The Invention of Nature

by Andrea Wulf

  As they paddled on, the vegetation grew denser. The embankment was like a living ‘palisade’, as Humboldt described it, green walls covered in leaves and lianas. Soon they couldn’t find a place to sleep at all any more, nor even get out of the canoe to go ashore. At least the weather was improving and Humboldt could take the necessary observations for his map. Then, ten days after they had first entered the Casiquiare, they reached the Orinoco again – the missionaries had been correct. It had not been necessary to travel all the way south to the Amazon, because Humboldt had proved that the Casiquiare was a natural waterway between the Orinoco and the Rio Negro. Since the Rio Negro was a tributary of the Amazon, it was clear that the two great river basins were indeed connected. And though Humboldt had not ‘discovered’ the Casiquiare, he had made a detailed map of the complex tributary system of these rivers. This map was a great improvement on all previous ones, which, he said, were as imaginary as if they ‘had been invented in Madrid’.

  On 13 June 1800, having raced downstream towards the north and then east along the Orinoco for three more weeks, they arrived in Angostura (today’s Ciudad Bolívar), a small bustling town on the Orinoco, a little less than 250 miles south of Cumaná. After 1,400 miles and seventy-five days of gruelling river travelling, Angostura with its 6,000 inhabitants seemed like a metropolis to Humboldt and Bonpland. Even the humblest dwelling appeared magnificent and the smallest convenience became a luxury. They cleaned their clothes, sorted their collections and prepared for their ride back across the Llanos.

  They had survived mosquitoes, jaguars, hunger and other dangers but, just as they thought the worst was over, Bonpland and Humboldt were suddenly struck down by a violent fever. Humboldt recovered quickly, but Bonpland was soon fighting for his life. When the fever slowly ebbed after two long weeks, it was replaced by dysentery. Embarking on the long journey across the Llanos in the middle of the rainy season would be too dangerous for Bonpland.

  They waited a month in Angostura until Bonpland had regained enough strength for the journey to the coast from where they intended to catch a boat to Cuba and from there to Acapulco in Mexico. Once again their trunks were loaded on to mules, with cages of monkeys and parrots dangling off their sides. The new collections had added so much weight to their luggage that progress was now tediously slow. At the end of July 1800, they stepped out of the rainforest into the open space of the Llanos. After weeks in the dense jungle where the stars appeared as if viewed from the bottom of a well, it was a revelation. Humboldt felt a sense of freedom that made him want to gallop across the wide plains. The sensation of ‘seeing’ everything around him felt completely new. ‘Infinity of space, as poets have said in every language,’ Humboldt now mused, ‘is reflected in ourself.’

  In the four months since they had first seen the Llanos, the rainy season had transformed the formerly bleak steppes into a partial seascape in which huge lakes and newly filled rivers were surrounded by carpets of fresh grass. But as the ‘air turned into water’, it was even hotter than it had been during their first crossing. The grasses and blooms spread their sweet fragrance across the expanse, jaguars hid in the high grass and thousands of birds sang in the early morning hours. The flatness of the Llanos was only interrupted by an occasional Mauritia palm. Tall and slender, these palms spread out their fingered fronds like huge fans. They were now loaded with shiny reddish edible fruits that reminded Humboldt of fir cones, and which seemed to possess a particular allure for their monkeys who stretched out to grab them through the bars of their cages. Humboldt had seen the palms already in the rainforest but here in the Llanos they had a unique function.

  Mauritia palms (Mauritia flexuosa) (Illustration Credit 5.5)

  ‘We observed with astonishment,’ he reported, ‘how many things are connected with the existence of a single plant.’ The Mauritia fruits attracted birds, the leaves shielded the wind, and the soil that had blown in and accumulated behind the trunks retained more moisture than anywhere else in the Llanos, sheltering insects and worms. Just the sight of these palms, Humboldt thought, produced a feeling of ‘coolness’. This one tree, he said, ‘spreads life around it in the desert’. Humboldt had discovered the idea of a keystone species, a species that is as essential for an ecosystem as a keystone is to an arch, almost 200 years before the concept was named. For Humboldt the Mauritia palm was the ‘tree of life’ – the perfect symbol of nature as a living organism.

  6

  Across the Andes

  AFTER SIX MONTHS of strenuous travel in the rainforest and the Llanos, Humboldt and Bonpland returned to Cumaná in late August 1800. They were exhausted but as soon as they had recovered and sorted their collections, they left again. In late November they sailed north for Cuba where they arrived in mid-December. Then, one morning in Havana in early 1801, Humboldt opened the newspapers just as they were preparing to leave for Mexico and read an article that made him change his plans. The newspaper reported that Captain Nicolas Baudin, whose expedition he had tried to join three years earlier in France, was sailing around the world after all. Back in 1798, when Humboldt had tried to find a passage out of Europe, the French government had not been able to finance the voyage but now, so Humboldt read, Baudin had been equipped with two ships – the Géographe and Naturaliste – and was on his way to South America from where he would sail across the South Pacific to Australia.

  The most obvious route would be for Baudin to stop in Lima, Humboldt guessed, and calculated that if all went to plan the Géographe and Naturaliste would probably arrive there by the end of 1801. The timing would be tight, but Humboldt now decided to try to join Baudin in Peru and then to continue with him on to Australia instead of going to Mexico. Of course Humboldt had no way of letting Baudin know where and when to rendezvous, nor did he know if the captain was even going to sail via Lima or whether there was any space on the ship for two extra scientists. But the more obstacles that were thrown into his path, ‘the more I hastened their executions’.

  To ensure the safety of their collections and to avoid carrying them across the globe, Humboldt and Bonpland now began frantically to make copies of their notes and manuscripts. They sorted and packed up everything they had hoarded over the past one and a half years to send to Europe. ‘It was very uncertain, almost improbable’, Humboldt wrote to a friend in Berlin, that he and Bonpland would survive a voyage around the globe. It made sense to get at least some of their treasures to Europe. All they retained was a small herbarium – a book filled with pressed plant specimens – so that they could compare any new species they found. A larger herbarium would remain in Havana for their return.

  With the European nations still at war, sea voyages remained perilous and Humboldt feared that his valuable specimens might be captured by one of the many enemy vessels. To spread the risk, Bonpland suggested splitting the collection. One large delivery was dispatched to France, and another to Germany via England with instructions that if seized by the enemy it was to be forwarded on to Joseph Banks in London. Since his return from Cook’s Endeavour voyage, thirty years previously, Banks had set up such a wide-ranging and global plant-collecting network that sea captains from all nations knew his name. Banks had also always tried to help French scientists by providing them with passports, despite the Napoleonic Wars, in the belief that the international community of scientists transcended war and national interests. ‘The science of two Nations may be at Peace,’ he said, ‘while their Politics are at war.’ Humboldt’s specimens would be safe with Banks.1

  Humboldt dispatched letters home, assuring his friends and family that he was happy and healthier than ever before. He described their adventures in detail, from the dangers of jaguars and snakes to the glorious tropical landscapes and strange blossoms. Humboldt was unable to resist ending a letter to the wife of one of his closest friends with: ‘and you, dearest, how is your monotonous life?’

  Once the letters were posted and the collections dispatched, Humboldt and Bonpland sailed in mid-March 1801 fro
m Cuba to Cartagena on the northern coast of New Granada2 (now Colombia). They arrived two weeks later, on 30 March. Once again, though, Humboldt added a detour – not only would he try to reach Lima by the end of December to meet Baudin’s expedition, but he would do so overland rather than by taking the easier sea route. On the way, Humboldt and Bonpland would cross, climb and investigate the Andes – the chain of mountains that runs from north to south in several spines along the length of South America, some 4,500 miles from Venezuela and Colombia in the north all the way down to Tierra del Fuego. It was the longest mountain range in the world and Humboldt wanted to climb Chimborazo, a beautiful snow-capped volcano south of Quito, in today’s Ecuador. At almost 21,000 feet, Chimborazo was believed to be the highest mountain in the world.

  This journey of around 2,500 miles from Cartagena to Lima would take the men through some of the harshest landscapes imaginable, pushing them to their physical limits. The lure was that they would travel through regions where no scientist had ever been before. ‘When one is young and active’, Humboldt said, it was easy not to think too much about the uncertainties and perils involved. If they wanted to meet Baudin in Lima, they had less than nine months. First they would travel from Cartagena along the Río Magdalena towards Bogotá – today’s capital of Colombia – from where they would march through the Andes to Quito and then further south all the way to Lima. But ‘all difficulties,’ Humboldt told himself, ‘could be conquered with energy.’

  On their way south, Humboldt also wanted to meet the celebrated Spanish botanist José Celestino Mutis, who lived in Bogotá. The sixty-nine-year-old Mutis had arrived from Spain four decades earlier and had led many expeditions through the region. No other botanist knew so much about South American flora, and in Bogotá Humboldt hoped to compare his collections with those that Mutis had accumulated during his long career. Though he had heard that Mutis could be difficult and guarded, Humboldt hoped to win him over. ‘Mutis, so close!’ he thought when they arrived in Cartagena from where he sent the botanist ‘a very artificial letter’ laced with praise and flattery. The only reason why he wasn’t sailing to Lima from Cartagena, Humboldt now wrote to Mutis, but had chosen the far more arduous route across the Andes was to meet him in Bogotá on the way.

  On 6 April, they left Cartagena to reach the Río Magdalena some sixty miles to the east. They walked through dense forests lit by fireflies – their ‘signposts’ in the dark, as Humboldt said – and spent a few miserable nights sleeping on their coats on the hard ground. Two weeks later they pushed their canoe into the Río Magdalena, travelling south towards Bogotá. For almost two months they paddled upstream against a strong current and along thick forests that ribboned the river. It was the rainy season, and once again they encountered crocodiles, mosquitoes and unbearable humidity. On 15 June they arrived in Honda, a small river port of about 4,000 people, less than 100 miles north-west of Bogotá. They now had to ascend from the river valley along rugged steep paths to a plateau that was almost 9,000 feet high and on which Bogotá was situated. Bonpland was struggling with the thin air – feeling nauseous and feverish. It made for exhausting travelling but their arrival in Bogotá on 8 July 1801 was triumphal.

  Greeted by Mutis and the city’s luminaries, the men found themselves rushed from one feast to another. No one had seen such festivities in Bogotá for decades. Humboldt had never enjoyed rigid ceremony, but Mutis explained that it would all have to be endured for the sake of the viceroy and the city’s leading inhabitants. After that, though, the old botanist opened his cabinets. Mutis also had a botanical drawing studio where thirty-two artists, some Indians among them, would eventually produce 6,000 different watercolours of indigenous plants. Even better, Mutis owned so many botanical books, as Humboldt later told his brother, that his collection was only surpassed by Joseph Banks’s library in London. This was an invaluable resource because it had been two years since Humboldt had left Europe, and this was the first time he could leaf through a vast selection of books, checking, comparing and cross-referencing his own observations. The visit brought advantages for both men. Mutis was flattered because he was able to show off that a European scientist had made this dangerous detour just to see him, while Humboldt received the botanical information he needed.

  Then, just as they were preparing to leave Bogotá, Bonpland was struck down by a recurrence of his fever. It took him several weeks to recover, leaving them even less time to cross the Andes en route to Lima. On 8 September, exactly two months after their arrival, they finally bade farewell to Mutis who gave them so much food that their three mules struggled to carry it all. The rest of their luggage was divided between another eight mules and oxen but the most delicate instruments were carried by five porters, local cargueros, as well as by José, the servant who had accompanied them for the past two years since their arrival in Cumaná. They were ready for the Andes, even though the weather could not have been worse.

  From Bogotá they crossed the first mountain chain along the Quindío Pass, a trail at almost 12,000 feet that was known to be the most dangerous and difficult in all the Andes. Battling thunderstorms, rain and snow, they walked along a muddy path that was often only eight inches wide. ‘These are the paths in the Andes,’ Humboldt wrote in his diary, ‘to which one has to entrust one’s manuscripts, instruments, [and] collections.’ He was amazed how the mules managed to balance along, although it was more a ‘patch-worked falling’, he said, than walking. They lost the fish and reptiles they had preserved from the Río Magdalena when the glass jars containing them were all smashed. Within days their shoes had been torn to shreds by the bamboo shoots that grew in the mud, and they had to continue barefoot.

  Crossing the Andes on heavily loaded mules (Illustration Credit 6.1)

  Their progress south towards Quito was slow as they crossed mountains and valleys. Moving up and down in altitude, they marched through fierce snowstorms before descending into the heavy heat of tropical forests. At times, they walked through dark ravines so deep and narrow that they had to grope their way blindly along the rocks, and at others they walked across sunlit meadows in the valleys. Some mornings the snow-capped peaks stood out against a pristine blue cupola and on others they were enveloped in clouds so thick that they could see nothing. High above them, huge Andean condors spread their three-metre-wide wings as they glided alone against the sky – solemnly black except for a necklace of white feathers and their white-fringed wings that shone ‘mirror-like’ against the midday sun. One night, about midway on their journey between Bogotá and Quito, they saw flames licking out of the Pasto volcano against the darkness.

  Humboldt had never felt further away from home. If he died now, it would be months or even years before his friends and family found out. And he had no idea what they were all doing. Was Wilhelm still in Paris, for example? Or had he and Caroline maybe moved back to Prussia? How many children did they have by now? Since leaving Spain two and a half years before, Humboldt had only received one letter from his brother and two from an old friend – and that had been over a year ago. Somewhere between Bogotá and Quito, Humboldt’s feeling of loneliness became so strong that he composed a long letter to Wilhelm, describing in great detail their adventures since his arrival in South America. ‘I don’t get tired of writing letters to Europe,’ was his first line. He knew that the letter was unlikely ever to reach its destination but it didn’t really matter. Writing from the remote Andean village in which the men found themselves that night was the closest Humboldt could get to a dialogue with his brother.

  The next day, they rose early to continue their journey. Sometimes precipices dropped down hundreds of feet from paths so narrow that the valuable instruments and collections dangled precariously over the abyss from their mules’ backs. These moments were especially tense for José who was responsible for the barometer, the expedition’s most important instrument because Humboldt needed it to determine the height of the mountains. The barometer was a long wooden baton into which a glass
tube had been inserted to hold the mercury. And although Humboldt had designed a protective box for this special travel barometer, the glass could still easily break. The instrument had cost him 12 thalers, but by the end of his five-year expedition that price had risen to 800 thalers, Humboldt later calculated, if he added all the money he had spent on wages for the people employed to carry it safely across Latin America.

  Of his several barometers, only this one had remained intact. A few weeks earlier, when the penultimate had been smashed on their way from Cartagena to the Río Magdalena, Humboldt had been so depressed that he had collapsed on to the ground in the middle of a small town square. As he lay there on his back and looked up at the sky, so far from home and the European instrument makers, he had declared: ‘Lucky are those who travel without instruments that break.’ How on earth, he wondered, could he measure and compare the globe’s mountains without his tools?

  When they finally arrived in Quito in early January 1802, 1,300 miles and nine months after leaving Cartagena, they received news that the reports about Captain Baudin had been wrong. Baudin was not after all sailing to Australia via South America, but instead making for the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa and from there across the Indian Ocean. Any other man would have despaired, but not Humboldt. At least now there was no rush to reach Lima, he reasoned, which gave them time to climb all the volcanoes he wanted to investigate.