The elevation also lent the climate a variability unusual in the tropics, and the city’s inhabitants would complain of experiencing several seasons in a single day. The fickle weather was blamed for a surfeit of catarrh, an inflammation of the nose and throat, but the residents especially dreaded those occasions when the wind would rebound off the mountains and, filled with moisture, swing around from the west. Known as the catia, after the place where it seemed to originate, this wind was said to cause headaches among the susceptible, and people sometimes shut themselves up in their houses while it was blowing. The “wind of Petare,” on the other hand, hailing from the east and southeast, was dry, pleasant, and invigorating—except during the rainy season, when breezes from this quarter brought frequent storms. Varied though it was, the climate around Caracas was well suited to sugarcane, coffee, bananas, pineapples, and even strawberries, grapes, and fruit trees such as apples and quince. Looking back on all the capitals of Spanish America that he had visited, Humboldt would later reflect that, whereas he discovered the greatest passion for science in Mexico City and Bogotá and the most pronounced interest in literature in Quito and Lima, he found the strongest European flavor in Cuba and Venezuela, owing to their extensive commerce with the Old World and their ready access to the Caribbean—made all the more piquant by the addition of Native American and African influences.

  The city also boasted a theater of more than fifteen hundred seats. By all accounts, Humboldt had no ear for music. But the theater was the hub of the city’s social life, and he would often attend the concerts there. On those occasions, he appreciated the fact that the orchestra seats were open to the air, which allowed him to glance up during the performance and gauge the conditions for astronomical viewing later that night.

  Humboldt found in Caracas a few families well versed in literature, music, and mathematics, but he was disappointed to see that natural history and the visual arts had been neglected. There was no newspaper in the city, and curiosity about the natural world was so tepid that he couldn’t find a single person who had ever ventured to the top of the neighboring Silla de Caracas, the saddle-shaped mountain towering over the valley. Concerned only with their crops, the weather, and other minutiae of daily existence, the people seemed “to live not to enjoy life, but only to prolong it.” The truth is that by the time of Humboldt’s visit, Caracas was a deeply divided city—racially, socially, and politically. In another few years, it would become the locus of the South American independence movement.

  The instigators of independence were not the most oppressed segments of the population, the Native Americans or the African slaves, but rather the whites known as Creoles. Elsewhere this term denotes a variety of racial and ethnic mixes, but in the Spanish colonies it referred to supposedly purebred Spaniards who had been born in the New World. Constituting ninety-five percent of the white population, the Creoles were themselves a diverse group, including descendants of the conquistadors, who had grown rich in service to the Crown over a period of centuries, as well as families who had arrived only recently from Spain, where they had enjoyed a level of prominence and wealth that they were eager to continue in the New World. Though there were bitter rivalries among the Creoles, they were nearly unanimous in their hatred of the Gachupines, the five percent of the white population that had been born in Spain. Also known as peninsulares, the Gachupines were given precedence in everything, while the Creoles were shut out of the best administrative and military positions after the Bourbon Reforms of the late eighteenth century. Well aware of their own superiority, the Gachupines adopted a gallingly supercilious manner. “The most miserable, uneducated, uncultured European,” Humboldt pointed out, “thinks himself superior to the whites born in the New World. . . .”

  Increasingly restive under Spanish rule, some Creoles had begun to take pride in the land of their birth and to see themselves as a people apart. “One often hears people saying proudly, `I am not Spanish, I am American,’” Humboldt reports. In fact, the Creoles’ resentment was fanned by the presence of the Indians and Africans. For, however low he happened to be on the social scale, every white could comfort himself that he was at least superior to every Indian and every black, as reflected in the oft-heard expression, Todo blanco es caballero, “Every white is a gentleman.” With their common skin color blurring the less obvious distinctions among Creole and Gachupine, the former found it easier to challenge the reputed superiority of their so-called betters. Humboldt would often hear a barefoot white ask in indignation, “Does that rich man think himself whiter than I am?” And thus, the spirit of independence was fostered in part by the subjugation of the nonwhite races.

  These simmering resentments, exacerbated by an economic downturn, had bubbled over into an abortive Creole revolt in Venezuela in 1797. That same year, Great Britain seized the nearby island of Trinidad, which it started using as a base for illicit trade with the Spanish colony. This was not the last of the meddling by Spain’s longtime rival, who would later play a key role in Venezuela’s struggle for independence. Several years after Humboldt and Bonpland’s departure, Caracas would take the lead in the revolt against Spain.

  THE terrace of Humboldt and Bonpland’s house in Caracas had a tantalizing view of the Silla, and it wasn’t long before the naturalists resolved to scale the peak, rainy season or no. The night of January 2, 1800, they spent at a coffee plantation outside town, so as to get an early start the following morning. But the weather was unexpectedly clear, and instead of resting up for the climb, the travelers stayed up all night watching for three predicted eclipses of the moons of Jupiter, since comparing the exact times of the eclipses t
o published tables would allow them to determine their longitude. However, owing to an error in the charts, the pair ended up missing all three occlusions, much to Humboldt’s disgust.

  The party of eighteen climbers set out before dawn, including local dignitaries as well as slaves to bear the instruments. The path was known to be frequented by smugglers, and though their black guides were somewhat familiar with the route, no one in the party had ever climbed as far as the eastern, or higher, spur of the Silla that was their objective. For the next two hours they hiked through the clear, cool morning, one behind the other on the narrow trail. On reaching the Puerta de la Silla, where the grade increased to thirty degrees, they felt the lack of crampons and iron-tipped sticks, since the grass was too short to provide a handhold and the underlying rock was too hard to be dug out into steps. One of their companions, a young Capuchin monk and professor of mathematics, had been boasting of his superior strength and courage. But now he and the other townfolk found the going particularly hard. Frequently, the fitter naturalists were forced to stop and wait for the rest of the party—till, peering down the mountain, they watched their erstwhile companions, including the young Capuchin, give up and begin their descent without them. The desertion was all the more unfortunate since the Capuchin had been entrusted with the entire supply of food and water. After that, Humboldt and Bonpland positioned the slaves bearing the most important instruments in front of them on the trail, to prevent the porters from abandoning them as well.