The Invention of Nature

The next day, they rose early to continue their journey. Sometimes precipices dropped down hundreds of feet from paths so narrow that the valuable instruments and collections dangled precariously over the abyss from their mules’ backs. These moments were especially tense for José who was responsible for the barometer, the expedition’s most important instrument because Humboldt needed it to determine the height of the mountains. The barometer was a long wooden baton into which a glass tube had been inserted to hold the mercury. And although Humboldt had designed a protective box for this special travel barometer, the glass could still easily break. The instrument had cost him 12 thalers, but by the end of his five-year expedition that price had risen to 800 thalers, Humboldt later calculated, if he added all the money he had spent on wages for the people employed to carry it safely across Latin America.

Of his several barometers, only this one had remained intact. A few weeks earlier, when the penultimate had been smashed on their way from Cartagena to the Río Magdalena, Humboldt had been so depressed that he had collapsed on to the ground in the middle of a small town square. As he lay there on his back and looked up at the sky, so far from home and the European instrument makers, he had declared: ‘Lucky are those who travel without instruments that break.’ How on earth, he wondered, could he measure and compare the globe’s mountains without his tools?

When they finally arrived in Quito in early January 1802, 1,300 miles and nine months after leaving Cartagena, they received news that the reports about Captain Baudin had been wrong. Baudin was not after all sailing to Australia via South America, but instead making for the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa and from there across the Indian Ocean. Any other man would have despaired, but not Humboldt. At least now there was no rush to reach Lima, he reasoned, which gave them time to climb all the volcanoes he wanted to investigate.

A view of Quito, Humboldt’s base for several months (Illustration Credit 6.2)

Humboldt was interested in volcanoes for two particular reasons. The first was to ascertain if they were ‘local’ occurrences or if they were linked subterraneously with each other. If they were not just local phenomena but instead consisted of groups or clusters that stretched across huge distances, it was possible that they were connected through the core of the earth. Humboldt’s second reason was that studying volcanoes might provide an answer to how the earth itself had been created.

In the late eighteenth century scientists had begun to suggest that the earth must be older than the Bible, but they couldn’t agree on how the earth had formed. The so-called ‘Neptunists’ believed that water had been the main force, creating rocks by sedimentation, slowly building up mountains, minerals and geological formations out of a primordial ocean. Others, the ‘Vulcanists’, argued that everything had originated through catastrophic events such as volcanic eruptions. The pendulum was still swinging between those two concepts. One problem that European scientists encountered was that their knowledge was almost entirely limited to the only two active volcanoes in Europe – Etna and Vesuvius in Italy. Now Humboldt had the chance to investigate more volcanoes than anyone before him. He became so fascinated with them as the key to understanding the creation of the earth that Goethe later joked, in a letter that introduced a female friend to Humboldt: ‘since you belong to the naturalists who believe that everything was created by volcanoes, I’m sending you a female volcano who completely scorches and burns whatever is left.’

With his plan to join Baudin’s expedition dashed, Humboldt used his new base in Quito to climb systematically every reachable volcano, no matter how dangerous. He was so busy that he caused some consternation in the parlours of Quito’s high society. His good looks had attracted the attention of several young unmarried women, yet ‘he never remained longer than was necessary,’ at dinner or other social events, said Rosa Montúfar, the daughter of the provincial governor and a noted beauty. Humboldt seemed to prefer to be outdoors, she complained, rather than in the company of attractive women.