The Invention of Nature

by Andrea Wulf

  Then, on 29 July 1829, five days after they had left Tobolsk, everything came to a sudden halt. Locals told them that an anthrax epidemic was spreading through the Baraba Steppe – the ‘Sibirische Pest’ as the Germans called it. Anthrax is usually contracted first by herbivorous animals such as cattle and goats when they ingest the extremely hardy spores of the bacterium that causes the disease. It can then spread to humans – a deadly disease with no cure. There was no other route to the Altai Mountains than to drive straight through the affected region. Humboldt made his decision quickly. Anthrax or not, they would continue. ‘At my age,’ he said, ‘nothing should be postponed.’ All the servants were made to sit inside the carriages, rather than outside, and they packed provisions and water to reduce their contact with possibly contaminated people and food. They would still have to change their horses regularly, however, thereby taking the risk of being given an infected carriage horse.

  Humboldt riding through the Baraba Steppe (Illustration Credit 16.2)

  As they sat in silence, hot and cramped behind tightly shut windows in their small carriages, they passed through a landscape of death. The ‘traces of the pest’ were everywhere, Humboldt’s companion Gustav Rose noted in his diary. Fires burned at the entrances and exits of the villages as a ritual to ‘clean the air’. They saw small makeshift hospitals and dead animals lying in the fields. In one small village alone, 500 horses had died.

  After a few days of uncomfortable travelling, they reached the Obi River which marked the end of the steppes. As this was also the demarcation line of the anthrax epidemic, they only had to cross the river to escape. But as they prepared, the wind picked up and quickly turned into a raging storm. The waves were too high for the ferry that shipped carriages and people across. For once, Humboldt didn’t mind the delay. The past few days had been tense but now it was almost over. They grilled some fresh fish and enjoyed the rain because the mosquitoes had disappeared. Finally, they could take off their suffocating masks. On the other side the mountains were waiting for Humboldt. When the storm calmed, they crossed the river and on 2 August they arrived at the thriving mining town of Barnaul – Humboldt had almost reached his destination. They had travelled the 1,000 miles from Tobolsk in just nine days. They were now 3,500 miles east of Berlin, as far as Caracas was to the west of Berlin, Humboldt calculated.

  Three days later, on 5 August, Humboldt saw the Altai Mountains for the first time, rising in the distance. In the foothills there were more mines and foundries which they investigated as they pressed on to Ust-Kamenogorsk, a fortress near the border of Mongolia – Oskemen, in today’s Kazakhstan. From there the paths into the mountains became so steep that they left their carriages and most of the baggage behind at the fortress, continuing on small narrow flat carts that the locals used. Often they went on foot as they climbed higher, passing gigantic granite walls and caves where Humboldt examined the rock strata, scribbling notes and drawing sketches. Sometimes when his scientific travel companions Gustav Rose and Christian Gottfried Ehrenberg were collecting plants and rocks, Humboldt became impatient and dashed ahead to climb even higher or to reach a cave. Ehrenberg became so distracted by the plants that the accompanying Cossacks had regularly to search for him. Once they found him soaking wet, standing in a bog with some grasses in one hand and in the other some moss-like specimen which he declared bleary-eyed was the same as the one that ‘covered the bottom of the Red Sea’.

  Humboldt was back in his element. Crawling into deep shafts, chiselling off rocks, pressing plants and scrambling up mountains, he compared the ore veins he found with those in New Granada in South America, the mountains themselves with those of the Andes, and the Siberian steppes with the Llanos in Venezuela. The Urals might have been important in terms of commercial mining, Humboldt said, but the ‘real joy’ of the expedition had only begun in the Altai Mountains.

  In the valleys the grasses and shrubs were so high that they couldn’t see each other even when only a couple of steps apart; higher up there were no trees at all. The huge mountains rose like ‘mighty domes’, Rose noted in his diary. They could see the summit of Belukha which at almost 15,000 feet was about 6,000 feet lower than Chimborazo but the highest mountain of the Altai, its twin peaks entirely covered in snow. By mid-August they had penetrated deep enough into the mountain range that the highest peaks were tantalizingly close. The problem was that they were too late in the season – there was just too much snow to go higher. Some had melted in May but by July the mountains had been covered again. Humboldt had to admit defeat, although the sight of Belukha enticed him to go further. There was no way that they would be able to climb in these conditions – in fact it would take until the second decade of the twentieth century before Belukha was conquered. The high peaks of Central Asia were beyond reach. Humboldt could see them but would never scale their summits. The season was against him, as was his age.

  Despite this disappointment, Humboldt felt that he had seen enough. His trunks were filled with pressed plants and long tables of measurements as well as rocks and samples of ores. When he found some hot springs, he deduced that they were linked to the gentle earthquakes in the region. No matter how much they walked and climbed during the day, he still had enough energy to set up the instruments at night for his astronomical observations. He felt strong and fit. ‘My health,’ he wrote to Wilhelm, ‘is excellent.’

  As they marched on, Humboldt decided that he would like to cross the Chinese–Mongolian border. A Cossack was dispatched to prepare and announce their arrival to the officials who were patrolling the region. On 17 August Humboldt and his team arrived at Baty where they found the Mongolian border post on the left bank of the Irtysh River and the Chinese on the right. There were some yurts, a few camels, herds of goats and about eighty ruffian soldiers dressed in ‘rags’, as Humboldt described them.

  Humboldt started with the Chinese post, visiting the commander in his yurt. There, seated on cushions and rugs, Humboldt presented his gifts: cloth, sugar, pencils and wine. Expressions of friendship were conveyed through a chain of interpreters, first from German to Russian, then from Russian to Mongolian, and finally from Mongolian to Chinese. Unlike the dishevelled soldiers, their commander, who had arrived only a few days previously from Beijing, looked impressive in his long blue silk coat and a hat that was decorated with several magnificent peacock feathers.

  After a couple of hours Humboldt was rowed across the river to meet the Mongolian officer in the other yurt. All the while the audience was growing. The Mongolians were fascinated by their foreign guests, touching and prodding Humboldt and his companions. They poked bellies, lifted coats, and nudged them – for once Humboldt was the exotic specimen but he loved every minute of the strange encounter. He had been to China, the ‘heavenly kingdom’, he wrote home.

  It was time to turn back. Since Cancrin had given him absolutely no permission to go further east than Tobolsk, Humboldt wanted to make sure that he would at least arrive in St Petersburg at the time they had agreed. They had to pick up their carriages at the fortress in Ust-Kamenogorsk and then turn west along the southern edge of the Russian Empire, passing Omsk, Miass and Orenburg, a journey of around 3,000 miles, following the border that separated Russia from China. The border, a long line of 2,000 miles dotted with stations, watchtowers and small fortresses manned by Cossacks along the Kazakh Steppe, was the home of the nomadic Kyrgyz.1

  In Miass, on 14 September, Humboldt celebrated his sixtieth birthday with the local apothecary, a man whom history would remember as Vladimir Lenin’s grandfather. The next day Humboldt dispatched a letter to Cancrin, recounting that he had reached a turning point in his life. Though he hadn’t achieved all he wanted before old age diminished his strength, he had seen the Altai and the steppes which had given him the greatest satisfaction and also the data he needed. ‘Thirty years ago,’ he wrote to Cancrin, ‘I was in the forests of the Orinoco and in the Cordilleras.’ Now he had finally been able to assemble the remaining ‘great
bulk of ideas’. The year 1829 was ‘the most important in my restless life’.

  From Miass they continued west to Orenburg where Humboldt once again decided to deviate from their route. Instead of turning north-west towards Moscow and then St Petersburg, he now went south to the Caspian Sea – another lengthy unauthorized detour. As a young boy he had dreamed of travelling to the Caspian Sea, he wrote to Cancrin on the morning of his departure. He had to see this huge inland sea before it was too late for him.

  It was probably the news of Russia’s victory against the Ottomans that encouraged Humboldt to change his plans. Cancrin had kept Humboldt up to date throughout by express courier. Over the past months, Russian soldiers had marched towards Constantinople from both sides of the Black Sea, defeating the Ottoman army time and again. As more Turkish strongholds fell, Sultan Mahmud II had realized that victory was on Russia’s side. On 14 September the Treaty of Adrianople was signed and the war ended – an enormous region that had been inaccessible and too dangerous for Humboldt opened up. Only ten days later Humboldt informed his brother that they would now travel to Astrakhan on the banks of the Volga, where the great river discharged into the northern end of the Caspian Sea. The ‘peace outside the gates of Constantinople’, Humboldt wrote to Cancrin, was ‘glorious’ news.

  In mid-October, they reached Astrakhan and boarded a steamer to explore the Caspian Sea and the Volga. The Caspian Sea was known for its fluctuating water levels – a fact that fascinated Humboldt much as he had been intrigued three decades previously by Lake Valencia in Venezuela. He was convinced, he later told scientists in St Petersburg, that measuring stations should be set up around the lake to record the water’s rise and fall methodically but also to investigate a possible movement of the ground; volcanoes and other subterraneous forces might be the reason for the changes, he suggested. Later he speculated that the Caspian Depression – the region around the northern part of the Caspian Sea, which lay more than ninety feet below sea level – might have sunk in tandem with the rising of the high plateaux in Central Asia and the Himalaya.

  Today we know that there are multiple reasons for the changing water levels. One factor is the amount of water coming in from the Volga which is tied to the rainfall of a huge catchment region – all of which in turn relates to the atmospheric conditions of the North Atlantic. Many scientists now believe that these fluctuations reflect climatic changes in the northern hemisphere, making the Caspian Sea an important field of study for climate change investigations. Other theories claim that the water levels are affected by tectonic forces. These are exactly the kinds of global connections that interested Humboldt. To see the Caspian Sea, Humboldt wrote to Wilhelm, was one of the ‘highlights of my life’.

  It was now the end of October and the Russian winter was almost upon them. Humboldt was expected first in Moscow and then in St Petersburg to report on his expedition. He was happy. He had seen deep mines and snow-capped mountains as well as the largest dry steppe in the world and the Caspian Sea. He had drunk tea with the Chinese commanders at the Mongolian border as well as fermented mare’s milk with the Kyrgyz. Between Astrakhan and Volgograd, the learned khan of the Kalmyk people had organized a concert in Humboldt’s honour during which a Kalmyk choir sang Mozart overtures. Humboldt had watched Saiga antelopes chasing across the Kazakh Steppe, snakes sunbathing on a Volga island and a naked Indian fakir in Astrakhan. He had correctly predicted the presence of diamonds in Siberia, had against his instructions talked to political exiles and had even met a Polish man who had been deported to Orenburg and who proudly showed Humboldt his copy of Political Essay of New Spain. During the previous months Humboldt had survived an anthrax epidemic and had lost weight because he found the Siberian food indigestible. He had plunged his thermometer into deep wells, carried his instruments across the Russian Empire and taken thousands of measurements. He and his team returned with rocks, pressed plants, fish in vials and stuffed animals as well as ancient manuscripts and books for Wilhelm.

  As before, Humboldt was not just interested in botany, zoology or geology but also in agriculture and forestry. Noting the rapid disappearance of the forests around the mining centres, he had written to Cancrin about the ‘lack of timber’ and advised him against using steam engines to drain flooded mines because doing so would consume too many trees. In the Baraba Steppe, where the anthrax epidemic had raged, Humboldt had noted the environmental impact of intense husbandry. The region was (and is) an important agricultural centre of Siberia, and the farmers there had drained swamps and lakes to turn the land into fields and pastures. This had caused a considerable desiccation of the marshy plains which would continue to increase, Humboldt concluded.

  Humboldt was searching for the ‘connections which linked all phenomena and all forces of nature’. Russia was the final chapter in his understanding of nature – he consolidated, confirmed and set into relation all the data he had collected over the past decades. Comparison not discovery was his guiding theme. Later, when he published the results of the Russian expedition in two books,2 Humboldt wrote about the destruction of forests and of humankind’s long-term changes to the environment. When he listed the three ways in which the human species was affecting the climate, he named deforestation, ruthless irrigation and, perhaps most prophetically, the ‘great masses of steam and gas’ produced in the industrial centres. No one but Humboldt had looked at the relationship between humankind and nature like this before.3

  Humboldt finally arrived back in St Petersburg on 13 November 1829. His endurance had been astonishing. Since their departure from St Petersburg on 20 May, his party had travelled 10,000 miles in less than six months, passing through 658 post stations and using 12,244 horses. Humboldt felt healthier than ever, strengthened by being outdoors for so long and by the excitement of their adventures. Everybody wanted to hear about his expedition. He had already suffered a similar spectacle in Moscow a few days earlier when half the city seemed to have turned up to meet him, dressed in gala uniforms and decorated in ribbons. In both cities parties were held in his honour and speeches were given, hailing him as the ‘Prometheus of our days’. No one seemed to mind that he had deviated from his original route.

  These formal receptions irritated Humboldt. Rather than talking about his climate observations and geological investigations, he found himself forced to admire a plait made of Peter the Great’s hair. Whereas the royal family wanted to learn more about the spectacular discovery of diamonds, the Russian scientists were keen to see his collections. And so it continued with Humboldt being handed on from one person to another. No matter how much he disliked these moments, he remained charming and patient. The Russian poet Alexander Pushkin was smitten by Humboldt. ‘Captivating speeches gushed from his mouth,’ Pushkin said, much like the water spouting from the marble lion in the fountain of the Grand Cascade in the royal palace in St Petersburg. In private Humboldt complained about the ceremonial pomp. ‘I’m almost collapsing under the burden of duties,’ he wrote to Wilhelm, but he also tried to exploit some of his fame and influence. Though he had refrained from publicly criticizing the conditions of the peasants and labourers, he now asked the tsar to pardon some of the deported people he had met during his travels.

  The Imperial Academy of Sciences in St Petersburg (Illustration Credit 16.3)

  Humboldt also delivered a speech at the Imperial Academy of Sciences in St Petersburg that would trigger a huge international scientific collaboration. For decades Humboldt had been interested in geomagnetism – just as he was in climate – because it was a global force. Determined to learn more about what he called the ‘mysterious march of the magnetic needle’, Humboldt now suggested the establishment of a chain of observation stations across the Russian Empire. The aim was to discover whether the magnetic variations were terrestrial in origin – generated, for example, by climatic changes – or caused by the sun. Geomagnetism was a key phenomenon in order to understand the correlation between the heavens and the earth because it could ‘re
veal to us’, Humboldt said, ‘what passes at great depths in the interior of our planet or in the upper regions of our atmosphere’. Humboldt had long investigated the phenomenon. In the Andes he had discovered the magnetic equator, and during his enforced stay in Berlin in 1806, when the French army in Prussia had prevented his return to Paris, he and a colleague had made magnetic observations every hour on the hour – day and night – an experiment that he had then repeated on his return in 1827. After his expedition in Russia, Humboldt also recommended that his fellow Germans, along with the British, French and American authorities, should all work together to collect more global data. He appealed to them as the members of a ‘great confederation’.

  Within a few years a web of magnetic stations laced the globe: at St Petersburg, Beijing and Alaska, Canada and Jamaica, Australia and New Zealand, Sri Lanka and even the remote island of St Helena in the South Atlantic where Napoleon had been incarcerated. Almost two million observations would be taken in three years. Like today’s climate change scientists, those who worked at these new stations were collecting global data, participating in what we would now call a Big Science Project. This was an international collaboration on a vast scale – the so-called ‘Magnetic Crusade’.

  Humboldt also used his St Petersburg speech to encourage climate studies across the vast Russian Empire. He wanted data related to the effects of the destruction of forests on the climate – the first large-scale study to investigate the impact that man had on climatic conditions. It was the duty of scientists, Humboldt said, to examine the changeable elements in the ‘economy of nature’.