The Invention of Nature

by Andrea Wulf

  As long as a man had his own piece of land, Jefferson believed, he was independent. He had even argued that only farmers should be elected as congressmen because he regarded them as ‘the true representatives of the great American interest’, unlike the avaricious merchants who ‘have no country’. Factory workers, merchants and stockbrokers would never feel bound to their country like farmers who worked the soil. ‘The small landholders are the most precious part of a state,’ Jefferson insisted, and had written into his draft for the Virginia constitution that every free person was to be entitled to fifty acres of land (though he had failed to get this provision passed). His political ally, James Madison, argued that the greater the proportion of husbandmen ‘the more free, the more independent, and the more happy must be the society itself’. For both men agriculture was a republican endeavour and an act of nation-building. Ploughing fields, planting vegetables and devising crop rotation were occupations that brought self-sufficiency and therefore political freedom. Humboldt agreed because the small farmers whom he had met in South America had developed ‘the sentiment of liberty and independence’.

  For all their agreement, there was one subject on which they differed: slavery. For Humboldt colonialism and slavery were basically one and the same, interwoven with man’s relationship to nature and the exploitation of natural resources. When the Spanish, but also the North American colonists, had introduced sugar, cotton, indigo and coffee to their territories, they had also brought slavery. In Cuba, for example, Humboldt had seen how ‘every drop of sugarcane juice cost blood and groans.’ Slavery arrived in the wake of what the Europeans ‘call their civilization’, Humboldt said, and their ‘thirst for wealth’.

  Jefferson’s first childhood memory, reputedly, was of being carried on a pillow by a slave, and as an adult, his livelihood was founded on slave labour. Although he claimed to loathe slavery, he would free only a handful of the 200 slaves who toiled on his plantations in Virginia. Previously Jefferson had thought that small-scale farming might be the solution to ending slavery at Monticello. While still in Europe as the American Minister, he had met hard-working German farmers whom he believed to be ‘absolutely incorruptible by money’. He had considered settling them at Monticello ‘intermingled’ with his slaves on farms of fifty acres each. These industrious and honest Germans were for Jefferson the epitome of the virtuous farmer. The slaves would remain his property, but their children would be free and ‘good citizens’ by having been brought up in the proximity of the German farmers. The scheme was never implemented, and by the time Humboldt met him, Jefferson had abandoned all plans to free his slaves.

  Slaves working on a plantation (Illustration Credit 8.3)

  Humboldt, though, never grew tired of condemning what he called ‘the greatest evil’. During his visit to Washington he didn’t quite dare to criticize the President himself, but he told Jefferson’s friend and architect William Thornton that slavery was a ‘disgrace’. Of course the abolition of slavery would reduce the nation’s cotton production, he said, but public welfare could not be measured ‘according to the value of its exports’. Justice and freedom were more important than numbers and the wealth of a few.

  That the British, French or Spanish could argue, as they did, over who treated their slaves with greater humanity, Humboldt said, was as absurd as discussing ‘if it was more pleasant to have one’s stomach slashed open or to be flayed’. Slavery was tyranny, and as he had travelled through Latin America Humboldt had filled his diary with descriptions of the wretched lives of slaves: one plantation owner in Caracas forced his slaves to eat their own excrement, he wrote, whereas another tortured his with needles. Wherever he had turned Humboldt had seen the scars of whips on the slaves’ backs. The indigenous Indians were not treated any better. In the missions along the Orinoco, for example, he had heard how children were abducted and sold as slaves. One particularly horrendous story involved a missionary who had bitten off his kitchen boy’s testicles as a punishment for kissing a girl.

  There had been a few exceptions. As he had crossed Venezuela on his way to the Orinoco, Humboldt had been impressed by his host at Lake Valencia who had encouraged the progress of agriculture and the distribution of wealth by parcelling up his estate into small farms. Instead of running a huge plantation, he had given much of his land to impoverished families – some of them freed slaves, others peasants who were too poor to own them. These families now worked as free independent farmers; they were not rich but they could live off the land. Similarly, between Honda and Bogotá, Humboldt had seen small haciendas where fathers and sons worked together without slave labour, planting sugar but also edible plants for their own consumption. ‘I love to dwell on these details,’ Humboldt said, because they proved his point.

  The institution of slavery was unnatural, Humboldt said, because ‘what is against nature, is unjust, bad and without validity.’ Unlike Jefferson, who believed that black people were a race ‘inferior to the whites in the endowment both of body and mind’, Humboldt insisted that there were no superior or inferior races. No matter what nationality, colour or religion, all humans came from one root. Much like plant families, Humboldt explained, which adapted differently to their geographical and climatic conditions but nonetheless displayed the traits of ‘a common type’, so did all the members of the human race belong to one family. All men were equal, Humboldt said, and no race was above another, because ‘all are alike designed for freedom’.

  Nature was Humboldt’s teacher. And the greatest lesson that nature offered was that of freedom. ‘Nature is the domain of liberty,’ Humboldt said, because nature’s balance was created by diversity which might in turn be taken as a blueprint for political and moral truth. Everything, from the most unassuming moss or insect to elephants or towering oak trees, had its role, and together they made the whole. Humankind was just one small part. Nature itself was a republic of freedom.

  1 In the previous year Napoleon had abandoned the idea of a French colony in North America when most of the 25,000 soldiers whom he had sent to Haiti to quash the slave rebellion there had died from malaria. Napoleon’s original plan had been to transfer his army from Haiti to New Orleans but in the wake of the disastrous campaign and with few men left, he abandoned the strategy – and sold the Louisiana Territory to the United States instead.

  PART III

  Return: Sorting Ideas

  9

  Europe

  IN LATE JUNE 1804, Humboldt left the United States on the French frigate Favorite, and in August, a few weeks before his thirty-fifth birthday, he arrived in Paris to a hero’s welcome. He had been away for more than five years and returned with trunks filled with dozens of notebooks, hundreds of sketches and tens of thousands of astronomical, geological and meteorological observations. He brought back some 60,000 plant specimens, 6,000 species of which almost 2,000 were new to European botanists – a staggering figure, considering that there were only about 6,000 known species by the end of the eighteenth century. Humboldt had assembled more, he boasted, than anyone else.

  ‘How I long to be once more in Paris!’ Humboldt had written to a French scientist from Lima almost two years previously. But this Paris was different from the city that he had last seen in 1798. Humboldt had left a republic and found a nation ruled by a dictator on his return. After a coup d’état in November 1799, Napoleon had declared himself First Consul and with that had become the most powerful man in France. Then, just a few weeks before Humboldt’s arrival, Napoleon had announced that he would be crowned Emperor of France. The sound of tools ricocheted through the streets as the building works for Napoleon’s grand vision for Paris began. ‘I’m so new that I need to orientate myself first,’ Humboldt wrote to an old friend. Notre Dame Cathedral was being restored for Napoleon’s coronation in December and the city’s timber-framed medieval houses were razed to make room for public spaces, fountains and boulevards. A canal, one hundred kilometres long, was dug to bring fresh water to Paris and the Quai d�
��Orsay was constructed to prevent the Seine from flooding.

  Most of the newspapers that Humboldt had known had been closed or were now run by editors loyal to the new regime, while caricatures of Napoleon and his reign were forbidden. Napoleon had established a new national police force as well as the Banque de France which regulated the nation’s money. His rule was centralized in Paris and he kept all aspects of national life under his tight control. The only thing that didn’t seem to have changed was that war still raged throughout Europe.

  Humboldt on his return to Europe (Illustration Credit 9.1)

  The reason why Humboldt had chosen Paris as his new home was simple – no other city was so deeply steeped in science. There was no other place in Europe where thinking was allowed to be so liberal and free. With the French Revolution the role of the Catholic Church had diminished, and scientists in France were no longer bound by religious canon and orthodox beliefs. They could experiment and speculate free from prejudice, questioning all and everything. Reason was the new religion, and money was flooding into the sciences. At the Jardin des Plantes, as the former Jardin du Roi was now known, new glasshouses had been built and the Natural History Museum was expanding with collections that had been pillaged from all over Europe by Napoleon’s army – herbaria, fossils, stuffed animals and even two live elephants from Holland. In Paris Humboldt found like-minded thinkers, along with engravers as well as scientific societies, institutions and salons. Paris was also Europe’s publishing centre. In short, it was the perfect place for Humboldt to share his new ideas with the world.

  The city was buzzing with activity. It was a true metropolis with a population of around half a million, the second largest city in Europe after London. In the decade after the revolution, Paris had been plunged into destruction and austerity, but now frivolity and gaiety prevailed again. Women were addressed as ‘Madame’ or ‘Mademoiselle’ instead of ‘citoyenne’, and tens of thousands of exiled French were permitted to return home. There were cafés everywhere, and since the revolution the number of restaurants had burgeoned from one hundred to five hundred. Foreigners were often surprised how much of Parisian life happened outside. The whole population seemed to live in public ‘as if their houses are only built to sleep in’, the English Romantic poet Robert Southey said.

  Along the banks of the Seine, near the small apartment that Humboldt rented in Saint-Germain, hundreds of washerwomen with rolled-up sleeves scrubbed their linen watched by those crossing the city’s many bridges. The streets were lined with stalls offering everything from oysters and grapes to furniture. Cobblers, knife grinders and pedlars offered their services noisily. Animals performed, jugglers played, and ‘philosophers’ lectured or perfected experiments. Here was an old man playing the harp, and there a small child beating the tambourine and a dog treading an organ. ‘Grimaciers’ contorted their faces into the most hideous shapes, while the smell of roasted chestnuts mingled with other less pleasurable scents. It was, one visitor said, as if the whole city were ‘devoted solely to enjoyment’. Even at midnight the streets were still full, with musicians, actors and conjurors entertaining the masses. The whole city, another tourist noted, seemed in ‘eternal agitation’.

  Paris street life (Illustration Credit 9.2)

  What amazed foreigners was the fact that all classes lived under one roof in large houses – from a duke’s apartment on the grand first floor to the servant’s or milliner’s quarters in the attic on the fifth floor. Literacy also seemed to transcend class as even the girls who sold flowers or trinkets had their heads deep in books when no customer needed their attentions. Bookstall after bookstall ribboned the streets, and the conversations at the tables that cluttered the pavements outside restaurants and cafés would often be about beauty and art, or a ‘discourse on some puzzling point of higher mathematics’.

  Humboldt adored Paris and the knowledge that pumped through its streets, salons and laboratories. The Académie des Sciences1 was the nexus of scientific enquiry but there were many other places too. The anatomy theatre in the École de Medicine could hold 1,000 students, the observatory was equipped with the best instruments and the Jardin des Plantes boasted a menagerie, a huge collection of natural history objects and a library in addition to its large botanical garden. There was so much to do and so many people to meet.

  The twenty-five-year-old chemist Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac was enthralling the scientific world with the daring balloon ascents that he used to study terrestrial magnetism at great heights. On 16 September 1804, only three weeks after Humboldt’s arrival, Gay-Lussac conducted magnetic observations as well as measuring temperatures and air pressure at 23,000 feet – more than 3,000 feet higher than Humboldt had climbed on Chimborazo. Unsurprisingly, Humboldt was keen to compare Gay-Lussac’s results with his own from the Andes. Within a few months Gay-Lussac and Humboldt were giving lectures together at the Académie. They became such close friends that they travelled together and even shared a small bedroom and study in the attic of the École Polytechnique a few years later.

  Wherever Humboldt turned, there were new and exciting theories. At the natural history museum in the Jardin des Plantes he met naturalists Georges Cuvier and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. Cuvier had turned the controversial concept of extinctions into a scientific fact by examining fossil bones and concluding that they didn’t belong to existing animals. And Lamarck had recently developed a theory of the gradual transmutation of species, paving the way for evolutionary ideas. The celebrated astronomer and mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace was working on ideas about the formation of the earth and the universe which helped Humboldt shape his own ideas. The savants in Paris were pushing the boundaries of scientific thought.

  A hot-air balloon over Paris (Illustration Credit 9.3)

  Everybody was excited about Humboldt’s safe return. It had been so long, Goethe wrote to Wilhelm von Humboldt, that it felt as if Alexander ‘had risen from the dead’. Others proposed that Humboldt be made president of the Berlin Academy of Sciences, but he had no intention of returning to Berlin. Even his family wasn’t there any more. With both his parents dead and Wilhelm now in Rome as the Prussian Minister at the Vatican, there was nothing to tempt him home.

  To his great surprise Humboldt found Wilhelm’s wife, Caroline, living in Paris. Pregnant with their sixth child, she had left Rome for France in June 1804 with two of their children after their nine-year-old son had died the previous summer. The milder climate in Paris, the couple believed, would be better for the two children, who were also suffering from dangerous fevers, than the sweltering heat of Rome during the summer. Wilhelm, stuck in Rome, pressed his wife for every single detail about his brother’s return. How was he? What were his plans? Had he changed? After this adventure do people stare at him as if at a ‘fantastical creature’?

  He looked really well, Caroline replied. The hardship of the expedition years had not weakened him – on the contrary, Alexander had never been healthier. The many mountain climbs had made him strong and fit, Caroline thought, and her brother-in-law seemed not to have aged during the past years. It was almost ‘as if he had only left us the day before yesterday’. His manners, gestures and countenance were just the same as before, she wrote to Wilhelm. The only difference was that he had put on some weight and that he talked even more and faster – as far as that was possible.

  But neither Caroline nor Wilhelm approved of Alexander’s wish to remain in France. It was his patriotic duty to return to Berlin and to live there for a while, they said, reminding him of his ‘Deutschheit’ – his ‘Germanness’. When Wilhelm wrote that ‘one has to honour the fatherland’, Alexander chose to ignore his brother. Just before his departure for the United States, he had already written to Wilhelm from Cuba that he had no desire ever to see Berlin again. When Alexander heard that Wilhelm wanted him to move there, he only ‘pulled faces’, Caroline reported back. He was having far too much fun in Paris. ‘The fame is greater than ever before,’ Humboldt boasted to his brother.r />
  After their arrival Bonpland had first gone to visit his family in the port town of La Rochelle on the French Atlantic coast, but Humboldt and Carlos Montúfar, who had accompanied them to France, had immediately travelled to Paris. Humboldt threw himself into his new life in the capital. He wanted to share the results of his expedition. Within three weeks, he was delivering a series of lectures on his explorations to packed audiences at the Académie des Sciences. He jumped so quickly from one subject to another that nobody could keep up. Humboldt ‘unites a whole Académie within him,’ a French chemist declared. As the scientists listened to his lectures, read his manuscripts and examined his collections, they were astonished at how a single man could be so familiar with so many different disciplines. Even those who had been critical about his abilities in the past were now enthusiastic, Humboldt proudly wrote to Wilhelm.

  He conducted experiments, wrote about his expedition and discussed his theories with his new scientific friends. Humboldt worked so much that it seemed as if ‘night and day form one mass of time’ during which he worked, slept and ate, one American visitor in Paris noted, ‘without making any arbitrary division of it’. The only way Humboldt could keep up was by sleeping very little, and only if he had to. If he woke in the middle of the night, he got up and worked. If he was not hungry, he ignored mealtimes. If he was tired, he drank more coffee.