by Andrea Wulf
Humboldt’s first sketch of the Naturgemälde (Illustration Credit 7.2)
Humboldt produced his first sketch of the Naturgemälde in South America and then published it later as a beautiful three-foot by two-foot drawing. To the left and right of the mountain he placed several columns that provided related details and information. By picking a particular height of the mountain (as given in the left-hand column), one could trace connections across the table and the drawing of the mountain to learn about temperature, say, or humidity or atmospheric pressure, as well as what species of animals and plants could be found at different altitudes. Humboldt showed different zones of plants, along with details of how they were linked to changes in altitude, temperature and so on. All this information could then be linked to the other major mountains across the world, which were listed according to their height next to the outline of Chimborazo.
This variety and richness, but also the simplicity of the scientific information depicted, was unprecedented. No one before Humboldt had presented such data visually. The Naturgemälde showed for the first time that nature was a global force with corresponding climate zones across continents. Humboldt saw ‘unity in variety’. Instead of placing plants in their taxonomic categories, he saw vegetation through the lens of climate and location: a radically new idea that still shapes our understanding of ecosystems today.
From Chimborazo they travelled 1,000 miles south to Lima. Humboldt was interested in everything, from plants and animals to Inca architecture. Throughout his travels across Latin America, Humboldt would often be impressed by the accomplishments of the ancient civilizations. He transcribed manuscripts, sketched Inca monuments and collected vocabularies. The indigenous languages, Humboldt said, were so sophisticated that there wasn’t a single European book that could not be translated into any one of them. They even had words for abstract concepts such as ‘future, eternity, existence’. Just south of Chimborazo, he visited an indigenous tribe who possessed some ancient manuscripts that described volcano eruptions. Luckily, there was also a Spanish translation which he copied into his notebooks.
As they continued, Humboldt also investigated the cinchona forests in Loja (in today’s Ecuador) and once again recognized how humankind devastated the environment. The bark of the cinchona tree contains quinine which was used to treat malaria, but once the bark was removed, the trees died. The Spanish had stripped huge swathes of wild forest. Older and thicker trees, Humboldt noted, had now become scarce.
Humboldt’s enquiring mind seemed inexhaustible. He studied layers of rocks, climate patterns and the ruins of Inca temples, and was also fascinated with geomagnetism – the study of the magnetic fields of the earth. As they climbed across mountain chains and descended into valleys, he set up his instruments. Humboldt’s curiosity originated in his urge to understand nature globally, as a network of forces and interrelationships – just as he had been interested in vegetation zones across continents and the occurrences of earthquakes. Since the seventeenth century scientists had known that the earth is itself a gigantic magnet. They also knew that the needle of a compass doesn’t show the true north, because the magnetic North Pole is not the same as the geographic North Pole. To make matters even more confusing, the magnetic north and south move, which caused great navigational problems. What scientists didn’t know was whether the intensity of magnetic fields across the world varied randomly, or systematically, from location to location.
As Humboldt had moved south along the Andes from Bogotà to Quito, coming closer to the Equator, he had measured how the earth’s magnetic field decreased. To his surprise, even after they had crossed the Equator near Quito the intensity of the magnetic field had continued to drop, until they reached the barren Cajamarca Plateau in Peru which was more than 7 degrees and about 500 miles south of the geographic Equator. It was only here that the needle turned from north to south: Humboldt had discovered the magnetic equator.
They arrived in Lima at the end of October 1802, four and a half months after they had departed from Quito and more than three years after they had left Europe. Here they found passage to sail north to Guayaquil on the west coast of today’s Ecuador from where Humboldt intended to travel to Acapulco in Mexico. As they sailed from Lima towards Guayaquil, Humboldt examined the cold current that hugs the western coast of South America from southern Chile to northern Peru. The current’s cold, nutrient-loaded water supports such abundance of marine life that it is the world’s most productive marine ecosystem. Years later, it would be called the Humboldt Current. And though Humboldt was flattered to have it named after him, he also protested. The fishing boys along the coast had known of the current for centuries, Humboldt said, all he had done was to have been the first to measure it and to discover that it was cold.
Humboldt was assembling the data he needed to make sense of nature as a unified whole. If nature was a web of life, he couldn’t look at it just as a botanist, a geologist or a zoologist. He required information about everything and from everywhere, because ‘observations from the most disparate regions of the planet must be compared to one another’. Humboldt amassed so many results and asked so many questions that some people thought him to be stupid, because he asked ‘the seemingly obvious’. His coat pockets, one of his guides noted, were like those of a little boy – full of plants, rocks and scraps of paper. Nothing was too small or insignificant to investigate because everything had its place in the great tapestry of nature.
Cotopaxi with smoke plume (Illustration Credit 7.3)
They arrived at the port town of Guayaquil on 4 January 1803, on the same day that Cotopaxi suddenly erupted some 200 miles to the north-east. Having climbed every reachable volcano in the Andes, this was the moment Humboldt had been waiting for. Just as he was preparing to sail to Mexico, a new gauntlet was thrown down. Humboldt was torn. Keen to explore Mexico before returning to Europe, he needed to find passage soon if he was to sail before the annual hurricane season in summer. Otherwise they would be stuck until the end of the year in Guayaquil. But now there was also the lure of an erupting volcano. If they hurried, perhaps they could make it to Cotopaxi and back in time to catch a boat to Mexico. But the journey from Guayaquil to Cotopaxi was dangerous. Humboldt would have to cross the high Andes again, only this time towards an active volcano.
Dangerous, yes, but too exciting to miss. At the end of January Humboldt and Montúfar set off, leaving Bonpland in Guayaquil with instructions to look out for a ship bound for Mexico. As they travelled north-east, Cotopaxi’s roar accompanied them. Humboldt couldn’t believe his luck. In a few days, he would again see the volcano that he had climbed eight months earlier, but this time alive and illuminated by its own fire. Then, only five days into their journey, a messenger arrived from Guayaquil with a note from Bonpland. He had found a ship to Acapulco but it would sail in two weeks. There was no way that Humboldt and Montúfar could make it to Cotopaxi. They would have to return to Guayaquil immediately. Humboldt was devastated.
As their ship sailed out of Guayaquil harbour on 17 February 1803, Humboldt could hear Cotopaxi, like a growling colossus. The volcanic chorus serenaded his departure, but it was also a sad reminder of what he was missing. It didn’t help that each night during their sea voyage the changing stars told him that they were leaving the southern hemisphere. As he peered through his telescope, the constellations of the southern sky were slowly disappearing. ‘I’m getting poorer day by day,’ Humboldt wrote in his diary, moving towards the northern hemisphere and away from a world that would hold a spell over him for the rest of his life.
During the night of 26 February 1803, Humboldt crossed the Equator for the last time.
He was thirty-three and had spent more than three years in Latin America, travelling through tropical jungles and climbing up to icy mountain summits. He had collected thousands of plants and taken countless measurements. Though he had risked his life many times, he had enjoyed the freedom and adventure. Most importantly, he was leaving Guayaquil with
a new vision of nature in his mind. In his trunks was the sketch of Chimborazo – his Naturgemälde. This one drawing and the ideas that had shaped it would change the way future generations perceived the natural world.
1 Though Chimborazo is not the highest mountain in the world – nor even in the Andes – in one way it is because it is so close to the Equator, its peak is the furthest away from the centre of the earth.
8
Politics and Nature
Thomas Jefferson and Humboldt
IT WAS AS if the sea were about to swallow them. Huge waves rolled on to the deck and down the stairway into the belly of the ship. Humboldt’s forty trunks were in constant danger of flooding. They had sailed straight into a hurricane and for six long days the winds would not stop, pounding the vessel with such force that they could not sleep or even think. The cook lost his pots and pans when the water came gushing in, and was swimming rather than standing in his galley. No food could be cooked and sharks circled the boat. The captain’s cabin, at the ship’s stern, was flooded so high that they had to swim through it, and even the most seasoned sailors were tossed across the deck like ninepins. Fearing for their lives, the sailors insisted on more brandy rations, intending, they said, to drown drunk. Each wave that rolled towards them seemed like a huge rock face. Humboldt thought that he had never been closer to death.
It was May 1804, and Humboldt, Bonpland, Montúfar and their servant, José, were sailing from Cuba towards the East Coast of the United States. It would be ironic to die now, Humboldt thought, having survived five years of perilous travels in Latin America. After their departure from Guayaquil in February 1803, they had spent a year in Mexico where Humboldt had stayed mainly in Mexico City, the administrative capital of the Viceroyalty of New Spain – the vast colony that included Mexico, parts of California and Central America, as well as Florida. He had scoured the extensive colonial archives and libraries, interrupting his research only for a few expeditions to mines, hot springs and yet more volcanoes.
It was time to return to Europe. Five years of travelling through extremes of climates and the wilderness had damaged his delicate instruments, many of which no longer worked properly. With so little contact with the scientific community back home, Humboldt also worried that he might have missed out on important scientific advances. He felt so isolated from the rest of the world, he wrote to a friend, as if he were living on the moon. In March 1804 they had sailed from Mexico to Cuba for a brief stopover in order to pick up the collections that they had stored in Havana three years earlier.
Humboldt returned from Mexico with detailed observations from nature but also with notes from archives and monuments such as this Mexican calendar which for him was proof of the sophistication of ancient civilizations (Illustration Credit 8.1)
As so often, Humboldt had then made some last-minute changes and decided to postpone his voyage home by a few more weeks. He wanted to sail via North America in order to meet Thomas Jefferson, the third President of the United States. For five long years, Humboldt had seen nature at its best – lush, magnificent and awe-inspiring – and now he wanted to see civilization in all its glory, a society built as a republic and on the principles of liberty.
From a young age Humboldt had been surrounded by Enlightenment thinkers who had planted the seeds of his life-long belief in liberty, equality, tolerance and the importance of education. But it had been the French Revolution in 1789, just before his twentieth birthday, that had determined his political views. Unlike the Prussians who were still ruled by an absolute monarch, the French had declared all men equal. Since then Humboldt had always carried the ‘ideas of 1789 in his heart’. He had visited Paris, in 1790, where he had seen the preparations for the celebration of the first anniversary of the revolution. So enthused had Humboldt been that summer that he had helped to cart sand for the building of a ‘temple of liberty’ in Paris. Now, fourteen years later, he wanted to meet the people who had forged a republic in America and ‘who understood the precious gift of liberty’.
After a week at sea, the hurricane abated and the winds eventually calmed. Then, at the end of May 1804, four weeks after their departure from Havana, Humboldt and his small team disembarked in Philadelphia, with its 75,000 inhabitants the largest city in the United States. On the eve of his arrival, Humboldt wrote a long letter to Jefferson, expressing his desire to meet in Washington, DC, the nation’s new capital. ‘Your writings, your actions, and the liberalism of your ideas,’ Humboldt wrote, ‘have inspired me from my earliest youth.’ He brought a wealth of information from Latin America, Humboldt informed Jefferson, where he had collected plants, made astronomical observations, found hieroglyphs of ancient civilizations deep in the rainforest and had amassed important data from the colonial archives of Mexico City.
Humboldt also wrote to James Madison, the Secretary of State and Jefferson’s closest political ally, declaring that ‘having witnessed the great spectacle of the majestic Andes and the grandeur of the physical world I intended to enjoy the spectacle of a free people.’ Politics and nature belonged together – an idea that Humboldt would be discussing with the Americans.
At sixty-one, Jefferson was still standing ‘straight as a gun barrel’ – a tall thin and almost gangly man with the ruddy complexion of a farmer and an ‘iron constitution’. He was the President of the young nation, but also the owner of Monticello, a large plantation in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia, a little more than one hundred miles south-west of Washington. Although his wife had died more than two decades earlier, Jefferson had a tightly knit family life and greatly enjoyed the company of his seven grandchildren. Friends commented how they often climbed on to his lap as he talked. At the time Humboldt arrived in the United States, Jefferson was still grieving for his younger daughter, Maria, who had died just a few weeks previously, in April 1804, after giving birth to a baby girl. His other daughter, Martha, often spent long periods at the White House and later moved permanently to Monticello with her children.
Jefferson hated idleness. He rose before dawn, read several books at the same time and wrote so many letters that he had bought a letter-copying machine to keep a record of his correspondence. He was a restless man who warned his daughter that ennui was ‘the most dangerous poison of life’. In the 1780s, after the War of Independence, Jefferson had lived in Paris for five years as the American Minister to France. He had used the posting to travel widely across Europe, returning home with trunks full of books, furniture and ideas. He suffered from what he called the ‘malady of Bibliomanie’, constantly buying and studying books. In Europe, he had also made time between his duties to see the finest gardens in England, as well as observing and comparing agricultural practices in Germany, Holland, Italy and France.
In 1804 Thomas Jefferson was at the pinnacle of his career. He had written the Declaration of Independence, was the President of the United States and by the end of the year he would win a landslide election, securing his second term. With Jefferson’s recent purchase of the Louisiana Territory from the French, the foundation was laid for the nation’s expansion to the west.1 For a mere US $15 million, Jefferson had doubled the nation’s size, adding more than 800,000 square miles that stretched west from the Mississippi to the Rocky Mountains and from Canada in the north to the Gulf of Mexico in the south. Jefferson had also just dispatched Meriwether Lewis and William Clark on the first overland journey across the whole of the North American continent. This expedition brought together all the subjects that interested Jefferson: he had personally briefed the explorers to collect plants, seeds and animals; they were to report on the soils and the agricultural practices of the Native Americans; and they were to survey land and rivers.
Humboldt’s arrival could not have been better timed. The American consul in Cuba, Vincent Gray, had already written to Madison, urging him to meet Humboldt because he had useful information about Mexico, their new southern neighbour since the acquisition of the Louisiana Territory.
The landscape through which they passed was one of well-tended fields with straight lines of crops and scattered farms surrounded by orchards and neat vegetable plots. This was the epitome of Jefferson’s ideas for the economic and political future of the United States: a nation of independent yeomen with small self-sufficient farms.
With the Napoleonic Wars tearing Europe apart, America’s economy was booming because as a neutral nation – at least for the moment – it was shipping much of the world’s goods. American vessels loaded with spices, cocoa, cotton, coffee and sugar zigzagged the oceans from North America to the Caribbean to Europe and to the East Indies. The export markets for their own agricultural produce were also expanding. It seemed that Jefferson was leading the country towards prosperity and happiness.
Yet America had changed in the three decades since the revolution. Old revolutionary friends had fallen out over their different visions for the republic and had turned to vicious partisan fighting. Divisions had arisen over what the various factions believed ought to be the fabric of American society. Should they be a nation of farmers, or one of merchants? There were those, like Jefferson, who envisaged the United States as an agrarian republic with an emphasis on individual liberty and the rights of the individual states, but also those who favoured trade and a strong central government.