by Andrea Wulf
The Humboldt family grave at Schloss Tegel (Illustration Credit 20.4)
When the steamer that carried the news of Humboldt’s death reached the United States in mid-May, thinkers, artists and scientists alike grieved. It was as if he had ‘lost a friend’, Frederic Edwin Church said. One of Humboldt’s former protégés, the scientist Louis Agassiz, delivered a eulogy to the Academy of Art and Sciences in Boston during which he claimed that every child in America’s schools had its mind fed ‘from the labors of Humboldt’s brain’. On 19 May 1859 newspapers across America reported the death of the man whom many called the ‘most remarkable’ ever born. They had been lucky to have lived in what they now called the ‘age of Humboldt’.
For the next few decades Humboldt’s reputation continued to loom large. On 14 September 1869 tens of thousands of people celebrated the centennial of his birth with festivities around the globe – in New York and Berlin, in Mexico City and Adelaide, and countless others. More than twenty years after Humboldt’s death, Darwin still called him the ‘greatest scientific traveller who ever lived’. Darwin never stopped using Humboldt’s books. In 1881, aged seventy-two, he picked up the third volume of Personal Narrative once again. When he was done, Darwin wrote ‘April 3rd 1882 finished’ on the back cover. Sixteen days later, on 19 April, he too was dead.
Darwin was not alone in admiring Humboldt’s works. Humboldt had scattered the ‘seeds’ from which new sciences grew, one German scientist claimed. Humboldt’s concept of nature also spread across disciplines – into the arts and literature. His ideas seeped into the poems of Walt Whitman and into the novels of Jules Verne. Aldous Huxley referred to Humboldt’s Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain in his own travel book, Beyond the Mexique Bay, in 1934, and in the mid-twentieth century his name appeared in the poems of Ezra Pound and Erich Fried. One hundred and thirty years after Humboldt’s death, the Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez resurrected him in The General in his Labyrinth, his fictionalized account of the last days of Simón Bolívar.
For many, Humboldt was, as the Prussian king Friedrich Wilhelm IV had said, simply ‘the greatest man since the Deluge’.
1 The origin of the German colours black, red and gold is not entirely clear but a particularly independently minded group of Prussian soldiers who had fought against Napoleon’s army between 1813 and 1815 had worn black uniforms with red facings and golden brass buttons. Later, when radical student fraternities were banned in many German states, the colours became a symbol for the fight for unity and liberty. The 1848 revolutionaries used them widely and the colours would later be adopted for the German flag.
2 Humboldt liked Americans and always welcomed them warmly. ‘To be an American was an almost certain passport to his presence,’ one visitor recalled. There was a saying in Berlin that the liberal Humboldt would rather receive an American than a prince.
3 Only two years later, in August 1858, the first telegraphic message between England and the United States was exchanged through the first transatlantic cable – but within a month the cable failed. It would take until 1866 to lay a new working line.
4 There was nothing Humboldt could do about the United States, but he succeeded in getting a law passed that freed slaves the moment they set foot on Prussian soil – one of his few political achievements. The draft bill was completed in November 1856, and was passed into law in March 1857.
21
Man and Nature
George Perkins Marsh and Humboldt
JUST AS NEWS of Humboldt’s death arrived in the United States, George Perkins Marsh was leaving New York to return to his home in Burlington, Vermont. The fifty-eight-year-old Marsh missed the eulogies that were delivered in Humboldt’s honour two weeks later, on 2 June 1859, at the American Geographical and Statistical Society in Manhattan where he was a member. Buried in his work in Burlington, Marsh had become the ‘dullest owl in Christendom’, as he wrote to a friend. He was also completely broke. In a bid to replenish his funds, Marsh was working on several projects at the same time. He was writing up a lecture series on the English language that he had given in the previous months at Columbia College in New York, compiling a report on railway companies in Vermont and composing a couple of poems for publication in an anthology, as well as writing several articles for a newspaper.
He had returned to Burlington from New York, he said, ‘like an escaped convict to his cell’. Hunched over piles of papers, books and manuscripts, he hardly left his study and rarely spoke to anybody. He was writing and writing, he told a friend, ‘with all my might’, and with only his books as company. His library contained 5,000 volumes from all over the world with one entire section dedicated to Humboldt. The Germans, Marsh believed, had ‘done more to extend the bounds of modern knowledge than the united labors of the rest of the Christian world’. German books were of ‘infinite superiority to any other’, Marsh said, with Humboldt’s publications as the crowning glory. So great was Marsh’s enthusiasm for Humboldt that he was delighted when his sister-in-law married a German, a doctor and botanist called Frederick Wislizenus. The reason for Marsh’s approval was because Wislizenus had been mentioned in the latest edition of Humboldt’s Views of Nature – his qualities as a husband were seemingly of minor significance.
George Perkins Marsh (Illustration Credit 21.1)
Marsh could read and speak twenty languages including German, Spanish and Icelandic. He picked up languages as others picked up a book. ‘Dutch,’ he claimed, ‘can be learned by a Danish & German scholar in a month.’ German was his favourite and he often peppered his letters with German words, using ‘Blätter’ instead of ‘newspapers’, for example, or ‘Klapperschlangen’ instead of ‘rattlesnakes’. When a friend struggled to observe a solar eclipse in Peru because of the clouds there, Marsh referred ‘to what Humboldt says of the unastronomischer Himmel Perus’ – Peru’s unastronomical sky.
Humboldt was the ‘greatest of the priesthood of nature’, Marsh said, because he had understood the world as an interplay between man and nature – a connection that would underpin Marsh’s own work because he was collecting material for a book that would explain how humankind was destroying the environment.
Marsh was an autodidact with an insatiable thirst for knowledge. Born in 1801 in Woodstock, Vermont, the son of a Calvinist lawyer, Marsh had been a precocious boy who by the age of five was learning his father’s dictionaries by heart. He read so rapidly, and so many books simultaneously, that friends and family were always surprised at how he could grasp the content of a page with one glance. All his life people would remark on Marsh’s extraordinary memory. He was, as one friend said, a ‘walking encyclopaedia’. But Marsh was not only learning from books, he also loved the outdoors. He was ‘forest-born’, he said, and ‘the bubbling brook, the trees, the flowers, the wild animals were to me persons, not things.’ As a young boy, he had enjoyed long walks with his father who had always pointed out the names of the different trees. ‘I spent my early life almost literally in the woods,’ Marsh told a friend, and this deep appreciation of nature stayed with him for the rest of his life.
For all this ferocious appetite for knowledge, Marsh was surprisingly unsure about his career. He had studied law but was a useless lawyer because he found his clients rough and uncouth. He was a great scholar, but disliked teaching. He was an entrepreneur with an unfailing knack for disastrous business decisions and he sometimes spent more time in court dealing with his own affairs than with those of his clients. When he tried his hand as a sheep farmer, he lost everything when the price of wool dropped. He was the owner of a woollen mill that first burned down and then was ruined by drift ice. He speculated in land, sold lumber and quarried marble – always losing money.
Marsh was certainly more scholarly than entrepreneurial. In the 1840s he had helped to establish the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC – the United States’ first national museum. He had published a dictionary of Nordic languages and was an expert on English etym
ology. He had also been a congressman for Vermont in Washington, but even his loyal wife admitted that her husband was not the most inspiring politician. He was, Caroline Marsh said, ‘entirely without oratorical charm’. Marsh tried his hand at so many different professions that one friend quipped, ‘If you live much longer you will be obliged to invent trades.’
There was one thing Marsh was certain about: he wanted to travel and see the world. The only problem was that he never had enough money. The solution, he had decided in spring 1849, was to seek a diplomatic post. His dream posting would have been Humboldt’s hometown of Berlin, but Marsh’s hopes were dashed when a senator from Indiana, who also had his eyes set on Berlin, sent several cases of champagne to Washington with which to bribe the politicians who would decide on the candidate. Within hours the men were in such ‘a state of fearful intoxication’, Marsh heard from friends, that they were dancing and singing. By the end of the night the drunken politicians announced that the senator from Indiana would be going to Berlin.
Marsh was determined to live abroad. Having been a congressman for several years, he was certain that with his contacts in DC he would be able to find a position. If not Berlin, then he would go elsewhere. He was lucky, because a few weeks later, at the end of May 1849, he was made the American Minister to Turkey in Constantinople with instructions to expand trade between the countries. Though it was not Berlin, the lure of the Ottoman Empire at the crossroads between Europe, Africa and Asia was exciting enough. The administrative tasks were supposed to be ‘very light’, Marsh told a friend. ‘I shall be at liberty to be absent from Constantinople a considerable part of the year.’
And so he was. Over the next four years Marsh and his wife Caroline travelled a great deal through Europe and parts of the Middle East. They were a happy couple. Intellectually, Caroline was very much her husband’s equal – she read almost as voraciously as he did, published her own collection of poems and edited every article, essay or book that her husband ever wrote. She was vocal about womens’ rights – as was Marsh, who supported female suffrage and education. Caroline was sociable, lively and a ‘brilliant talker’. She often teased Marsh, who was prone to gloom, for being an ‘old owl’ and ‘a croaker’.
Much of her adult life, though, Caroline struggled with ill health – an excruciating back pain that often left her unable to walk for more than a few steps. Over the years, doctors prescribed a wide assortment of remedies from sea bathing to sedatives and iron supplements, but nothing had helped and just before they left for Turkey, a doctor in New York pronounced her mysterious illness ‘incurable’. Marsh nursed her devotedly and often carried her in his arms. Amazingly, Caroline still managed to join her husband on most of his travels. Sometimes she was carried by local guides, and at others she had to lie on a contraption that was strapped on a mule or even a camel, but she was always in good spirits and determined to accompany Marsh.
When they first travelled from the United States to Constantinople, they made a detour of several months to Italy, but their first real expedition was to Egypt. In January 1851, a year after their arrival in Constantinople, they went to Cairo and then sailed down the Nile. From the deck of their boat they saw an exotic world unfold. Date palms lined the river and crocodiles basked in the sun on sandbanks. Pelicans and flocks of cormorants accompanied them and Marsh admired the herons that were gazing at their own reflections in the water. They acquired a young ostrich ‘fresh from the Desert’, who often rested his head on Caroline’s knees. They saw a patchwork of fields hugging the river, planted with rice, cotton, beans, wheat and sugarcane. From early dawn to late at night they heard the creaking wheels of the irrigations systems – long chains of jars and buckets pulled by oxen that delivered the Nile’s water to the surrounding fields. Along their way, they stopped at the remains of the ancient city of Thebes where Marsh carried Caroline through the great temples, and further south they visited the pyramids of Nubia.
Fields and terraces along the Nile at Nubia
This was a world that exuded history. The monuments told a story of past riches and long-gone kingdoms, while the landscapes showed the traces of ploughshares and spades. Barren terraces shaped the countryside into a geometrical patchwork and every sod turned or tree felled had left indelible records on the ground. Marsh saw a world shaped by humankind and marked by thousands of years of agricultural activity. The ‘very earth’, he said, the naked rocks and the shaven hills, bore testimony to the toil of man. Marsh saw the legacy of ancient civilizations not only in the pyramids and temples but carved into the soil.
How old and worn this part of the world seemed but also how youthful his own country was compared to this landscape. ‘I should like to know,’ he wrote to an English friend, ‘whether the newness of everything in America strikes a European as powerfully as the antiquity of the Eastern continent does us.’ Marsh realized that the appearance of nature was tightly interwoven with the actions of humankind. As they sailed along the Nile, Marsh could see how the vast irrigation systems turned the desert into lush fields but he also noticed the complete lack of wild plants because nature had been ‘subdued by long cultivation’.
Everything that Marsh had read in Humboldt’s books suddenly made sense. Humboldt had written that the ‘restless activity of large communities of men gradually despoil the face of the earth’ – exactly what Marsh was seeing now. Humboldt had said that the natural world was linked to the ‘political and moral history of humanity’, from imperial ambitions that exploited colonial crops to the migration of plants along the paths of ancient civilizations. He had described how sugar plantations in Cuba and the smelting of silver in Mexico had caused dramatic deforestation. Greed shaped societies and nature. Man left trails of destruction, Humboldt had said, ‘wherever he stepped’.
As Marsh travelled through Egypt, he became increasingly fascinated by flora and fauna. ‘How I envy your knowledge of the many tongues in which Nature speaketh,’ he now wrote to a friend. Though not a trained scientist, Marsh began to measure and record. He had become ‘a student of nature’, he proudly announced, as he collected plants for botanical friends, insects for an entomologist in Pennsylvania, and hundreds of specimens for the newly established Smithsonian Institute in Washington. ‘Scorpions are not yet in season,’ he wrote to the curator there, his friend Spencer Fullerton Baird, but he already had snails and twenty different species of small fish pickled in alcohol. Baird was asking for the skulls of camels, jackals and hyenas, as well as fish, reptiles and insects ‘and all else’, and later also dispatched fifteen gallons of alcohol when Marsh ran out of spirit in which to preserve the specimens.
Marsh was a meticulous note-taker, writing wherever he went – holding the paper on his knees, catching it when the wind scattered the pages and scribbling through sandstorms. ‘Trust nothing to the memory,’ wrote the man who was famed for his ability to recollect everything he read.
For eight months Marsh and Caroline travelled through Egypt and then across the Sinai Desert on camels to Jerusalem and all the way to Beirut. At Petra, they saw the magnificent buildings cut into the marbled pinkish rocks, although Marsh found that he had to close his eyes when he saw how the camel that carried Caroline manoeuvred through narrow passages and along deep precipices. Between Hebron and Jerusalem he noted how the old terraced hills, which had been in cultivation for thousands of years, now looked ‘for the most part barren and desolate’. Towards the end of the expedition, Marsh had come to believe that the ‘assiduous husbandry of hundreds of generations’ had transformed this part of the earth into an ‘effete and worn out planet’. It was a turning point in his life.
By the time Marsh was recalled from Constantinople, in late 1853, he had travelled through Turkey, Egypt, Asia Minor and parts of the Middle East as well as Greece, Italy and Austria. Back home in Vermont, he saw the countryside that he had known all his life through the prism of his observations in the Old World and realized that America was marching towards the same environmen
tal destruction. He now applied the lessons of the Old World to the New World. So radically had Vermont’s landscape, for example, changed since the first white settlers had arrived, that what was left was ‘nature in the shorn and crippled condition to which human progress has reduced her’, Marsh said.
America’s environment had begun to suffer. Industrial waste polluted the rivers and entire forests disappeared as timber was used for fuel, manufacturing and railways. ‘Man is everywhere a disturbing agent,’ Marsh said and, as a one-time mill owner and sheep farmer, knew that he had himself contributed to the damage. Vermont had already lost three-quarters of its trees but with the steady move of settlers across the continent, the Midwest was also changing. Chicago had become one of the greatest lumber and grain depots of the United States. It was shocking to see how parts of Lake Michigan’s waters were covered with logs and timber rafts from ‘all the forests in the States’, Marsh said.
Meanwhile the efficiency of America’s agricultural machinery overtook that of Europe for the first time. In 1855 visitors to the World Fair in Paris were amazed to see that an American reaping machine could cut an acre of oats in twenty-one minutes – a third of the time comparable European models took. American farmers were also the first to power their machines with steam, and as US agricultural methods became industrialized, the price of grains fell. At the same time manufacturing output was steadily rising and in 1860 the US became the fourth largest manufacturing country in the world. That same year, in spring 1860, Marsh pulled out his notebooks and began to write Man and Nature, a book in which he would take Humboldt’s early warning about deforestation to its full conclusion. Man and Nature told a story of destruction and avarice, of extinction and exploitation, as well as of depleted soil and torrential floods.