Not that secular institutions had been neglected in the capital. Thanks to the flood of Mexican silver, the city also boasted a university, a public library, a botanical garden, an academy of fine arts, and, of particular interest to Humboldt, a state-of-the-art school of mining directed by Andres del Río, a classmate from Freiberg. The mint, which Humboldt found “the richest and largest in the whole world,” had from 1726 to 1780 coined gold and silver worth half again as much as all the mints of France combined. In fact, Humboldt calculated that the silver extracted from every mine in Europe over the course of a full year would keep Mexico City’s mint operating for a scant two weeks.
The travelers settled into a comfortable house near the library, where Humboldt spent many hours engaged in research. He also pored over the mint archives and myriad other public records, as he amassed the statistics for his Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain. The Aztec ruins just off the main square were being excavated during this time, and the famous round calendar stone now in the National Anthropological Museum had just been unearthed. Fascinated by the country’s ancient inhabitants and impressed by their obvious erudition, Humboldt sketched some of the recently discovered sculptures, which he later reproduced in his Researches Concerning the Institutions and Monuments of the Ancient Inhabitants of America, the work, published in 1810, that introduced Europe to the culture of America’s pre-Hispanic peoples.
Taking time out from their stay in the capital, the visitors also journeyed to the immense, pyramid-studded ruins at Teotihuacán (“Place Where Gods Are Made”), about thirty miles to the north. Examining the extensive complex, Humboldt concluded that the structures appeared even more ancient than those of the Toltecs, predecessors of the Aztecs who had come to dominate the Valley of Mexico about A.D. 900. Later archeologists have proven him right: We now know that the culture of Teotihuacán flourished from about A.D. 300 to 900, when it was the largest city in the Americas and the capital of the most extensive pre-Hispanic empire in the New World, stretching from north-central Mexico as far as present-day Guatemala.
In Mexico City, the course of Humboldt’s journey took yet another unexpected turn: Instead of continuing on to the Philippines and hence around the world, he decided to extend his stay in Mexico, then to return to Europe via Cuba and the United States. He gave several reasons for this change of plans. To his friend the French astronomer Jean-Baptiste-Joseph Delambre, he explained, “As for the Philippines, I have given them up temporarily, for . . . I am eager first to publish the results of this expedition.” To the secretary of the Institut National Humboldt also wrote, “I can think of nothing but of preserving and publishing my manuscripts.” But in that same letter, he cited several other considerations as well: “The damaged state of our instruments, the futility of our efforts to replace them, the impossibility of meeting Captain Baudin, the lack of a ship that could bring us to the enchanted islands of the South Pacific, but, above all, the urgent need to keep pace with the rapid advancement of science which must have taken place during our absence, these are the motives for the abandonment of our project of returning via the Philippines. . . .” Perhaps other, unnamed factors were at work as well. Was he, like many other travelers before and after, enchanted by the beauty and the history of Mexico and eager to see more of the country? Or, after four strenuous years, were he and Bonpland simply worn out, having reached the end of even their amazing reserves? They were certainly homesick: “How I long to be in Paris!” Humboldt exclaimed in his letter to the Institut.
And so it was decided: Humboldt and Bonpland, still accompanied by Carlos Montúfar, would extend their stay in Mexico, eventually wending their way to the eastern coast, where they would find a ship to Cuba, then to the United States, and finally to Europe. Leaving Mexico City, they traveled north and west for the months of August and September 1803.
Their first destination was the thirteen-mile-long canal-and-tunnel complex at Nochistongo, constructed to control the floods to which Mexico City, built on Lake Texcoco, was susceptible. The most extensive water-control project of the colonial era and one of the great public works projects of the time, the canal had been designed and begun by Enrique Martínez, a Spanish engineer of French extraction. Martínez’s design called for a canal and a five-mile-long tunnel through the relative lowlands of Nochistongo. Begun in 1607 and employing more than fifteen thousand Indian workers, the project had been completed in an astonishing ten months. But the tunnel, eleven feet wide and fourteen feet high, had proved inadequate, and various additions and extensions had been made over the ensuing decades. Finally, in 1767, the huge project had been brought to fruition, after enormous expense and the loss of an estimated seventy thousand workers’ lives.
In early August, eager to explore Mexico’s mineral wealth in more detail, Humboldt and the others set out for what at the time was the richest silver mine in the world, La Valenciana, located outside lovely Guanajuato, some 170 miles northwest of Mexico City. Dramatically perched on a series of steep ravines at the foot of the Sierra de Santa Rosa, Guanajuato was a major city, with a population of about seventy thousand. “One is astonished,” Humboldt found, “to see in this wild spot large and beautiful edifices in the midst of miserable Indian huts. The house of Colonel Don Diego Rul, who is one of the proprietors of the mine of Valenciana, would be an ornament to the finest streets of Paris and Naples.” Though the city had been founded in 1559, after the discovery of gold and silver, Guanajuato’s current boom traced back to only 1768, when a partnership led by Antonio de Obregón y Alcocer had unearthed the richest vein of silver in the known world. Obregón, elevated to the title conde de la Valenciana, became one of the richest men in Mexico and, in thanks for his incredible good fortune, built the spectacular, gold-and-silver-filled Iglesia de San Cayetano on a hill overlooking the city, hard by the entrance to the mine itself. At the time of Humboldt’s visit, La Valenciana employed more than twenty thousand and produced an astonishing one fifth of the world’s annual silver extraction.
The former mining inspector was determined to learn everything he could. “I climbed all mountains using my barometer,” he wrote. “In Valenciana I descended three times to the bottom of the mine, two times in Rayas, in Mellado, in Fraustros, in Animas, and in San Bruno. I visited the mine of Villalpando, spent two days in Santa Rosa and in Los Álamos. . . . I had a dangerous fall on my back in Fraustros, and experienced extreme pain for fourteen days due to a sprain of the base of my spine!” In his diary he referred to his stay in Guanajuato as one of the most exhausting periods of his life, quite a statement considering some of the other trials to which he had subjected himself.
With its extensive deposits of gold and silver, the area around Guanajuato had long been one of the richest regions of New Spain. A few years after Humboldt’s departure, the region also became the cradle of Mexican independence. For decades, living conditions had been deteriorating among the largely Indian workers on the large estates, due to factors ranging from drought to population growth, to a shift from maize to cash crops such as wheat and fruit. By September 1810, the poverty and outrage had escalated to the point where Miguel Hidalgo, parish priest in the town of Dolores, not far from Guanajuato, was moved to issue his famous Grito de Independencia, calling for revolution, racial equality, and social justice. Dolores was the first town to fall to the rebels, followed by nearby San Miguel (home of Ignacio Allende, another leader of the revolt). Guanajuato itself was captured soon afterward, when its Alhondiga de Granaditas, a grain storehouse converted into a Spanish fortress, fell on September 28. But the uprising did not win the support of either the wealthiest Creoles in the area, or the more autonomous Indian workers in other parts of the country. In January of the following year, government forces retook Guanajuato and crushed the rebellion, displaying the severed heads of the revolutionary ringleaders—Hidalgo, Allende, Juan Aldama, and Mariano Jiménez—in iron cages hung from the four corners of the Alhondiga. A guerrilla war dragged on, and it was not until 1821
, eleven years later, after liberal changes in Spain caused the conservative Creole elite to join the revolution, that Mexico finally won its independence. And even afterward, the country’s history would be rife with political turbulence, revolution, and, in the mid-nineteenth century, a disastrous war with the United States.
Though all these events were still in the future, Humboldt sensed the political forces taking shape in Mexico, just as he had in the other Spanish possessions in South America. Whatever the future government of Mexico, he argued, the country’s huge untapped potential must be developed to the advantage of all its citizens, including the Indians who had suffered the most under the three centuries of Spanish rule. It was to this mistreated and neglected segment of the population that he turned in the closing words of the Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain: “May this labor begun in the capital of New Spain,” he hoped, “be of utility to those called to watch over public prosperity! And may it in an especial manner impress upon them this important truth, that the prosperity of the whites is intimately connected with that of the copper-colored race, and that there can be no durable prosperity for the two Americas till this unfortunate race, humiliated but not degraded by long oppression, shall participate in all the advantages resulting from the progress of civilization and the improvement of social order!”
On September 9, the travelers left Guanajuato and headed south, stopping at the gracious city of Valladolid (since renamed Morelia in honor of another hero of the War of Independence, José María Morelos y Pavón, who was born there in 1765). On September 19, about 150 miles west of Mexico City, they reached the volcano of Jorullo (thought to be an Indian word meaning “Paradise,” a reference to the lush tropical surroundings). Humboldt was particularly eager to see Jorullo, as it was one of the few volcanoes formed in historical times.
On September 29, 1759, following a period of earthquakes and subterranean explosions, the mountain had risen from the surrounding fields, spewing hot ash and triggering mud flows. After six weeks, the cone had reached 820 feet, and by the time it had ceased erupting in 1774, it towered 4,400 feet above the surrounding plain and formed a crater over a mile wide. From eyewitness accounts of Jorullo’s creation and from its bubblelike shape, Humboldt took the volcano as evidence for Leopold von Buch’s “crater of elevation” theory, the enormously influential but ultimately disproved idea that volcanoes were formed by the upwelling of subterranean gases. Humboldt believed the fact that horses’ hooves produced a peculiarly hollow sound on the earth nearby was a corroboration of that view.
The Indians living in the area had a different theory of Jorullo’s origin. “In their opinion,” Humboldt wrote, “the volcanic eruption was the work of the monks, the greatest, no doubt, which they have ever produced in this hemisphere!” Apparently, a group of Capuchin missionaries had stayed at a nearby plantation and, “not having had a favorable reception . . . they poured out the most insulting imprecations against the place. . . . They prophesied that the farm would be consumed by fire, and that soon afterward the air would cool off so that all mountains would be covered with snow and ice. The first of these maledictions having come true, the Indians regard the gradual cooling of the volcano as the sinister foreboding of perpetual winter. It is in this manner that the Church preys on the credulity of the natives so as to render their ignorant minds the more submissive.”
From Jorullo, Humboldt’s party continued to the Indian town of Pátzcuaro, located on the shore of a large and lovely lake. The travelers then trekked eastward to Nevado de Toluca, an extinct, fifteen-thousand-foot-high volcano with a lake in its crater. Humboldt became the first man to scale the volcano, taking barometric readings to determine the upper limit of vegetation and the lower limit of the snowcap. “As it is an honorable object for the exertions of scientific societies to trace out perseveringly the cosmical variations of temperature, atmospheric pressure, and magnetic direction and intensity,” he wrote in Aspects of Nature, “so it is the duty of the geological traveler, in determining the inequalities of the earth’s surface, to attend more particularly to the variable height of volcanoes.” Toward this end, as he ranged over the Mexican isthmus, he measured, in addition to Jorullo and Toluca, the heights of the snowcapped, still-active Popocatépetl and the extinct volcanoes Cofre de Perote and Orizaba.
Moreover, Humboldt discovered that, whereas the Andean volcanoes ran in a north-south direction, those in Mexico formed a generally east-west line, today called the Trans-Mexican Volcanic Belt. Here was yet more evidence that, rather than being independent phenomena, as Werner and the neptunists believed, volcanoes shared a subterranean link and tended to congregate along fissures in the earth’s crust. Thus the suspicions concerning the origin of volcanoes that Humboldt had reached in South America were confirmed by his study of the Mexican mountains.
Returning to Mexico City, Humboldt and Bonpland began to pack their extensive collections—now including Aztec codices and sculptures in addition to new geological and botanical specimens—for the long journey back to Europe. On January 20, 1804, they and Carlos Montúfar set out eastward from the capital, toward Puebla, known as “the City of Tiles” for the beautiful hand-painted ceramics decorating many of its buildings. Founded in 1535, on the road between Mexico City and Veracruz, Puebla had grown by the time of Humboldt’s visit to a city of nearly fifty thousand, boasting one of the country’s finest cathedrals and the first theater in all of Mexico. From Puebla, the travelers continued west to Cholula, which had been a major city and important religious center for nearly two millennia. With a population of about one hundred thousand at the time of Cortés’s arrival, the city had chosen to resist the Spaniards, for which they had suffered an estimated six thousand dead and a sacking by Cortés’s allies the Tlascans.
From Cholula, Humboldt’s party passed the old Aztec town of Jalapa, then began their descent from the highlands toward the coast. On February 19, they arrived at Veracruz, ending their Mexican adventure at the place where Hernán Cortés had begun his. Despite the bad anchorage and numerous sandbanks, Veracruz was ideally located for trade with Spain and the Caribbean, and for centuries the city had been Mexico’s principal eastern port, servicing some five hundred ships a year at the time of Humboldt’s visit. Yet, with its tropical heat, it was also considered Mexico’s “principal seat of yellow fever (vómito prieto). Thousands of Europeans landing in Mexico at the period of the great heats fall victims to this cruel epidemic,” Humboldt explained. “Some vessels prefer landing at Vera Cruz in the beginning of winter, when the tempests begin to rage, to exposing themselves in summer to the loss of the greater part of their crew from the effects of the vómito, and to a long quarantine on their return to Europe.” So severe were the outbreaks that they impeded the economy of the entire country, which received necessities from Europe through Veracruz and shipped goods to market via the port. Fortunately, there was no outbreak during Humboldt’s stay. The packet for Havana was due to depart in three weeks, leaving him ample time to verify the port’s location and explore the environs.
IN his year in New Spain, Humboldt had collected an enormous amount of information about the land and its people. Taking detailed measurements wherever he went, he had improved the country’s maps and had introduced an original and widely copied cartographic technique depicting a cross-section of the country’s landforms. Exploring Mexico’s volcanoes, he had confirmed his earlier ideas about mountain formation and had moved even further into the vulcanist camp. Studying the Aztec and other indigenous cultures, he had made important realizations concerning their Asian origin and their fantastic history, which he was about to reveal to Europe.
Moreover, he was leaving a considerable legacy within Mexico’s borders. For Humboldt recognized Mexico’s unique place among the countries of the New World—populous, thriving, but nevertheless harboring tremendous untapped potential. Spain had been so singly focused on the viceroyalty’s obvious mineral wealth that it had neglected the country’s many other re
sources—agricultural, manufacturing, commercial, human—which in the long run, Humboldt realized, would have made a much more lasting contribution to the colonial economy. Mexico’s annual agricultural production, he pointed out, actually had a significantly greater monetary value than the vaunted gold- and silver-mining operations. “If we consider the people of New Spain and their commercial connections with Europe, it cannot be denied that in the present state of things the abundance of the precious metals has a powerful influence on the national prosperity. It is from this abundance that America is enabled to pay in specie for the produce of foreign industry, and to share in the enjoyments of the most civilized nations of the old continent. Notwithstanding this real advantage,” he warned, “it is to be sincerely wished that the Mexicans, enlightened as to their true interest, may recollect that the only capital of which the value increases with time consists in the produce of agriculture, and that nominal wealth becomes illusory whenever a nation does not possess those raw materials which serve for the subsistence of man or as employment for his industry.”
In 1811, Humboldt would publish his Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain. Like the later Political Essay on the Island of Cuba, the book would draw together diverse data regarding population growth, agriculture, mines, manufactories, commerce, and the distribution of wealth, all collected from personal observation or government archives. A masterful synthesis of all these disparate elements, New Spain provided the first systematic, detailed examination of conditions in the colony and the problems it faced as it entered the nineteenth century. Though stuffed with statistics, the work was also intended as a plea—especially to Charles IV of Spain, to whom the book is dedicated—to recognize Mexico’s enormous nonmineral wealth and to harness it in a way that would benefit all its citizens.
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