Humboldt's Cosmos

by Gerard Helferich

  When the travelers finally reached the sunny, settled Sabana de Bogotá, the savannah surrounding the city, Humboldt sent a messenger ahead with news of their arrival. The next day, as the party approached the city, they were met by a colorful procession of dozens of horsemen and hundreds of citizens on foot, most of whom had never seen anyone who did not count himself a subject of the Spanish King. Humboldt was swept into the city in the archbishop’s fine six-horse carriage, while Bonpland rode in another vehicle behind. Though astonished and somewhat embarrassed by the spectacle, Humboldt was also flattered. “There hadn’t been such bustle and tumult in this dead town for years and years,” he wrote in his journal.

  The world-famous botanist José Celestino Mutis had hastily assembled a distinguished reception committee, who were waiting on the steps of Mutis’s house. As Humboldt climbed out of the carriage, clutching his barometer (which he refused to entrust to anyone else), he was embraced by the aging botanist, who showed such deference and modesty that the guest became uncomfortable. Humboldt launched immediately into work, then realized his faux pas. “We started talking straight away about scientific matters,” he related. “I began to tell of the plants I had seen during the day,” but Mutis “very cleverly steered the conversation round to more general topics so that the others standing nearby could understand.” A marvelous banquet had been laid inside, and Humboldt was again astonished when the renowned scientist Salvador Rizo materialized to serve them at table. Mutis had temporarily evicted his brother’s widow from the house next door, and the visitors were to lodge there.

  José Celestino Mutis was born in 1732 in Cádiz. One of Linnaeus’s earliest disciples in Spain, he emigrated in 1760 to Colombia, where, as head of the Royal Botanical Expedition of New Grenada, he pioneered the study of quinine and became the world’s foremost authority on the plants of South America. Mutis’s botanical library was second only to that of Joseph Banks in London, and arranged on shelves in an adjoining room was a collection of more than twenty thousand dried plant specimens, which a team of thirty artists had been painting for the past fifteen years, under Mutis’s personal supervision. The illustrations were intended for the mammoth Flora de Bogotá o de Nueva Granada, which Mutis didn’t live to finish (in fact, the illustrations wouldn’t see publication for another century and a half). A man of wide-ranging interests, Mutis also founded in Bogotá the first astronomical observatory in South America and transformed the city into an international center of learning, which Humboldt considered the “Athens of America.”

  The mountains around Bogotá had for centuries been home to the Chibcha Indians, one of the most technologically sophisticated indigenous peoples of Colombia. Among their many industries—agriculture, weaving, pottery, copper smelting—the Chibchas practiced gold making. In fact, the legend of El Dorado, the inspiration for much of the fevered, disastrous early exploration of the South American interior, is thought to have originated with this group. Each year, according to the legend, the Chibchas chose a new leader, who was covered in gold dust and ceremonially washed in a nearby lake, into which golden ceremonial items were also thrown. (One of these chiefs, Bacatá, is immortalized in the name Bogotá.) First conquered by the Inca, the Chibchas were subdued only a few decades later, in 1538, by lawyer-and-writer-turned-conquistador Jiménez de Quesada, who enslaved them, destroyed their temples, and stole their gold. In 1740, Santa Fe de Bogotá was named capital of New Grenada (which also included present-day Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, and Panama), continuing the city’s long tradition as a governmental center despite its remote location.

  While Bonpland recovered from his malaria attack, Humboldt made scientific excursions to the surrounding countryside, where he inspected deposits of rock salt and coal. He also measured the heights of the nearby mountains, some of which rose to sixteen thousand feet above sea level, and he visited Lake Guatavita, thought to be the body of water in the legend of El Dorado. On one foray, Humboldt traveled to el Campo de Gigantes (the Field of Giants) to examine the mastodon bones there. The forebears of modern elephants, the forest-dwelling mastodons evolved in Africa in the Oligocene epoch (thirty-eight to twenty-four million years ago) then, during the Miocene epoch (twenty-five to five million years ago) migrated from Africa to Europe and thence to Asia and across the Bering Land Bridge to the Americas, only to perish as the Ice Age of the Pleistocene era (two million to eleven thousand years ago) swept over the world.

  In 1833, during his voyage to South America aboard the Beagle, Charles Darwin also investigated a deposit of mastodon bones (in Argentina). Projecting from the face of a cliff, the skeletons were badly decomposed but identifiable. When he asked his guides how they supposed the bones had gotten into this unlikely location, Darwin was amused by their response: Clearly, the huge mastodon had been a burrowing animal! From the creatures’ wide range over both the Old and the New worlds, Darwin concluded that the climate in those regions must once have been similar. But if that were the case, why were so many species of plants and animals now living in North America—such as the wolf, the bear, and the elm tree—not found in South America? And why were so few species that were native to South America—such as the jaguar, the spider monkey, and the ceiba tree—found farther north? To resolve this dilemma, Darwin pointed to the mountainous barrier that Humboldt had reported running east to west across southern Mexico (the Trans-Mexican Volcanic Belt). The formation of this range, he suggested, had created a barrier impassible by plants and animals. Then, over millions of years, the isolated populations to the north and south had evolved in divergent directions according to the law of natural selection, until the products were recognized as different species.

  AFTER two months of recuperation from his fever, Bonpland was finally well enough to travel. On September 8, the explorers set out toward Quito, nearly five hundred miles away. From Bogotá, they trekked westward, down the Cordillera Oriental and across the Magdalena Valley. Navigating narrow, twisting trails with solid rock on either side, deep mud underfoot, and thick vegetation obliterating the light above, they descended through uninhabited woods and passed the towns of Pandi, Espinal, Contreras, and Ibagué. Just as he had earlier eschewed the easiest route through the rain forest, here Humboldt forsook the relatively level way through interconnecting river valleys and elected to climb over the Cordillera Central via the treacherous Quindío Pass, which, at nearly twelve thousand feet, was one of the most demanding trails in all the Andes. As they ascended through stands of bamboo, wax palms, and tree ferns, punctuated with orchids, passion flowers, and fuchsias, the party was struck by driving rains. The animals sank deep in the mud, and the men’s boots were destroyed by bamboo spikes jutting from the swampy ground.

  Just beyond the pass, the travelers were met by a group of cargueros, Indian porters who eked out a living by strapping a chair to their back and, walking doubled over and supporting themselves with a cane, conveyed Spanish mining officials over the mountain trails. Humboldt, the self-proclaimed republican, was infuriated to see such a degrading practice and to “hear the qualities of a human being described in the terms that would be employed in speaking of a horse or a mule,” such as surefootedness and an easy gait. Rather than mount the human beasts of burden, he and Bonpland elected to walk down the mountain to the town of Cartago, though their feet were bare and bleeding. To Humboldt, this was undoubtedly a noble, democratic deed, but the gesture didn’t impress the cargueros; to them, it was just an act of stinginess that deprived them of much-needed income. In fact, the porters were vociferous in their objection to a new road being built through the mountains, on the grounds that it would rob them of their livelihood.

  The travelers were now about 150 miles west of Bogotá. From Cartago, they continued some 175 miles southward through the fertile Cauca Valley, which joins the valley of the Magdalena. For the month of November they remained at the town of Popayán, which had been founded in 1537 and, thanks to its position on the road over which gold traveled between Quito and Car
tagena, had quickly grown into an important administrative center. On one of their excursions to explore the local geological formations and flora, Humboldt and Bonpland climbed the 15,604-foot-tall active volcano Puracé, which at the time was giving off noisy jets of steam.

  Though not one of the tallest or best-known peaks on the continent, Puracé is notable as the first of the dozens of active volcanoes that Humboldt would climb in South America. During the ascent, he would have been mulling the host of questions that had been occupying him since his climb of el Pico del Teide, and even before: How were volcanoes formed? What caused their subterranean fire? Did they communicate underground, or was each volcano an independent entity? At the time, scientists’ scant knowledge of volcanoes had been based almost exclusively on their observations of Europe’s two active peaks—Etna and Vesuvius. But it was a mistake to rely too heavily on these models, Humboldt believed, since they might not be representative of all volcanoes. In fact, at about 11,000 and 4,300 feet, respectively, they were both relatively low. Taking them as archetypes of the world’s volcanoes, Humboldt wrote, one might be led into a fallacy like the one made by “Virgil’s shepherd, who thought he beheld in his humble cottage the type of the Eternal City, Rome.”

  On the contrary, “to become completely acquainted with the important phenomena of the composition, the relative age, and mode of origin of rocks, we must compare together observations from the most varied and remote regions”—such as the great peaks of South America. Not that Humboldt necessarily had expected to find differences of kind between American and European volcanoes; indeed, he believed that the study of both would illuminate the universal laws governing them all. “If . . . new zones do not necessarily present to us new kinds of rock . . . ,” he wrote, “they, on the other hand, teach us to discern the great and everywhere equally prevailing laws, according to which the strata of the crust of the earth are superposed upon each other, penetrate each other as veins or dykes, or are upheaved or elevated by elastic forces.”

  Humboldt’s mentor Werner had encouraged his students to travel so as to observe the earth’s whole range of geological phenomena firsthand. Now Humboldt was taking him at his word, intent on testing his teacher’s theories against this mass of new data. Were the earth’s mountains created in a one-time act of creation, as Werner believed? Were they really formed by matter settling out of a great primordial ocean? Humboldt would not resolve any of these questions on the slopes of Puracé, but he would return to them repeatedly throughout his exploration of this magnificent landscape.

  As the party left Popayán, the sky was shrouded in perpetual gray, and the traveling conditions remained miserable. “Thick woods intersperse with swamps,” Humboldt wrote, “where the mules sank up to their girths, and narrow paths winding through such rocky clefts that one could almost fancy one was entering a mine, and the road paved with bones of mules that had perished from cold or fatigue.” At about eight thousand feet, the travelers entered one of the barren, frigid plateaus called páramos (from the Spanish word for “wasteland”), where only scrubby alpine plants could survive. On the Páramo de Pasto, the clouds mingled with volcanic gases, and the rain turned to sleet and snow. At night, the Indian guides erected tents made from wooden poles covered with the large, waxy leaves of the heliconia (a member of the banana family); then in the morning they would carefully roll them up and repack them for next time.

  The travelers passed Christmas in the town of Pasto, in the southwestern tip of present-day Colombia. Then, crossing the equator, they finally entered Quito on January 6, 1802. It had been a harsh journey of more than eight months and nearly eight hundred miles over the mountains, far longer than Humboldt had planned—and the party was still some eight hundred miles from Lima, where they hoped to rendezvous with Captain Baudin. The French expedition was expected in less than six months, and Humboldt was anxious to reach the coast in time.

  Though Quito is situated only about fifteen miles south of the equator, due to its high elevation, it is graced with a pleasant, springlike climate. The city’s name commemorates the Quitus Indians, who made the area their home for at least a thousand years. Before the arrival of the Spanish, the Quitus merged with the Cara, Shyri, and Puruhás peoples into the Kingdom of Quitu, whose capital was located at present-day Quito. Around 1500, Quitu was conquered by the Inca, who established a capital of their own there, only to be conquered by the Spanish three decades later. Perched at 9,300 feet above sea level, Quito spread out on picturesque, rolling hills surrounded by volcanoes. In 1660, an eruption of its closest volcanic neighbor, Pichincha, destroyed the city, and in 1797 it was severely damaged by an earthquake at Riobamba, which killed forty thousand people over a wide area. Five years later, when Humboldt arrived, the city was still experiencing aftershocks. If he wanted to study volcanic activity, he couldn’t have chosen a better place.

  Despite the earthquake damage, Humboldt found Quito a handsome, lively city, with impressive monasteries and churches. After the 1797 quake the sky had become perpetually cloudy, and the mean temperature had dropped noticeably. Yet, despite the geologic disasters they were forced to endure—or perhaps because of them—the city’s forty thousand inhabitants exhibited a nonchalant, carpe diem attitude toward life. Humboldt found the Quiteños charming, sophisticated, and determined to enjoy the moment, since they never knew when the ground might tremble again. “The town,” he wrote, “breathed an atmosphere of luxury and voluptuousness, and perhaps nowhere is there a population so entirely given up to the pursuit of pleasure. Thus can man accustom himself to sleep in peace on the brink of a precipice.”

  Humboldt and Bonpland were taken in by the Marqués de Aguirre y Montúfar, the provincial governor and one of the wealthiest men in the city. Montúfar’s young son Carlos, whom Humboldt found “an estimable youth,” became the visitor’s fast companion for the remainder of the journey—and for nearly a decade afterward. As with Humboldt’s other close friendships, it’s tempting to speculate on the nature of his relationship with Montúfar. Accentuating the sense of mystery is the fact that Humboldt wrote an entire fourth volume of the Personal Narrative, then destroyed it on the eve of publication. Some have speculated that he wanted to shield his relationship with Montúfar from inquisitive eyes and to protect the reputation of his socially prominent friend. (However, most historians today believe that, attracted though he may have been to young, handsome men, Humboldt did not engage in sexual relations with them. One is reminded of his earlier admonition that “serious themes, and especially the study of nature, become barriers against sexuality.”)

  Whatever the nature of his friendship with Montúfar, it seems doubtful that it was the motivation for the destruction of Volume Four. Humboldt divulged virtually no personal details in the first three volumes. If he felt the need to obscure the nature of his relationship with Montúfar, or with anyone else, it would have been a simple matter for him to skip over it and to concentrate instead on the more factual aspects of the journey. Indeed, though Humboldt is prolix in his scientific ruminations and his physical descriptions in the three existing volumes, despite the Personal Narrative’s title he includes very little that could be described as truly personal. Various other ad hoc companions—Carlos del Pino, Nicolás Soto, Juan González—are little more than names who pass in and out of the story. Even Bonpland, Humboldt’s dear companion, barely emerges from the book as a flesh-and-blood character. So even if Montúfar had been included in Volume Four, how would that have provided grist for the scandalmongers?

  The alternative motivation put forward for Humboldt’s destruction of the fourth volume is that the material had, by the time of publication, become politically embarrassing. After his return to Europe, Humboldt was named chamberlain to the king of Prussia. Perhaps Volume Four was too generous in its praise of the developing independence movements in Spanish America, to a degree that was unfitting for a member of a European royal court. Yet Humboldt was certainly outspoken concerning his republican views
in his other writings from those years, including the rest of the Personal Narrative.

  We will never know the exact nature of Humboldt’s friendship with Montúfar, any more than we will ever know the precise character of his relationship with any of the other men that he was drawn to over the course of his long life. The destruction of Volume Four will most likely remain a mystery, along with much else about the personal life of this intensely private man.

  IN Quito, Humboldt received a stunning setback to his plans: He learned that the Baudin expedition would not be calling on the South American coast after all. Instead of sailing across the Atlantic and around Cape Horn, Baudin had chosen a route around the tip of Africa. The hoped-for rendezvous—which Humboldt had traveled more than eight months and some eight hundred backbreaking miles to achieve—would never happen.

  Yet Humboldt preferred to focus on the positive. “We have come to feel that man ought not to count upon anything which he cannot obtain by his own enterprise,” he wrote French astronomer and mathematician Jean-Baptiste-Joseph Delambre. “Accustomed to disappointments, we consoled ourselves in the thought that we had been prompted by a good purpose in all the sacrifices we made. In going over our herbariums, our barometric and trigonometric observations, our drawings and our experiments on the atmosphere of the Cordilleras, we see no reason for regretting our visit to countries that have remained largely unexplored by scientists.”

  Thrown back on his own resources, Humboldt immersed himself in his study of the Andes with a ferocity that left little time for anything else. The marqués de Montúfar’s beautiful daughter, Doña Rosa, found Humboldt charming, but elusive. “At table,” she recalled many years later, “he never remained longer than was absolutely necessary to still his hunger and pay the customary courtesies to the ladies. He seemed always glad to be outdoors again, examining rocks and collecting plants. At night, long after we all had retired, he would observe the stars. To us young women this manner was more difficult to understand than for my father, the marqués.” Her description is reminiscent of Humboldt’s early preference of the woods and fields of Tegel, as well as his sister-in-law Caroline’s futile efforts to domesticate him in Paris. Clearly, two and a half years in the wilderness had done nothing to whet Humboldt’s appetite for polite society or feminine companionship.