Humboldt's Cosmos

by Gerard Helferich

  Faced with the prospect that they would have nothing but insect bites to show for their grueling journey—no latitude and longitude readings, no botanical specimens, no tangible validation of any kind—Humboldt questioned anew the wisdom of their itinerary. It would be far shorter and less strenuous to retrace their route to the coast rather than to venture another thousand miles—nearly twice as far again—into an unsettled, unknown wilderness. Should he discard his original ambition to prove the existence of the Casiquiare Canal? Worn out from a month of misery on the river, Humboldt, uncharacteristically, hesitated before the challenge.

  Ultimately, he determined to press on. Though the route was long, he told himself, they had only ten days’ paddling upstream; after that, the entire way would be with the current. Having come so far, he felt they must continue: “It would have been blamable, to have suffered ourselves to be discouraged by the fear of a cloudy sky, and by the mosquitoes of the Casiquiare.” Besides, the Indian pilot assured them that as soon as they left the black waters of the Río Negro, they would find clear skies and “those great stars that eat the clouds.” Still, it’s an indication of the party’s wretchedness that the doggedly confident and ferociously determined Humboldt would even consider the alternative to forging ahead.

  Eight miles from San Carlos, above the rapids near Piedra de Uinamane, the expedition entered the Casiquiare. Until now the rain forest had presented more opportunities for botanizing than for geologizing. However, as they’d traveled, Humboldt had been noting the location and composition of the various mountains and outcroppings they’d passed. Always toward the front of his mind was the great controversy still raging between the neptunists and the vulcanists. With every geological observation he made, Humboldt asked himself what new light it might shed on this central dispute.

  Here at Uinamane, Humboldt noticed that the granite was streaked with numerous veins several inches wide. Some of these blazes were of white quartz mixed with feldspar, while others consisted of mica combined with black tourmaline. Moreover, wherever the two types of veins crossed, the black always obscured the white. Werner and the neptunists held that such veins were created when clefts in existing rock were filled by sediments deposited from above. The fact that the pattern here was consistent—that black always covered white—suggested that the former had been laid down more recently. It also seemed to support Werner’s explanation, since one wouldn’t have expected to find such a consistent pattern in Hutton’s more violent vulcanist model. Indeed, this precise configuration of veins was often seen in Europe, and its discovery here in the New World seemed to lend new credence to Werner’s ideas. “Being a disciple of the school of Freiberg,” still casting his lot with the neptunists, Humboldt found, “I could not but pause with satisfaction at the rock of Uinamane, to observe the same phenomena near the equator, which I had so often seen in the mountains of my own country.”

  At its mouth, the Casiquiare was a majestic sight, rivaling the Río Negro in width. In fact, the rivers greatly resembled each other, with thick forest growing down to their banks—except that the Negro ran black and the Casiquiare white. That night Humboldt sat up several hours waiting for the clear skies that the Indian pilot had promised, so that he could fix the mouth of the Casiquiare on the world’s maps. But “the air was misty,” he was forced to report, “notwithstanding the aguas blancas, which were to lead us beneath an ever-starry sky.”

  The first European settlements on the Casiquiare and elsewhere south of the great rapids of the Orinoco had begun as crude blockhouses boasting a pair of small-caliber cannon and a detachment of two soldiers. Only in the past fifteen years had these military outposts been converted to missions, under the governance of the Franciscan monks. One such mission was San Francisco Solano, near the mouth of the Casiquiare, and it was here that Humboldt’s party stopped for the night.

  One of the Indians of the mission had two fine birds, a young toucan and a purple macaw, which Humboldt bought and added to his zoological collection. Not counting these most recent acquisitions, the cramped, unstable canoe was now carrying—besides the dozen human crew and passengers, scientific instruments, provisions, and thousands of mineralogical and botanical specimens—a dog, seven parrots, seven other assorted birds, and nine monkeys (including three species previously unknown to science). Although some of the animals were confined to cages, others roamed over the boat. Father Zea, for one, was not enthusiastic about sharing the tight quarters with yet more creatures, and he “whispered some complaints at the daily augmentation of this ambulatory collection.” Already, at the threat of rain, two titis (small monkeys) would run to take shelter in the ample sleeves of the priest’s cassock. And for the remainder of the journey, the toucan took delight in teasing the two cusicusis (small, nocturnal monkeys). The toucan also amused the crew by seizing food in its beak, throwing it up in the air, and catching it before swallowing it. In drinking, it would make extraordinary gestures over the water (owing to the shape of its beak), which the Indians interpreted as the sign of the cross, the reason the bird was known locally as diostede, or “God gave it to thee.” Watching the antics of the animals, the travelers were occasionally to forget the constant misery of the insects. For though the weather hadn’t cleared as expected, the white water of the Casiquiare had brought the predicted swarms of crocodiles and mosquitoes.

  But on May 11, a light east wind began to blow, heralding a general clearing. Humboldt happily reckoned that he’d be able to get an astronomical reading to fix their position that night, and the party delayed their departure so as not to stray too far from the mouth of the Casiquiare before those observations could be made. With some difficulty the crew ascended the rapids of Cunanivacari that afternoon, paddling against a current of more than six miles an hour. Four miles farther upriver, they spied a strange formation jutting from the plain, a perpendicular rock wall eighty feet high, with two turrets so symmetrical that they bore an eerie resemblance to the ruins of an ancient fort. Humboldt wondered, Was the formation the remnant of an island that had once risen out of an inland sea, as Werner would have postulated, or had it been heaved up by volcanic forces deep within the earth, as Hutton would have argued?

  At five in the evening, they beached the lancha for the night at a large rock known as the Piedra de Culimacari. The evening was clear, and taking a sighting on the Southern Cross, Humboldt was able to fix the latitude of the Casiquiare’s junction with the Río Negro at 2 degrees, 0 minutes, 42 seconds; using his chronometer and observing the stars in the feet of the Centaur, he fixed its longitude at 69 degrees, 33 minutes, 50 seconds. Thus, with mathematical precision, Humboldt established one terminus of the natural canal that supposedly didn’t exist.

  Desperate to escape the misery of the mosquitoes, the travelers broke camp after these observations, at half past one in the morning. The current was running at nearly eight miles an hour against them, and fourteen hours of constant paddling yielded a gain of only ten miles. It was afternoon before the lancha finally arrived at the mission of Mandacava. Like the other missions on the Casiquiare, Mandacava was sparsely populated, with only about sixty Indians in residence. In fact, since the coming of the padres, the native population had actually declined along the river, as the native people had retreated into the forest to preserve their independence and traditional way of life.

  The missionary, a kindly, aging man, had, in his words, spent “twenty years of mosquitoes in the forest of the Casiquiare,” and his legs were so mottled by insect bites that the original color of the skin could scarcely be discerned. That night the priest spoke of his solitude—and his regret that he could not dissuade some of his charges from the ancient custom of cannibalism. Usually, the priest explained, the practice was confined to enemies killed in battle, when the body would be cut into pieces and carried as a trophy to the huts of the victors. However, there were exceptions. Just a few years before, an Indian had held his wife prisoner in their conuco, and when she was sufficiently fattened, he
had butchered and eaten her as one would a farm animal. Another case involved a man who had previously lived peacefully in the mission. While accompanying an injured Indian through the forest one day, the man grew impatient with the other’s slowness, killed him, and hid the body in a copse of trees. Returning home, he began to make preparations for a feast, until his children convinced him to give up his grisly plan.

  Today it’s generally believed that accounts of cannibalism among indigenous peoples were often overstated by early European visitors, due to misunderstanding, fear, cultural chauvinism, and the desire to justify the forced spread of their own “civilizing influences.” That said, the Caribs, Aztecs, and other groups in South America undoubtedly practiced the custom, ritualistically consuming parts of enemies killed in battle, as a way of consolidating their victory, or of deceased loved ones, as a means of honoring the dead.

  Humboldt related that one evening, as the explorers were eating roasted monkey, a young Indian member of their crew commented that the meat, though darker, reminded him of the taste of human flesh. Among his people, he explained matter-of-factly, the meat from the inside of the hands was particularly prized. Asked if he was still tempted sometimes to indulge in cannibalism, the man answered that now that he was living among the missionaries he would eat only what they ate—not out of any moral repugnance, he seemed to imply, but out of a sense of propriety, just as Indians accustomed to going naked in their own village would cover themselves when visiting the mission. “Reproaches addressed to the native on the abominable practice which we here discuss, produce no effect,” Humboldt found; “it is as if a Brahmin, traveling in Europe, were to reproach us with the habit of feeding on the flesh of animals. In the eyes of the Indian of the Guaisiia [tribe], the Cheruvichahena [tribe] was a being entirely different from himself; and one whom he thought it was no more unjust to kill than the jaguars of the forest.”

  On the night of May 13, Humboldt took some astronomical sightings, then the travelers left the mission at two o’clock in the morning. The following day, the mosquitoes and biting ants again drove the travelers from their camp in the middle of the night. And as the expedition continued upriver, the insects grew only worse. The Europeans’ hands and faces swelled to new dimensions of misery, and even Father Zea, who had been bragging that he would pit his mosquitoes at Maipures against any in the forest, admitted that the sting of the mosquitoes along the Casiquiare was the most painful he had ever experienced.

  As they paddled upstream, the explorers felt they were entering a barbarous, forbidding land. There was nothing to attract men here, and the Casiquiare didn’t see five Indian boats a year. In fact, except at the scattered missions, the travelers hadn’t seen a soul along the river since they’d left the rapids at Maipures, a month before. The area was so wild and so little frequented that, except for a few rivers, even the native guides couldn’t name any of the passing landmarks. The skies clouded over again, making astronomical observations impossible, and for the next eight days the expedition had no firm idea where they were. The river was cluttered with half-submerged, nearly invisible trees capable of crushing a light canoe, and “the vegetation along the banks became ever thicker,” Humboldt wrote, “in a manner of which it is difficult even for those acquainted with the aspect of the forests between the tropics, to form an idea. There is no longer a bank: a palisade of tufted trees forms the margin of the river. You see a canal two hundred toises [about thirteen hundred feet] broad, bordered by two enormous walls, clothed with lianas and foliage. We often tried to land, but without success. . . . We sailed along . . . seeking to discover, not an opening (since none exists), but a spot less wooded,” where the Indians could hack out a campsite.

  Though they were in the midst of a vast forest, the travelers had trouble finding wood dry enough for their campfires, which were necessary to keep the jaguars at bay. The humidity had also dampened their powder, making their firearms useless for hunting. They had been able to buy scant provisions at the past few missions, and food was growing scarce. To take the edge off their appetites, they resorted to gathering cocoa, grinding it, mixing the bitter powder with river water, and drinking it.

  Hungry, wet, exhausted, tormented by insects, the men were clearly approaching their physical and mental limits during these long days on the Casiquiare. Since childhood, Humboldt had longed to make a journey such as this, and when opportunity had finally shone, he’d left every known thing to pursue that dream. Yet now, faced with the particular miseries of the Casiquiare, he may well have begun to regret that ambition. For it was on the Casiquiare, especially, that youthful ideal met unfeeling reality, and there that the expedition began to resemble an endless slog through hostile territory, recalling Orellana’s nightmarish journey down the Amazon two and a half centuries before. On the Casiquiare, even Humboldt had trouble summoning his usual rapture at the wonders of nature. One night, when the party camped in a grove of magnificent palm trees to escape a violent rain, Humboldt found that, however glorious the tropical foliage and however thrilling the storm, “to have enjoyed it fully we should have breathed an air clear of insects. . . . I advise those who are not very desirous of seeing the great bifurcation of the Orinoco,” he appended with typical understatement, “to take the way of the Atabapo in preference to that of the Casiquiare.” Meanwhile, the precious botanical specimens continued to molder in their cases.

  On the night of May 20, a meteor shower was visible through the high, thin clouds (the Indians called meteors “the urine of the stars,” and referred to the dew as “the spittle of the stars”). But the overcast was too thick to permit astronomical measurements. During the night, the cries of jaguars were heard very near camp, and the mastiff began to bark. When the big cats grew too close, the dog scampered under the hammocks and started to howl. “How great was our grief,” Humboldt wrote, “when in the morning, at the moment of reembarking, the Indians informed us that the dog had disappeared!” The men waited in camp, hoping the mastiff had only strayed, but when he failed to return, they were forced to conclude that he had been carried off in the night by the great cats. “The dog,” Humboldt grieved, “who had followed us from Caracas, and had so often in swimming escaped the pursuit of the crocodiles, had been devoured in the forest.” The loss of their mascot only deepened the travelers’ sense of malaise.

  The very next day, the explorers were rewarded for their perseverance. They again entered the Orinoco—proving once and for all the existence of the Casiquiare Canal. Humboldt is characteristically terse in his description of the event, writing only, “On the 21st May, we again entered the bed of the Orinoco three leagues below the mission of Esmeralda.” But it must have been a moment of great triumph for him, the achievement of his single most important goal in the rain forest and compensation for weeks of misery on the river. Persevering over hunger, mosquitoes, and doubt, he had vindicated La Condamine and added an important new waterway to the map of South America.

  In fact, Humboldt saw the confirmation of the canal’s reality as far more than the resolution of an esoteric academic controversy. He strongly believed that the discovery would affect the future of the continent and bring real benefits to the people living there, and he foresaw a day when “the Casiquiare, as broad as the Rhine, and the course of which is one hundred and eighty miles in length, will no longer form uselessly a navigable canal between two basins of rivers which have a surface of one hundred and ninety thousand square leagues. The grain of New Grenada will be carried to the banks of the Río Negro, boats will descend from the sources of the Napo and the Ucuyabe, from the Andes of Quito and of Upper Peru, to the mouths of the Orinoco, a distance which equals that from Timbuktu to Marseilles. A country nine or ten times larger than Spain, and enriched with the most varied productions, is navigable in every direction by the medium of the natural canal of the Casiquiare.” Alas, it wasn’t to be. Despite a brief role in the rubber trade in the early nineteen hundreds and again during World War II, the Casiquiare never be
came the bustling waterway that Humboldt prophesied; today, as in ages past, the principal inhabitants are still the moscas and the zancudos.

  Though Humboldt had solved the geographic puzzle of the Casiquiare, it was a bit early for celebration. It had been a month since the explorers left the Orinoco near the mouth of the Guaviare. Seven hundred fifty miles remained to their destination of Angostura.

  TEN miles upstream on the Orinoco was the mosquito-plagued village of Esmeralda, so named because European prospectors, in a fit of wishful thinking, had mistaken the worthless rock crystals in the nearby mountains for diamonds and emeralds. The town was situated on an open plain graced with picturesque streams and hillocks. But the place was so notorious for its isolation and misery that the very name had become a threat, with the clerical authorities terrorizing obstreperous monks with the promise of banishment there. Though the village had only eighty inhabitants, three different Indian peoples were represented, plus a number of mixed-bloods (including many malefactors who had been sent there as a form of internal exile).

  The missionary from Santa Barbara, some 150 miles away, made only five or six visits to Esmeralda every year. The rest of the time, the denizens’ temporal and spiritual welfare was left to an aged churchwarden, who taught the children the rosary, rang the mission bell when the spirit moved, and occasionally whacked his charges with a chorister’s wand to keep them in line. Mistaking his visitors for Spanish merchants, the warden smiled condescendingly over their packages of paper used for drying plant specimens. “You come to a country where this type of merchandise has no sale,” he explained; “we write little here; and the dried leaves of maize, the plátano [banana], and the vijaho [heliconia], serve us, like paper in Europe, to wrap up needles, fish hooks, and other little articles of which we must be careful.”