The Invention of Nature

Here he could truly study animals that he had only seen as stuffed specimens in Europe’s natural history collections. They caught birds and monkeys which they kept in large wide-meshed reed baskets or chained to long ropes in the hope of sending them back to Europe. The titi monkeys were Humboldt’s favourites. Small with long tails and soft greyish fur, they had a white face that looked like a heart-shaped mask, Humboldt noted. They were beautiful and graceful in their movements, easily jumping from branch to branch which gave them their German name, Springaffe – jumping monkey. Titi monkeys were extremely difficult to catch alive. The only way, they discovered, was to kill a mother with a blowgun and a poisoned dart. The titi youngster would not let go of its mother even as she came crashing down the tree. Humboldt’s team had to be quick to catch and tear the young monkey away from its dead mother. One that they had captured was so clever that it always tried to grab at the engravings in Humboldt’s scientific books depicting grasshoppers and wasps. To Humboldt’s amazement the monkey seemed able to distinguish engravings that showed its favourite foods – such as the insects – while pictures of human and mammal skeletons didn’t interest the titi at all.

There was no better place to observe animals and plants. Humboldt had entered the most magnificent web of life on earth, a network of ‘active, organic powers’, as he later wrote. Enthralled, he pursued every thread. Everything bore witness to the power and the tenderness of nature, Humboldt wrote home with swagger, from the boa constrictor that can ‘swallow a horse’ to the tiny hummingbird balancing itself on a delicate blossom. This was a world pulsating with life, Humboldt said, a world in which ‘man is nothing’.

One night, when he was yet again woken by a piercing orchestra of animal screams, he unpeeled the chain of reaction. His Indian guides had told him that these outbreaks of noise were simply the animals worshipping the moon. Far from it, Humboldt thought, realizing that the cacophony was ‘a long-extended and ever-amplifying battle of the animals’. The jaguars were hunting in the night, chasing tapirs which escaped noisily through the dense undergrowth, which in turn scared the monkeys sleeping in the treetops above. As the monkeys then began to cry out, their clamour woke the birds and thus the whole animal world. Life stirred in every bush, in the cracked bark of trees and in the soil. The whole commotion, Humboldt said, was the result of ‘some contest’ in the depth of the rainforest.

Again and again during his travels, Humboldt witnessed these battles. Capybaras rushed from the water to escape the deadly jaws of the crocodiles only to run straight into the jaguars waiting for them at the edge of the jungle. It had been the same with the flying fish that he had observed on their sea voyage: as they had jumped out of the ocean away from the dolphins’ sharp teeth, they were caught mid-air by albatrosses. It was the absence of man, Humboldt noted, that allowed animals to prosper abundantly but it was a development that was ‘limited only by themselves’ – by their mutual pressure.

This was a web of life in a relentless and bloody battle, an idea that was very different from the prevailing view of nature as a well-oiled machine in which every animal and plant had a divinely allotted place. Carl Linnaeus, for example, had recognized the idea of a food chain when he talked of hawks feeding on small birds, small birds on spiders, spiders on dragonflies, dragonflies on hornets, and hornets on aphids – but he had regarded this chain as a harmonious balance. Each animal and plant had its God-given purpose and reproduced accordingly in just the right numbers to keep this balance stable in perpetuity.

Yet what Humboldt saw was no Eden. The ‘golden age has ceased’, he wrote. These animals feared each other and they fought for survival. And it wasn’t just the animals; he also noted how vigorous climbing plants were strangling huge trees in the jungle. Here it was not the ‘destructive hand of man’, he said, but the plants’ competition for light and nourishment that limited their lives and growth.