The Invention of Nature

by Andrea Wulf

  A view of Quito, Humboldt’s base for several months (Illustration Credit 6.2)

  Humboldt was interested in volcanoes for two particular reasons. The first was to ascertain if they were ‘local’ occurrences or if they were linked subterraneously with each other. If they were not just local phenomena but instead consisted of groups or clusters that stretched across huge distances, it was possible that they were connected through the core of the earth. Humboldt’s second reason was that studying volcanoes might provide an answer to how the earth itself had been created.

  In the late eighteenth century scientists had begun to suggest that the earth must be older than the Bible, but they couldn’t agree on how the earth had formed. The so-called ‘Neptunists’ believed that water had been the main force, creating rocks by sedimentation, slowly building up mountains, minerals and geological formations out of a primordial ocean. Others, the ‘Vulcanists’, argued that everything had originated through catastrophic events such as volcanic eruptions. The pendulum was still swinging between those two concepts. One problem that European scientists encountered was that their knowledge was almost entirely limited to the only two active volcanoes in Europe – Etna and Vesuvius in Italy. Now Humboldt had the chance to investigate more volcanoes than anyone before him. He became so fascinated with them as the key to understanding the creation of the earth that Goethe later joked, in a letter that introduced a female friend to Humboldt: ‘since you belong to the naturalists who believe that everything was created by volcanoes, I’m sending you a female volcano who completely scorches and burns whatever is left.’

  With his plan to join Baudin’s expedition dashed, Humboldt used his new base in Quito to climb systematically every reachable volcano, no matter how dangerous. He was so busy that he caused some consternation in the parlours of Quito’s high society. His good looks had attracted the attention of several young unmarried women, yet ‘he never remained longer than was necessary,’ at dinner or other social events, said Rosa Montúfar, the daughter of the provincial governor and a noted beauty. Humboldt seemed to prefer to be outdoors, she complained, rather than in the company of attractive women.

  The irony was that Rosa’s handsome brother, Carlos Montúfar, now became Humboldt’s companion – a pattern of friendship that repeated itself in Humboldt’s life. He never married – in fact, he once said that a married man was always ‘a lost man’ – nor did he ever seem to have had any intimate relationships with women. Instead Humboldt had regular infatuations with his male friends to whom he wrote letters in which he confessed his ‘undying’ and ‘fervent’ love. And though he lived at a time when it was not uncommon for men to declare passionate feelings in their platonic friendships, Humboldt’s declarations tended to be strong. ‘I was tied to you as by iron chains,’ he wrote to one friend, and cried for many hours when he left another.

  There had been a couple of particularly intense friendships in the years before South America. Throughout his life Humboldt had such relationships in which he not only declared his love but also showed, for him, an unusual submissiveness. ‘My plans are subordinated to yours,’ he wrote to one friend, and ‘you can order me, like a child, and you will always find obedience without grumble.’ Humboldt’s relationship with Bonpland, by contrast, was very different. Bonpland was a ‘good person’, Humboldt had written to a friend on the eve of his departure from Spain, but ‘he has left me very cold for the past six months, that means, I only have a scientific relationship with him.’ Humboldt’s explicit remark that Bonpland was only a scientific colleague may have been an indication how differently he felt about other men.

  Contemporaries noted Humboldt’s ‘lack of true love for women’ and a newspaper later insinuated that he might be homosexual when an article wrote of his ‘sleeping partner’. Caroline von Humboldt said that ‘nothing will ever have a great influence on Alexander that doesn’t come through men.’ Even twenty-five years after Humboldt’s death, the German poet Theodor Fontane complained that a Humboldt biography he had just read did not mention the ‘sexual irregularities’.

  At twenty-two, Carlos Montúfar was ten years younger than Humboldt and, with dark curly hair and almost black eyes, carried himself tall and proud. He was to remain at Humboldt’s side for several years. Montúfar was no scientist but a quick learner, and Bonpland certainly didn’t seem to mind the new addition to their team. Others, though, viewed the friendship with some jealousy. The South American botanist and astronomer José de Caldas had met Humboldt a few months earlier on their way to Quito and had politely been rebuffed when he had asked to join the expedition. Annoyed, Caldas now wrote to Mutis in Bogotá that Montúfar had become Humboldt’s ‘Adonis’.

  Humboldt never explicitly explained the nature of these male friendships but it’s likely that they remained platonic because he admitted that ‘I don’t know sensual needs.’ Instead he escaped into the wilderness or threw himself into strenuous activity. Great physical exertion cheered him up and nature, he declared, calmed the ‘wild urges of passions’. And once again, he was exhausting himself. Humboldt was climbing dozens of volcanoes – sometimes with Bonpland and Montúfar, and sometimes without – but always with José carefully carrying the precious barometer. For the next five months, Humboldt scaled every reachable volcano from their base in Quito.

  One such was Pichincha, a volcano to the west of Quito, where poor José suddenly sank and almost disappeared into a snow bridge that covered a deep crevasse. Luckily he managed to pull himself (and the barometer) out. Humboldt then continued to the summit where he lay flat on a narrow rock ledge that formed a small natural balcony over the deep crater. Every two or three minutes violent tremors shook this little platform, but he remained unperturbed and crawled to the edge to peer over into Pichincha’s deep crater. Bluish flames flickered inside, and Humboldt was almost suffocated by the sulphuric vapours. ‘No imagination would be able to conjure up something as sinister, mournful, and deathly as we saw there,’ Humboldt said.

  He also attempted to climb Cotopaxi, a perfectly cone-shaped volcano which, at more than 19,000 feet, is the second highest mountain in Ecuador. But snow and steep slopes prevented him from going any higher than 14,500 feet. Though he failed to reach the summit, the sight of snow-covered Cotopaxi standing alone against the azure ‘vault of Heaven’ remained one of the most majestic views he had ever seen. Cotopaxi’s shape was so perfect and its surface appeared so smooth, Humboldt wrote in his diary, that it was as if a wood turner had created it on his lathe.

  On another occasion Humboldt and his small team followed an ancient congealed stream of lava that filled a valley below Antisana, a volcano that rose to 18,714 feet. As they moved higher the trees and shrubs became smaller until they reached the tree line and walked into the so-called páramo above. The tufted brownish stipa grass that grew here gave the landscape an almost barren look, but on closer inspection they could see that the ground was covered in minute colourful flowers held tightly within little rosettes of green leaves. They found small lupins and tiny gentians which formed soft, moss-like cushions. Wherever the men turned, delicate purple and blue blossoms dotted the grass.

  It was also bitterly cold, and so windy that Bonpland was knocked off his feet several times as he bent down to pick flowers. Gales blasted ‘ice needles’ into their faces. Before their final climb to the summit of Antisana, they had to spend the night in what Humboldt called the ‘highest dwelling place in the world’, a low thatched hut at 13,000 feet which belonged to a local landowner. Nestled in the folds of a gently undulating plateau, with Antisana’s peak rising behind them, the hut’s location was stunning. But ill with altitude sickness, cold, and without food or even candles, the men endured one of their most miserable nights ever.

  That night Carlos Montúfar became so ill that Humboldt, who was sharing a bed with him, grew very worried. Throughout the night Humboldt rose repeatedly to fetch water and administer compresses. By the morning Montúfar had recovered enough to accompan
y Humboldt and Bonpland on their final ascent. They made it to almost 18,000 feet – even higher, Humboldt noted with glee, than two French scientists, Charles-Marie de la Condamine and Pierre Bouguer, who had come to this part of the Andes in the 1730s to measure the shape of the earth. They had only reached just under 15,000 feet.

  Mountains held a spell over Humboldt. It wasn’t just the physical demands or the promise of new knowledge. There was also something more transcendental. Whenever he stood on a summit or a high ridge, he felt so moved by the scenery that his imagination carried him even higher. This imagination, he said, soothed the ‘deep wounds’ that pure ‘reason’ sometimes created.

  1 From Cumaná, in November 1800, Humboldt had already sent two parcels of seeds to Banks for Kew Gardens, as well as some of his astronomical observations. And Banks continued to help Humboldt. Banks would later retrieve one of Humboldt’s boxes filled with rock specimens from the Andes from an English captain who had captured the French vessel.

  2 The Spanish Empire in Latin America was divided into four viceroyalties and a few autonomous districts such as the Captaincy General of Venezuela. The Viceroyalty of New Granada encompassed much of the northern part of South America roughly covering today’s Panama, Ecuador and Colombia as well as parts of north-western Brazil, northern Peru and Costa Rica.

  7

  Chimborazo

  FIVE MONTHS AFTER his arrival, Humboldt finally left Quito on 9 June 1802. He still intended to travel to Lima, even though Captain Baudin wouldn’t be there. From Lima Humboldt hoped to find passage to Mexico, which he also wanted to explore. First, though, he was going to climb Chimborazo – the crown of his obsession. This majestic inactive volcano – a ‘monstrous colossus’ as Humboldt described it – was about 100 miles to the south of Quito and rose to almost 21,000 feet.1

  As Humboldt, Bonpland, Montúfar and José rode towards the volcano, they passed thick tropical vegetation. In the valleys they admired daturas with their large trumpet-shaped orange blossoms and bright red fuchsias with their almost unreal-looking sculptural petals. Then, as the men slowly ascended, these voluptuous blooms were replaced by open grass plains where herds of small llama-like vicuñas grazed. Then Chimborazo appeared on the horizon, standing alone on a high plateau, like a majestic dome. For several days as they approached, the mountain stood out against the vibrant blue of the sky with no cloud smudging its imposing outline. Whenever they stopped, an excited Humboldt took out his telescope. He saw a blanket of snow on the slopes, and the landscape around Chimborazo appeared barren and desolate. Thousands of boulders and rocks covered the ground, as far as he could see. It was an otherworldly scenery. By now Humboldt had climbed so many volcanoes that he was the most experienced mountaineer in the world but Chimborazo was a daunting prospect even to him. But what appeared unreachable, Humboldt later explained, ‘exerts a mysterious pull’.

  On 22 June they arrived at the foot of the volcano where they spent a fitful night in a small village. Early the next morning, Humboldt’s team began the ascent together with a group of local porters. They crossed the grassy plains and slopes on mules until they reached an altitude of 13,500 feet. As the rocks became steeper, they left the animals behind and continued on foot. The weather was turning against them. It had snowed during the night and the air was cold. Unlike the previous days, the summit of Chimborazo was shrouded in fog. Once in a while the fog lifted, granting them a brief yet tantalizing glimpse of the peak. It would be a long day.

  Snow-capped Chimborazo (Illustration Credit 7.1)

  At 15,600 feet their porters refused to go on. Humboldt, Bonpland, Montúfar and José divided the instruments between them and continued on their own. The fog held Chimborazo’s summit in its embrace. Soon they were crawling on all fours along a high ridge that narrowed to a dangerous two inches with steep cliffs falling away to their left and right – fittingly the Spanish called this ridge the cuchilla, or ‘knife edge’. Humboldt looked determinedly ahead. It didn’t help that the cold had numbed their hands and feet, nor that the foot that he had injured during a previous climb had become infected. Every step was leaden at this height. Nauseous and dizzy with altitude sickness, their eyes bloodshot and their gums bleeding, they suffered from a constant vertigo which, Humboldt later admitted, ‘was very dangerous, given the situation we were in’. On Pichincha Humboldt’s altitude sickness had been so severe that he had fainted. Here on the cuchilla, it could be fatal.

  Despite these difficulties, Humboldt still had the energy to set up his instruments every few hundred feet as they ascended. The icy wind had chilled the brass instruments and handling the delicate screws and levers with half-frozen hands was almost impossible. He plunged his thermometer into the ground, read the barometer and collected air samples to analyse its chemical components. He measured humidity and tested the boiling point of water at different altitudes. They also kicked boulders down the precipitous slopes to test how far they would roll.

  After an hour of treacherous climbing, the ridge became a little less steep but now sharp rocks tore their shoes and their feet began to bleed. Then, suddenly, the fog lifted, revealing Chimborazo’s white peak glinting in the sun, a little over 1,000 feet above them – but they also saw that their narrow ridge had ended. Instead, they were confronted by the mouth of a huge crevasse which opened in front of them. To get around it would have involved walking across a field of deep snow but by now it was 1 p.m. and the sun had melted the icy crust that covered the snow. When Montúfar gingerly tried to tread on it, he sank so deeply that he completely disappeared. There was no way to cross. As they paused, Humboldt took out the barometer again and measured their altitude at 19,413 feet. Though they wouldn’t make it to the summit, it still felt like being on the top of the world. No one had ever come this high – not even the early balloonists in Europe.

  Looking down Chimborazo’s slopes and the mountain ranges in the distance, everything that Humboldt had seen in the previous years came together. His brother Wilhelm had long believed that Alexander’s mind was made ‘to connect ideas, to detect chains of things’. As he stood that day on Chimborazo, Humboldt absorbed what lay in front of him while his mind reached back to all the plants, rock formations and measurements that he had seen and taken on the slopes of the Alps, the Pyrenees and in Tenerife. Everything that he had ever observed fell into place. Nature, Humboldt realized, was a web of life and a global force. He was, a colleague later said, the first to understand that everything was interwoven as with ‘a thousand threads’. This new idea of nature was to change the way people understood the world.

  Humboldt was struck by this ‘resemblance which we trace in climates the most distant from each other’. Here in the Andes, for example, grew a moss that reminded him of a species from the forests in northern Germany, thousands of miles away. On the mountains near Caracas he had examined rhododendron-like plants – alpine rose trees, as he called them – which were like those from the Swiss Alps. Later, in Mexico, he would find pines, cypresses and oaks that were similar to those that grew in Canada. Alpine plants could be found on the mountains of Switzerland, in Lapland and here in the Andes. Everything was connected.

  For Humboldt, the days they had spent travelling from Quito and then climbing up Chimborazo had been like a botanical journey that moved from the Equator towards the poles – with the whole plant world seemingly layered on top of each other as the vegetation zones ascended the mountain. The plant groups ranged from the tropical species down in the valleys to the lichens that he had encountered near the snow line. Towards the end of his life, Humboldt often talked about understanding nature from ‘a higher point of view’ from which those connections could be seen; the moment when he had realized this was here, on Chimborazo. With ‘a single glance’, he saw the whole of nature laid out before him.

  When they returned from Chimborazo, Humboldt was ready to formulate his new vision of nature. In the Andean foothills, he began to sketch his so-called Naturgemälde – an untranslatabl
e German term that can mean a ‘painting of nature’ but which also implies a sense of unity or wholeness. It was, as Humboldt later explained, a ‘microcosm on one page’. Unlike the scientists who had previously classified the natural world into tight taxonomic units along a strict hierarchy, filling endless tables with categories, Humboldt now produced a drawing.

  ‘Nature is a living whole,’ he later said, not a ‘dead aggregate’. One single life had been poured over stones, plants, animals and humankind. It was this ‘universal profusion with which life is everywhere distributed’ that most impressed Humboldt. Even the atmosphere carried the kernels of future life – pollen, insect eggs and seeds. Life was everywhere and those ‘organic powers are incessantly at work’, he wrote. Humboldt was not so much interested in finding new isolated facts but in connecting them. Individual phenomena were only important ‘in their relation to the whole’, he explained.

  Depicting Chimborazo in cross-section, the Naturgemälde strikingly illustrated nature as a web in which everything was connected. On it, Humboldt showed plants distributed according to their altitudes, ranging from subterranean mushroom species to the lichens that grew just below the snow line. At the foot of the mountain was the tropical zone of palms and, further up, the oaks and fern-like shrubs that preferred a more temperate climate. Every plant was placed on the mountain precisely where Humboldt had found them.