The Invention of Nature

Humboldt needed to find a nation that would let him join a voyage, or which would at least grant him passage to their colonial possessions. He begged the British and the French for help, and then the Danes. He considered a voyage to the West Indies, but found his hopes dashed by the ongoing sea battles. Then he accepted an invitation to accompany the British Earl of Bristol to Egypt, even though the old aristocrat was known as being rather eccentric. But again these plans came to nothing when Bristol was arrested by the French, suspected of espionage.

At the end of April 1798, one and a half years after his mother’s death, Humboldt decided to visit Paris where Wilhelm and Caroline now lived. He hadn’t seen his brother for more than a year and turning his attention to the victorious French also seemed the most practical solution to his travel dilemma. In Paris he spent time with his brother and sister-in-law, but also wrote letters, contacted people, and cajoled, filling his notebooks with the addresses of countless scientists, as well as buying yet more books and instruments. ‘I live in the midst of science,’ Humboldt wrote excitedly. As he made his rounds, he met his boyhood hero, Louis Antoine de Bougainville, the explorer who had first set foot on Tahiti in 1768. At the grand old age of seventy, Bougainville was planning a voyage across the globe to the South Pole. Impressed by the young Prussian scientist, he invited Humboldt to join him.

Aimé Bonpland (Illustration Credit 3.2)

It was also in Paris that Humboldt first ran into a young French scientist, Aimé Bonpland, in the hallway of the house where both were renting a room. With a battered botany box – a vasculum – slung across his shoulder, Bonpland was obviously also interested in plants. He had been taught by the best French naturalists in Paris, and, as Humboldt learned, was a talented botanist, skilled in comparative anatomy, and had also served as a surgeon in the French navy. Born in La Rochelle, a port town on the Atlantic coast, the twenty-five-year-old Bonpland was from a naval family with a love for adventures and voyages in his blood. Bumping into each other regularly in the corridors of their accommodation, Bonpland and Humboldt began to talk and quickly discovered a mutual adoration for plants and foreign travels.

Like Humboldt, Bonpland was keen to see the world. Humboldt decided that Bonpland would be the perfect companion. Not only was he passionate about botany and the tropics, but he was also good-natured and charming. Stoutly built, Bonpland exuded a solid strength that promised resilience, good health and reliability. In many ways, he was Humboldt’s exact opposite. Where Humboldt spread frantic activity, Bonpland carried an air of calmness and docility. They were to make a great team.

In the midst of all the preparations, Humboldt now seemed to experience flashes of guilt about his late mother. There were rumours, Friedrich Schiller told Goethe, that ‘Alexander couldn’t get rid of the spirit of his mother’. Apparently she appeared to him all the time. A mutual acquaintance had told Schiller that Humboldt was participating in some dubious séances in Paris involving her. Humboldt had always been afflicted by a ‘great fear of ghosts’, as he had admitted to a friend a few years previously, but now it had got much worse. No matter how much he cast himself as a rational scientist, he felt his mother’s spirit watching his every move. It was time to escape.

The immediate problem, though, was that the command of Bougainville’s expedition was given to a younger man, Captain Nicolas Baudin. Though Humboldt received reassurances that he could join Baudin on his voyage, the whole expedition foundered due to a lack of government funds. Humboldt refused to give up. He now wondered if he could join the 200 scholars who accompanied Napoleon’s army which had left Toulon in May 1798 to invade Egypt. But how to get there? Few, Humboldt admitted, ‘have had greater difficulties’.

As the quest for a ship continued, Humboldt contacted the Swedish consul in Paris who promised to procure him a passage from Marseille to Algiers, on the North African coast, from where he could travel overland to Egypt. Humboldt also asked his London acquaintance, Joseph Banks, to obtain a passport for Bonpland in case they encountered an English warship. He was prepared for all eventualities. Humboldt himself travelled with a passport issued by the Prussian ambassador in Paris. Along with his name and age, the document gave a rather detailed, though not exactly objective, description stating that he had grey eyes, a large mouth, a big nose and a ‘well-formed chin’. Humboldt scribbled in the margins in jest: ‘large mouth, fat nose, but chin bien fait’.