The Invention of Nature

The brothers did not attend her funeral. Other events seemed of greater importance; Alexander was more excited about the attention that his new miner’s lamps were receiving, along with his experiments in Galvanism. Four weeks after his mother’s death, Alexander was announcing his preparations for his ‘great voyage’. Having waited for years for the opportunity to control his own destiny, he finally felt unshackled at the age of twenty-seven. Her death didn’t affect him much, he confessed to his old friend from Freiberg, because they had been ‘strangers to each other’. Over the previous few years Humboldt had spent as little time as possible at the family home and whenever he left Tegel, he had been relieved. As one close friend wrote to Humboldt: ‘her death … must be particularly welcomed by you.’

Within a month Alexander had resigned as a mining inspector. Wilhelm waited a little longer but moved a few months later to Dresden and then to Paris where he and Caroline turned their new house into a salon for writers, artists and poets. Their mother’s death had left the brothers wealthy. Alexander had inherited almost 100,000 thalers. ‘I have so much money,’ he bragged, ‘that I can get my nose, mouth and ears gilded.’ He was rich enough to afford to go anywhere he liked. He had always lived relatively simply because he was not interested in luxuries – lavishly printed books, yes, or expensive new scientific instruments, but he had no interest in elegant clothing or fashionable furniture. An expedition, on the other hand, was something very different, and he was willing to spend a large part of his inheritance on it. He was so excited that he couldn’t decide where to go and mentioned so many possible destinations that no one knew what his plans were: he spoke of Lapland and Greece, then Hungary or Siberia, and maybe the West Indies or the Philippines.

The precise destination didn’t yet matter because first he wanted to prepare, and now did so with pedantic drive. He had to test (and buy) all the instruments he needed, as well as travel through Europe to learn everything he could about geology, botany, zoology and astronomy. His early publications and growing network of contacts opened the doors – and he had even had a new plant species named after him: Humboldtia laurifolia, a ‘splendid’ tree from India, he wrote to a friend, ‘isn’t that fabulous!!’

Over the next months he interviewed geologists in Freiberg and learned how to use his sextant in Dresden. He climbed the Alps to investigate mountains – so that he might later compare them, as he told Goethe – and, in Jena, he conducted more electrical experiments. In Vienna he examined tropical plants in the hothouses of the imperial garden, where he also tried to convince the young director, Joseph van der Schot, to accompany him on his expedition, declaring that their future together would be ‘sweet’. He spent a cold winter in Salzburg, Mozart’s birthplace, where he measured the height of the nearby Austrian Alps and tested his meteorological instruments, braving icy rains as he held his instruments in the air during storms to detect the electricity of the atmosphere. He read and reread all the travellers’ accounts he could get hold of, and pored over botanical books.

As he rushed from one learned centre in Europe to another, Humboldt’s letters exuded a breathless energy. ‘This is just the way I am, I do what I do, impetuously and briskly,’ he said. There was no one place where he could learn everything, and no one person could teach him everything.

Humboldtia laurifolia (Illustration Credit 3.1)

After about a year of frantic preparations, it dawned upon Humboldt that although his trunks were stuffed with equipment and his head was filled with the latest scientific knowledge, the political situation in Europe was making his dreams impossible. Much of Europe was embroiled in the French Revolutionary Wars. The execution of the French king, Louis XVI, in January 1793, had united the European nations against the French revolutionaries. In the years following the revolution, France had declared war on one country after another, in a roll-call that included among others Austria, Prussia, Spain, Portugal and Britain. Gains and losses were made on both sides, treaties signed and then overthrown, but by 1798 Napoleon had gained Belgium, the Rhineland from Prussia, the Austrian Netherlands and large parts of Italy for France. Wherever Humboldt turned, his movements were hampered by war and armies. Even Italy – with the tantalizing geological prospects of the volcanoes Mount Etna and Vesuvius – had, thanks to Napoleon, been closed off.