The Invention of Nature

In the Llanos they encountered dust devils, and frequent mirages conjured up cruel promises of cool and refreshing water. Sometimes, they travelled during the night to avoid the scorching sun. They often went thirsty and hungry. One day they came across a small farm – nothing more than a solitary house with a few small huts around it. Covered in dust and burned by the sun, the men were desperate for a bath. With the landowner absent, the foreman pointed them to a nearby pool. The water was murky but at least a little cooler than the air. Excitedly, Humboldt and Bonpland stripped off their dirty clothes, but just as they stepped into the pool, an alligator that had been lying motionless on the opposite bank decided to join them. Within seconds the two men had jumped out and grabbed their clothes, running for their lives.

Humboldt and his team in the Llanos (Illustration Credit 5.1)

Although the Llanos might have been an inhospitable environment, Humboldt was enthralled by the vastness of the landscape. There was something about the flatness and its daunting size that ‘fills the mind with the feeling of infinity’, he wrote. Then, about halfway across the plains, they reached the small trading town of Calabozo. When locals told Humboldt that many of the shallow pools in the area were infested with electric eels, he couldn’t believe his luck. Since his experiments with animal electricity in Germany, Humboldt had always wanted to examine one of these extraordinary fish. He had heard strange tales about the five-foot-long creatures that could deliver electric shocks of more than 600 volts.

The problem was how to catch the eels given that they lived buried in the mud at the bottom of the pools and thus could not be easily netted. The eels were also so highly charged that touching them would mean instant death. The locals had an idea. They rounded up thirty wild horses in the Llanos and drove the herd into the pond. As the horses’ hooves churned up the mud, the eels wriggled up to the surface, giving off enormous electric shocks. Entranced, Humboldt watched the gruesome spectacle: the horses screamed in pain, the eels thrashed beneath their bellies, and the water’s surface boiled with movement. Some horses fell and, trampled by the others, drowned.

The battle between horses and electric eels (Illustration Credit 5.2)

Over time the strength of the electric shocks diminished and the weakened eels retreated into the mud from where Humboldt pulled them with dry wooden sticks – but he hadn’t waited long enough. When he and Bonpland dissected some of the animals, they endured violent shocks themselves. For four hours they conducted an array of dangerous tests including holding an eel with two hands, touching an eel with one hand and a bit of metal with the other, or Humboldt touching an eel while holding Bonpland’s hand (with Bonpland feeling the jolt). Sometimes they stood on dry ground, at others on wet; they attached electrodes, poked the eels with wet sticks of sealing wax and picked them up with wet clay and fibre cords made from palms – no material was left untested. Unsurprisingly, by the end of the day Humboldt and Bonpland felt sick and feeble.

The eels also made Humboldt think about electricity and magnetism in general. Watching the grisly encounter between eels and horses, Humboldt thought of the forces that, variously, created lightning, bound metal to metal and moved the needles of compasses. As so often, Humboldt started with a detail or an observation, and then spun out to the greater context. All ‘flow forth from one source’, he wrote, and ‘all melt together in an eternal, all-encompassing power’.

At the end of March 1800, almost two months after leaving Caracas, Humboldt and Bonpland finally reached the Capuchin mission in San Fernando de Apure at the Rio Apure. From here they would paddle east along the Rio Apure and through the rainforest to the Lower Orinoco – a distance of about a hundred miles as the crow flies, but more than double that length along the looping river bends. Once they reached the confluence of the Rio Apure and the Lower Orinoco, their intention was to travel south along the Orinoco and across the great Atures and Maipures rapids, deep into a region where few white men had ever gone. Here they hoped to find the Casiquiare, the fabled link between the great Amazon and Orinoco.

The boat they had acquired in San Fernando de Apure was launched into the Rio Apure on 30 March, heavily loaded with provisions for four weeks – not enough for the entire expedition, but all they could fit into the vessel. From the Capuchin monks they bought bananas, cassava roots, chickens and cacao as well as the pod-like fruits of the tamarind tree which they were told turned the river water into a refreshing lemonade. The rest of the food they would have to catch – fish, turtle eggs, birds and other game – and barter for more with the indigenous tribes with the alcohol they had packed.