Mary refused to be put off. The reason for her journey was “the pursuit of fish and fetish.” The fishes were for Dr. Günther of the British Museum and the fetishes were to enable her to complete her father’s study of primitive religion. Her extensive reading had prepared her well for what awaited her. One story that made a particular impression was that of the Dutch explorer Alexandrine Tinné (1835–69), who had set out twenty-five years earlier to become the first European woman to cross the Sahara—but she got drawn into a vicious tribal altercation among the Tuareg and ended up with her hands chopped off and left to die by her guides. This persuaded Mary she needed to travel light and to be properly equipped. She landed in Africa in August 1893 with one suitcase, a holdall, a large bowie knife, and a revolver.
As for attire, she made no concession to the climate: She had always worn black silk and saw no reason to change. In her voluminous, high-collared, cinch-waisted dresses and little black hat, she looked as though she was about to take a hansom to the West End rather than a dugout up the Ogooué River. This worked to her advantage: Wherever she went she was instantly recognizable. Businesslike, humorous, and unflappable in the face of danger, she would march into remote jungle villages with a cheery “It’s only me!” In a canoe on the Congo River a crocodile reared up over the boat’s stern. She whacked him on the snout with a paddle and sent him packing. Confronted by a leopard about to pounce, she coolly lobbed a large earthenware pot, which “burst on the leopard’s head like a shell.” Her friend Rudyard Kipling shook his head in wonderment. “Being human,” he said, “she must have been afraid of something, but one never found out what it was.”
Her two long journeys in 1893 and 1894 explored what are now Nigeria, Sierra Leone, and Gabon. She became the first woman to climb the active volcano Mount Cameroon (4,095 meters or 13,436 feet). To her deep disgust, the summit was wreathed in thick cloud, robbing her of her main object in going up it, which was “to get a good view.” Of more than a hundred fauna samples she collected for the British Museum, there were eighteen species of reptile and sixty-five species of fish, seven of which were new to science and three of which have since been named after her. She was also one of the first Europeans to see the mythical gorilla with her own eyes. “Never have I seen anything to equal gorillas going through the bush; it is a graceful, powerful, superbly perfect hand-trapeze performance.” On the other hand, she had never seen anything so ugly. She admitted to a “feeling of horrible disgust that an old gorilla gives on account of its hideousness of appearance.”
She turned her adventures into two books, Travels in West Africa (1897) and West African Studies (1899). Models of great travel writing, they are witty, full of robust opinions, and vividly observed. If you want to know what a python tastes like, relive a locust attack, or learn how to survive a tornado, Mary Kingsley is your woman. She makes Peary’s work read like a railway timetable. Particularly appealing is her tone of voice—what one reviewer called her “light, chaffy style”—forthright, unpretentious, and delivered with jolly-hockey-sticks enthusiasm. Here she is on African insects:
Undoubtedly one of the worst things you can do in West Africa is take any notice of an insect. If you see a thing that looks like a cross between a flying lobster and the figure of Abraxis on a Gnostic gem do not pay it the least attention—just keep quiet and hope it will go away—for that is your best chance; you have none in a stand up fight with a good thorough-going African insect.
The books were bestsellers and are still in print. Apart from her gifts as a storyteller, they present a remarkably rounded view of African life. Mary’s close study of the Fang people of Gabon had led her to respect a way of life she found preferable, in many ways, to the “secondhand rubbishy white culture” of the colonial administrators and missionaries. She had learned, she said, to “think in black,” enabling her to look on the bright side of cultural practices such as polygamy, even cannibalism. Once, when staying in a Fang hut, a “violent smell” alerted her to a bag suspended from the roof. Emptying the contents into her hat, she found “a human hand, three big toes, four eyes, two ears and other portions of the human frame.” She showed no squeamishness: “I subsequently learned that the Fang will eat their fellow friendly tribesfolk, yet they like to keep a little something belonging to them as a memento.”
She saw a future for Africa that was based on developing trade, not colonial control: “Officialdom says it won’t have anything but its old toys: missionaries, stockbrokers, good intentions, ignorance and Maxim guns. We shall see.” Her refusal to accept that Africans were less intelligent or less well behaved was far ahead of its time. “You see more drunkenness in the Vauxhall Road on a Saturday night,” she pointed out, “than in the whole of West Africa in a week.” As she wrote to her friend Alice Stopford Green in 1897, “These white men who make a theory first and then go hunting travelers’ tales to support the same may say what they please of the pleasure of the process. Give me the pleasure of getting a mass of facts and watching them.”
Adding to her “mass of facts” about West Africa was to take up the rest of her short life. Africa had become her raison d’être. Surveying the damp English winter of November 1895 only confirmed her desire to get back there as soon as she could. She missed life in the forest with a passionate intensity: “If you do fall under its spell, it takes all the colour out of other kinds of living.” She tried to make up for it by turning up the heating in her brother’s Kensington flat to tropical levels and by going shopping with a monkey perched on her shoulder. Her more regular public appearances were at her lectures, which she gave, accompanied by magic-lantern slides, to a huge array of admirers—geographical societies, gatherings of academics, students, nurses, boys’ clubs in city slums—and she was the first woman ever to address the chambers of commerce at both Liverpool and Manchester. Attendances of more than two thousand were not uncommon. Tall, angular, and very thin, with her matronly black outfits and her hair pulled severely back and pinned under her cap, she looked much older than a woman of thirty-five. The combination of her old-fashioned, no-nonsense appearance and her wonderfully crafted funny stories allowed Mary to be thoughtful, controversial, and entertaining all at once, and audiences loved it. So did she, playing up to her slightly antiquated image: “I expect I remind you of a maiden aunt—long since deceased,” she began one talk.
When the Daily Telegraph reported her return from Africa under the title “The New Woman,” she reacted angrily. She was no feminist: She disparaged agitators for equal rights as “androgynes” or “men-women.” “As for encasing the more earthward extremities of my anatomy in trousers,” she wrote in Travels in West Africa, “I would rather have perished on a scaffold.” Despite this ardent assertion of her womanhood, she never came close to marrying, and her one serious crush (on Matthew Nathan, the acting governor of Sierra Leone) went unrequited. Perhaps her “maiden aunt” persona put him off. In Rudyard Kipling’s autobiography, Something of Myself (1937), he tells a revealing story. He first met Mary at one of his own aunt’s tea parties and was so entranced by her that he offered to walk her home. When the conversation strayed to cannibalism, he invited her up to his rooms “to talk it out there.” Mary at first accepted the invitation, “as a man would,” and then suddenly remembered herself: “Oh, I forgot I was a woman. ’Fraid I mustn’t.” Is there a faint hint of flirtation here? Kipling doesn’t say. It’s more likely that her time in Africa had blunted her English social radar. She once wrote to a friend that she did not go to Africa as a “tonic.” Rather, after the trauma of her parents’ deaths, she thought “having been for so many years so close to death and danger in the most dreadful form they can come to one, namely the fight for the life of one we love, that a mere English social life was, and ever will remain, an impossibility to me, so I went off to carry on the old fight, where it is at its thickest, in the Terrible Bight of Benin.” Like Peary and his Arctic, Mary had found her soul mate in a place rather than a person.
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899 she set out for Africa for the last time. Her objective was to collect samples of freshwater fish for the British Museum from the Orange River in South Africa, and then make her way “home” to West Africa. However, by the time she arrived, the Anglo-Boer War had broken out. Mary volunteered as a nurse and was sent to tend injured Boer prisoners of war in Simon’s Town camp near Cape Town. The conditions were dreadful and disease was rife. Mary drank wine in place of water to reduce the risk of infection but it was to no avail; within a few months she succumbed to typhoid. She died alone, asking her nurses to leave the room as she was dying. Only thirty-seven years old, she was buried at sea, as she had requested; but with full military honors, which she had not. It was not quite the end of the story. The coffin was insufficiently weighted and bobbed off over the waves. A lifeboat had to be launched in pursuit and the casket dispatched to the deep by attaching anchors to it. Mary Kingsley had never been easy to pin down.
If Genghis Khan sought power, Peary fame, and Mary Kingsley freedom, what drove the Prussian polymath Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) was knowledge. Explorer, geographer, cartographer, geologist, mineralogist, botanist, sociologist, and volcanologist, he is a giant of nineteenth-century science, linking the heroic voyages of Captain Cook and the conceptual revolution of Charles Darwin. He died just six months before the publication of On the Origin of Species in 1859, but without him, it might never have been written. When Darwin boarded the Beagle in 1826, he had Humboldt’s Personal Narrative tucked into his knapsack, a book he was still reading and rereading (and still taking notes from) right up until his death in 1882. “He was the greatest traveling scientist who ever lived,” Darwin wrote in his diary. “I have always admired him; now I worship him.” He wasn’t the only one. Goethe claimed that he had learned more in an hour’s conversation with Humboldt than in eight days of studying books. Thomas Jefferson counted him a close friend and sought his advice on what vines to plant at his country estate in Virginia. By his early thirties, Humboldt was said to be the second-most-famous man in the world after Napoleon. When the two met briefly in 1804, the yet-to-be-crowned emperor greeted him patronizingly: “You collect plants, Monsieur?” When Humboldt modestly agreed that he did, Napoleon turned smartly on his heel with a curt “So does my wife!” He later tried to deport him as a spy.
Humboldt did a great deal more than “collect plants.” His name is in every botany and biology textbook—as well as every atlas—in the world. He has a penguin named after him, and a squid, a dolphin, a skunk, a lily, an orchid, and many other plant and animal species. The Humboldt Broncos are an ice-hockey team from Humboldt, Saskatchewan, one of a swath of North American places named for him, including Humboldt Bay, the Humboldt Sink, the Humboldt River, Humboldt Lake, Humboldt Salt Marsh, and the Humboldt Mountains. More important still, the greatest marine ecosystem on earth, the vast upwelling from the Antarctic Ocean that runs along the coasts of Chile and Peru and keeps them cool and dry, is called the Humboldt Current. Few human beings have inscribed themselves on the planet on such a scale.
Scale is a word that suits him. He invented what we now call earth science. He turned geography into an academic discipline and rewrote the history of the planet. He was the first real ecologist. The idea that the earth is a single interconnected entity had its first and most eloquent champion in Humboldt. He collected data from every possible source: animals, plants, fossils, rocks, the movements of stars, and weather patterns. He sought to combine all this information into one dynamic system, which he called harmony in nature.
Humboldt’s early life has some similarities to Peary’s. His father, a major in the Prussian army and one of Frederick the Great’s closest advisers, died when he was ten. His mother loomed large in his life as Peary’s had done, but far from smothering him with love, Maria von Humboldt drafted in a corps of private tutors to educate Alexander and his older brother, Wilhelm, to an appropriate standard. Alexander did not meet it. He was an inattentive student, preferring to spend time poring over his collections of plants, insects, and rocks, earning himself the nickname “the little apothecary.” He also had a gift for languages and could draw beautifully, particularly landscapes, but Maria was unimpressed. She wanted him to be a politician. Carted off to a succession of universities, he failed to graduate from any of them. Toiling away at finance and economics to please his mother, he quietly developed his languages and studied geology, botany, and history on the side.
At Göttingen University he made friends with Georg Forster, son of Johann Reinhold Forster, the naturalist on James Cook’s second voyage to the South Pacific. Talking with Georg, Humboldt suddenly realized what he wanted to do: Scientific exploration was to be his destiny. Sensing that geology was the quickest way to get there, he entered the Freiberg School of Mines, a new and progressive establishment with a growing international reputation. Humboldt was the star student of his year, staggering everyone with his ability to memorize immense amounts of technical information and with his capacity for hard work. Once again, he didn’t graduate, but he didn’t need to: The Prussian government offered him a job as an assessor of mines. Posted to rural Bavaria, he spent five years reorganizing a series of semiredundant gold and copper mines, reequipping them, hiring new staff, and introducing the latest mining technology. He invented a safety lamp, and using his own money, founded a technical school for young miners. The government was so taken with him they sent him on several diplomatic missions to France. Louis Philippe, king of the French, always looked forward to his visits. Then in 1796 Alexander von Humboldt’s mother died.
Like Mary Kingsley at a similar age, Humboldt all at once found himself free of family obligations. What’s more, he had been left a sizable inheritance. He began to plan, but a chance meeting with a diplomat led to an introduction to Charles IV of Spain. The Spanish empire was sitting on a vast hoard of mineral wealth in South America and Humboldt made a favorable impression on the king, talking him through the latest developments in mining. The result was an invitation to visit the Spanish colonies in South America, at that time completely closed to the rest of the world. This was the break that Humboldt had waited for, and he immediately went out and spent a fortune on scientific and astronomical instruments. He set sail from Marseilles with the French botanist Aimé Bonpland in 1799. Together they spent five years in Central and South America, covering six thousand miles on horseback, in canoes, and on foot. It was a journey that would change our understanding of the world.
The revolutionary general and liberator of South America, Simón Bolívar (1783–1830), called Humboldt the true discoverer of the continent. Before him no one had guessed that the Amazon rain forest was the planet’s richest and most diverse habitat. With Bonpland he collected more than 60,000 samples and discovered over 3,500 new species: No single trip has ever yielded as many. Humboldt’s vision went far beyond the work of his contemporaries, who were busily filling in branches on the sprouting tree of species devised by Linnaeus. He was intent on uncovering the hidden connections between apparently unconnected phenomena. He wasn’t just interested in what a plant looked like. He wanted to know why it lived where it lived, the type of rocks that produced the soil it grew in, the prevailing climatic conditions, the other species that grew near it—as well as the species that fed on it, near it, or under it and how the whole ecological cycle it was part of worked. That was why he had to travel. It was not enough to give his samples a label and a Latin name: He had to understand the context. One of the pleasures of reading Humboldt is that he never lost his childlike sense of awe: “The stars as they sparkle in the firmament fill us with delight and ecstasy,” he wrote, “and yet they all move in orbit marked out with mathematical precision.”
Humboldt was incapable of noticing anything without then asking “why?” When he observed the “brilliant fireworks” of the Leonid meteor shower in northern Venezuela, he went on to calculate when they would next return. Confronted with volcanoes, he perceived that they were lined up along subterran
ean fissures in the earth’s crust and was able to demonstrate the course of those faults. He proved that many mountain ranges were volcanic in origin, destroying the then fashionable theory of Neptunism, which suggested that all rocks were originally oceanic sediments. He was the first to show that the earth’s magnetic field weakens as you travel from the poles toward the equator. He covered so much ground he was able to plot lines linking places with the same temperature to map the planet’s climate, for which he coined the word “isotherm.” His discovery of the guano deposits on the Peruvian coast revolutionized agriculture in Europe and America, providing entrepreneurs with a lucrative and potent source of fertilizer.
His scientific curiosity extended to human culture, too. In South America he saw that the continent’s startling range of plant and animal species was mirrored by its ethnic diversity: “A traveler, however great his talent for languages, can never hope to learn enough to make himself understood along the navigable rivers.” On the Orinoco he found a parrot that was the last remaining speaker of a language belonging to a tribe exterminated by its neighbors, and dutifully recorded the bird’s forty-word vocabulary. Aztec and Inca ruins led him to suggest, heretically for his time, that their cultures had once rivaled the ancient civilizations of Europe and the Middle East—and he was the first to speculate that the native peoples of South America had originally come from Asia, a hypothesis now confirmed by genetics. Wherever Humboldt looked, new possibilities emerged.
He was a remarkably hands-on scientist. While still a mining inspector back in Bavaria, his fascination with Luigi Galvani’s theories of animal magnetism had led him to conduct more than four thousand experiments, many on himself, in which he attached electrodes to his skin and recorded the sometimes excruciating pain they caused. In South America he and Bonpland climbed to 19,260 feet (5,870 meters) on Chimborazo, the Ecuadorian volcano then thought to be the world’s highest mountain. Although they didn’t quite make the summit, no one had ever climbed so high before. Humboldt, his nose streaming blood, became the first person to note down the effects (and correctly guess the cause) of altitude sickness. In the jungle he reported being unable to breathe because of the dense clouds of mosquitoes. Seeing how the Orinoco Indians prepared curare, a poison from plants, he tested it on himself, then on captured monkeys, giving them gradated doses and even resorting to mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to keep them alive. To penetrate the mystery of electric eels, he “imprudently” placed both his bare feet on one (“the pain and the numbness are so violent it is impossible to describe the nature of the feeling they excite”) and then asked the Indians how to collect specimens safely. They showed him how by driving a herd of thirty wild horses into an eel-infested lake. As the water crackled with electric charge, the terrified horses lunged frantically about with bulging eyes; several succumbed to the shocks and drowned, but gradually the eels ran out of battery. Once the horses were calm (or dead), Humboldt could pick up the exhausted eels (using dry lengths of wood to act as an insulator) and begin his dissections, meticulously noting down all the various shocks he received in the process.
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