The Invention of Nature

by Andrea Wulf

  Along their warpath Bolívar gave stirring speeches to the people of New Granada. ‘Wherever the Spanish empire rules,’ he said, ‘there rules death and desolation!’ And as he marched, he gained new recruits. Bolívar believed that the colonies of South America had to unite. If one was enslaved, so was the other, he wrote. Spanish rule was a ‘gangrene’ that would affect every part unless ‘hewn off like an infected limb’. It was the colonies’ own disunity, he said, that would be their downfall, not Spanish arms. The Spanish were ‘locusts’ that destroyed the ‘seeds and roots of the tree of freedom’, he said, a pest that could only be destroyed if they united against them. He charmed, bullied and threatened to convince the New Granadans to join him on his way to Venezuela to free Caracas.

  If Bolívar didn’t get his way, he could be brash and insulting. ‘March! Either you shoot me or, by God, I will certainly shoot you,’ Bolívar shouted when one officer refused to cross into Venezuelan territory. ‘I must have 10,000 guns,’ he demanded on another occasion, ‘or I shall go mad.’ His determination was infectious.

  He was a man full of contradictions, as happy in a hammock slung on the branches amid a thick forest as on a packed dance floor. He would impatiently draft the nation’s first constitution in a canoe paddling along the Orinoco but would also delay military action for his own gain to wait for a lover. He said that dancing was the ‘poetry of motion’, but could also coldly order the execution of hundreds of prisoners. He could be charming when in a good mood but ‘ferocious’ when irritated, with his moods shifting so fast that ‘the change was incredible’, as one of his generals said.

  Bolívar was a man of action but also believed that the written word had the power to change the world. On later campaigns he would always travel with a printing press, carrying it up and down the Andes and across the vast plains of the Llanos. His mind was sharp and fast, he often dictated numerous letters at the same time to several secretaries and was known for making snap decisions. There were men, he said, who needed solitude to think but ‘I deliberated, reflected, and mulled best when I was at the centre of the revelry – among the pleasures and clamour of a ball.’

  Simón Bolívar (Illustration Credit 12.2)

  From the Río Magdalena, Bolívar and his men marched through the mountains towards Venezuela, fighting and defeating royalist troops. By spring 1813, six months after he had landed in Cartagena, Bolívar had freed New Granada but Venezuela was still in Spanish hands. In May 1813 his army descended from the mountains into the high valley where the Venezuelan city of Mérida was situated. When the Spanish heard that Bolívar was approaching, they left Mérida in a panic. Bolívar and his troops arrived with their clothes worn, hungry and ill with fever but to a hero’s welcome. The citizens of Mérida declared Bolívar ‘El Libertador’ and 600 new recruits signed up to his army.

  Three weeks later, on 15 June 1813, Bolívar issued a brutal decree that proclaimed a ‘War to the Death’. It condemned all Spaniards in the colonies to death unless they agreed to fight alongside Bolívar’s army. It was ruthless but effective. As Spaniards were executed, royalists defected and joined the republicans – and as Bolívar’s army moved eastwards towards Caracas, their numbers increased. By the time they arrived in the capital on 6 August, the Spanish had fled the city. Bolívar took Caracas without a fight. ‘Your liberators have arrived,’ he told the inhabitants, ‘from the banks of the swollen Magdalena to the flowering valleys of Aragua.’ He talked of the vast plateaux they had crossed and the huge mountains they had climbed – aligning their victories with the rugged wilderness of South American nature.

  As Bolívar’s soldiers marched through Venezuela along the War to the Death’s bloody trail, killing almost every Spaniard they found, another army rose: the so-called ‘Legions of Hell’. Made up of rough plainsmen from the Llanos, along with mestizos and slaves, the Legions of Hell were under the command of fierce and sadistic José Tomás Boves, a Spaniard who had lived in the Llanos as a cattle dealer and whose army would eventually kill 80,000 republicans. Boves’s men were fighting against Bolívar’s privileged class of creoles who they claimed were to be feared more than Spanish rule. Bolívar’s revolution descended into a merciless civil war. One Spanish official described Venezuela as a region of death: ‘Towns that had thousands of inhabitants are now reduced to a few hundred or even a few dozens,’ villages were burned, and unburied corpses were decomposing in the streets and fields.

  Humboldt had predicted that the South American struggle for independence would be bloody because colonial society was deeply riven. For three centuries the Europeans had done everything to cement the ‘hatred of one caste for another’, Humboldt told Jefferson. Creoles, mestizos, slaves and indigenous people were not a united people but divided and mistrustful of each other. It was a warning that came to haunt Bolívar.

  Meanwhile in Europe, Spain had finally been released from Napoleon’s military grip and was able to concentrate on its unruly colonies. Having taken back his throne, the Spanish king, Ferdinand VII, now equipped a huge armada of some sixty ships and dispatched more than 14,000 soldiers to South America – the largest fleet Spain had ever sent to the New World. When the Spanish arrived in Venezuela in April 1815, Bolívar’s army – weakened by the fighting against Boves – didn’t stand a chance. In May, the royalists took Caracas and the revolution seemed to be over for good.

  Bolívar once again fled his country – this time to Jamaica from where he tried to drum up international support for his revolution. He wrote to Lord Wellesley, the former British Secretary of State, explaining that the colonists needed help from Britain. ‘The most beautiful half of the earth,’ Bolívar warned, was going to be ‘reduced to a state of desolation’. He was willing to march all the way to the North Pole if he had to, he added – but neither England nor the United States was yet willing to involve themselves in the volatile Spanish colonial affairs.

  James Madison, the fourth American President, declared that no US citizen was allowed to enlist in any kind of military expedition against the ‘dominions of Spain’. Former President John Adams thought the prospect of South American democracy a laughable idea – as absurd as establishing democracy ‘among birds, beasts and fishes’. Thomas Jefferson repeated his fears of despotism. How, he asked Humboldt, was a ‘priest-ridden’ society going to establish a republican and free government? Three centuries of Catholic rule, Jefferson insisted, had turned the colonists into ignorant children and ‘enchained their minds’.

  From Paris, Humboldt watched anxiously, sending letters to members of the US government in which he asked them to support their southern brethren, and then impatiently complaining when he didn’t receive answers quickly enough. His enquiries should be dealt with as a matter of great urgency, an American general in Paris wrote to Jefferson, because Humboldt’s influence ‘is greater than that of any other man in Europe’.

  No one in Europe or North America knew more about South America than Humboldt – he had become the authority on the subject. His books were a treasure trove of information about a continent that until then had been ‘so shamefully unknown’, Jefferson said. There was one publication in particular that attracted attention: Humboldt’s Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain. Published in four volumes between 1808 and 1811, it had rolled off the printing presses at exactly the moment when the world turned its attention to the independence movements in South America.

  Humboldt sent Jefferson the volumes in regular consignments as they were published, and the former President studied them carefully to learn as much as he could about the rebelling colonies. ‘We have little knowledge of them,’ Jefferson told Humboldt, ‘but through you.’ Jefferson and many of his political friends were torn between their wish to see free republics spreading, the risk of officially supporting a potentially unstable regime in South America and the spectre of a great economic competitor rising in the southern hemisphere. It was not so much what the United States wished for them but ‘what is practica
ble’, Jefferson believed. He hoped that the colonies would not unite as one nation but remain separate countries because as a ‘single mass they would be a very formidable neighbor’.

  Jefferson was not alone in gleaning information from Humboldt’s books: Bolívar also studied the volumes because most parts of the continent that he wanted to liberate were unknown to him. In the Political Essay of New Spain Humboldt had doggedly woven together his observations on geography, plants, conflicts of race and Spanish exploits with the environmental consequences of colonial rule and labour conditions in manufacturing, mines and agriculture. He provided information about revenues and military defence, about roads and ports, and he included table upon table of data ranging from silver production in mines to agricultural yields, as well as total amounts of imports and exports to and from the different colonies.

  The volumes made several points very clear: colonialism was disastrous for people and the environment; colonial society was based on inequality; the indigenous people were neither barbaric nor savages, and the colonists were as capable of scientific discoveries, art and craftsmanship as the Europeans; and the future of South America was based on subsistence farming and not on monoculture or mining. Though focused on the Viceroyalty of New Spain, Humboldt always compared his data with that from Europe, the United States and the other Spanish colonies in South America. Just as he had looked at plants in the context of a wider world and with a focus on revealing global patterns, he now connected colonialism, slavery and economics. The Political Essay of New Spain was neither a travel narrative nor an evocation of marvellous landscapes, but a handbook of facts, hard data and numbers. It was so detailed and overwhelmingly meticulous that the English translator wrote in the preface to the English edition that the book tended to ‘fatigue the attention of the reader’. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Humboldt chose another translator for his later publications.

  The man who had been granted rare permission by Carlos IV to explore the Spanish Latin American territories went on to publish a harsh criticism of the colonial rule. His book was filled, Humboldt told Jefferson, with the expressions of his ‘independent sentiments’. The Spanish had incited hatred between the different racial groups, Humboldt accused. The missionaries, for example, treated the indigenous Indians brutally and were driven by ‘culpable fanaticism’. Imperial rule exploited the colonies for raw materials and destroyed the environment as it went along. European colonial policies were ruthless and suspicious, he said, and South America had been destroyed by its conquerors. Their thirst for wealth had brought the ‘abuse of power’ to Latin America.

  Humboldt’s criticism was based on his own observations, supplemented with information he had received from the colonial scientists whom he had met during his expedition. All this was then underpinned with the statistical and demographic data from governmental archives, mainly in Mexico City and Havana. In the years after his return, Humboldt evaluated and published these results, first in the Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain and later in the Political Essay on the Island of Cuba. These scathing indictments of colonialism and slavery showed how everything was interrelated: climate, soils and agriculture with slavery, demographics and economics. Humboldt claimed that the colonies could only be liberated and self-sufficient when they were ‘freed from the fetters of the odious monopoly’. It was the ‘European barbarity’, Humboldt insisted, that had created this unjust world.

  Humboldt’s knowledge of the continent was encyclopaedic, Bolívar wrote in September 1815 in his so-called ‘Letter from Jamaica’ in which he referred to his old friend as the greatest authority on South America. Written in Jamaica, where he had fled four months previously when the Spanish armada had arrived, the letter was the distillation of Bolívar’s political thought and his vision for the future. In it, he also echoed Humboldt’s criticism about the destructive impact of colonialism. His people were enslaved and confined to cultivating cash crops and mining in order to feed Spain’s insatiable appetite, Bolívar wrote, but even the lushest fields and greatest ores would ‘never satisfy the lust of that greedy nation’. The Spanish destroyed vast regions, Bolívar warned, and ‘entire provinces are transformed to deserts’.

  Humboldt had written about soils that were so fertile that they only needed to be raked to produce rich harvests. In much the same vein Bolívar now asked how a land so ‘abundantly endowed’ by nature could be kept so desperately oppressed and passive. And just as Humboldt had claimed in the Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain that the vices of the feudal government had passed from the northern to the southern hemisphere, so Bolívar now compared the Spanish grip on their colonies to ‘a kind of feudal ownership’. But the revolutionaries would continue to fight, Bolívar asserted, because ‘the chains have been broken’.

  Bolívar also realized that slavery stood at the centre of the conflict. If the enslaved population was not on his side, as he had painfully experienced during the brutal civil war with José Tomás Boves and his Legions of Hell, they were against him and against the creole plantation owners who relied on slave labour. Without the help of the slaves there would be no revolution. It was a subject that he discussed with Alexandre Pétion, the first President of the Republic of Haiti – the island where Bolívar had escaped to after an assassination attempt on him in Jamaica.

  Haiti had been a French colony but after a successful slave rebellion in the early 1790s, the revolutionaries had declared independence in 1804. Pétion, who was mixed race – the son of a wealthy Frenchman and a mother of African ancestry – was one of the founding fathers of the republic. He was also the only ruler and politician who promised to help Bolívar. When Pétion pledged arms and ships in exchange for the promise to free the slaves, Bolívar agreed. ‘Slavery,’ he said, ‘was the daughter of darkness.’

  After three months in Haiti, Bolívar sailed for Venezuela with a small fleet of Pétion’s ships, packed with gunpowder, weapons and men. When he arrived in summer 1816, Bolívar declared freedom for all the slaves. This was a first and important step, but he struggled to convince the creole elite. Three years later he said that slavery still shrouded the country in a ‘black veil’ and – once again invoking nature as a metaphor – warned that ‘storm clouds darkened the sky, threatening a rain of fire’. Bolívar liberated his own slaves and promised freedom in exchange for military service, but it was only a decade later when he wrote the Bolivian constitution, in 1826, that the full abolition of slavery became law. It was a bold move at a time when apparently enlightened American statesmen, such as Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, still had hundreds of slaves working their plantations. Humboldt, who had been a staunch abolitionist since seeing the slave market in Cumaná shortly after his arrival in South America, was impressed with Bolívar’s decision. A few years later Humboldt praised Bolívar in one of his books for setting an example to the world, particularly in contrast to the United States.

  Over the next years Humboldt followed events in South America from Paris. There was much toing and froing – with Bolívar slowly uniting the regional warlords who were fighting the Spanish in their territories. The revolutionaries were in control of some regions, but these were often far apart and the men had certainly not acted as a united force. In the Llanos, for example, José Antonio Páez had, after Boves’s death at the end of 1814, gained the support of the plainsmen – the llaneros – for the republican cause. His 1,100 wild llaneros on horses and barefoot Indians armed only with bows and arrows defeated almost 4,000 experienced Spanish soldiers in the open steppes of the Llanos in early 1818. These tough and rough-mannered men were the most accomplished riders. As a creole and a city-dweller, Bolívar was not someone they would have chosen as their leader but he won their respect. Though extremely thin – at five feet six inches Bolívar weighed only 130 pounds – he displayed an endurance and strength in the saddle that gained him the nickname ‘Iron Ass’. Whether swimming with his hands tied behind his back for a dare or dismounting over his horse’s head (w
hich he had practised after seeing the llaneros doing it), Bolívar impressed Páez’s men with his physical prowess.

  Humboldt would probably not have recognized Bolívar any more. The dashing young man who had promenaded through Paris in the latest fashion now dressed simply in jute sandals and a plain coat. Though only in his mid-thirties, Bolívar’s face was already lined and his skin jaundiced, but his eyes radiated a piercing intensity and his voice had the power to rally his soldiers. During the previous years Bolívar had lost his plantations and been exiled from his country several times. He was relentless with his men but also with himself. He often slept, just wrapped in a cape, on the bare floor or spent all day driving his horse across rough terrain but retained enough energy to read French philosophers in the evening.

  The Spanish still controlled the northern part of Venezuela including Caracas as well as much of the Viceroyalty of New Granada, but Bolívar had gained territories in the eastern provinces of Venezuela and along the Orinoco. The revolution was not progressing as swiftly as he had hoped, but he believed that it was time to encourage elections in the liberated regions and to have a constitution. A congress was called to assemble at Angostura (today’s Ciudad Bolívar in Venezuela) on the banks of the Orinoco, the town where Humboldt and Bonpland had been struck down with fever almost two decades previously after their gruelling weeks to find the Casiquiare River. With Caracas in the hands of the Spanish, Angostura was the temporary capital of the new republic. On 15 February 1819, twenty-six delegates took their seats in a simple brick building that was the government house to listen to Bolívar’s vision of the future. He presented them with the constitution that he had drafted on the river journey along the Orinoco and once again talked about the importance of unity between race and class as well as between the different colonies.