The Invention of Nature

Dangerous, yes, but too exciting to miss. At the end of January Humboldt and Montúfar set off, leaving Bonpland in Guayaquil with instructions to look out for a ship bound for Mexico. As they travelled north-east, Cotopaxi’s roar accompanied them. Humboldt couldn’t believe his luck. In a few days, he would again see the volcano that he had climbed eight months earlier, but this time alive and illuminated by its own fire. Then, only five days into their journey, a messenger arrived from Guayaquil with a note from Bonpland. He had found a ship to Acapulco but it would sail in two weeks. There was no way that Humboldt and Montúfar could make it to Cotopaxi. They would have to return to Guayaquil immediately. Humboldt was devastated.

As their ship sailed out of Guayaquil harbour on 17 February 1803, Humboldt could hear Cotopaxi, like a growling colossus. The volcanic chorus serenaded his departure, but it was also a sad reminder of what he was missing. It didn’t help that each night during their sea voyage the changing stars told him that they were leaving the southern hemisphere. As he peered through his telescope, the constellations of the southern sky were slowly disappearing. ‘I’m getting poorer day by day,’ Humboldt wrote in his diary, moving towards the northern hemisphere and away from a world that would hold a spell over him for the rest of his life.

During the night of 26 February 1803, Humboldt crossed the Equator for the last time.

He was thirty-three and had spent more than three years in Latin America, travelling through tropical jungles and climbing up to icy mountain summits. He had collected thousands of plants and taken countless measurements. Though he had risked his life many times, he had enjoyed the freedom and adventure. Most importantly, he was leaving Guayaquil with a new vision of nature in his mind. In his trunks was the sketch of Chimborazo – his Naturgemälde. This one drawing and the ideas that had shaped it would change the way future generations perceived the natural world.

¹ Though Chimborazo is not the highest mountain in the world – nor even in the Andes – in one way it is because it is so close to the Equator, its peak is the furthest away from the centre of the earth.

8

Politics and Nature

Thomas Jefferson and Humboldt

IT WAS AS if the sea were about to swallow them. Huge waves rolled on to the deck and down the stairway into the belly of the ship. Humboldt’s forty trunks were in constant danger of flooding. They had sailed straight into a hurricane and for six long days the winds would not stop, pounding the vessel with such force that they could not sleep or even think. The cook lost his pots and pans when the water came gushing in, and was swimming rather than standing in his galley. No food could be cooked and sharks circled the boat. The captain’s cabin, at the ship’s stern, was flooded so high that they had to swim through it, and even the most seasoned sailors were tossed across the deck like ninepins. Fearing for their lives, the sailors insisted on more brandy rations, intending, they said, to drown drunk. Each wave that rolled towards them seemed like a huge rock face. Humboldt thought that he had never been closer to death.

It was May 1804, and Humboldt, Bonpland, Montúfar and their servant, José, were sailing from Cuba towards the East Coast of the United States. It would be ironic to die now, Humboldt thought, having survived five years of perilous travels in Latin America. After their departure from Guayaquil in February 1803, they had spent a year in Mexico where Humboldt had stayed mainly in Mexico City, the administrative capital of the Viceroyalty of New Spain – the vast colony that included Mexico, parts of California and Central America, as well as Florida. He had scoured the extensive colonial archives and libraries, interrupting his research only for a few expeditions to mines, hot springs and yet more volcanoes.

It was time to return to Europe. Five years of travelling through extremes of climates and the wilderness had damaged his delicate instruments, many of which no longer worked properly. With so little contact with the scientific community back home, Humboldt also worried that he might have missed out on important scientific advances. He felt so isolated from the rest of the world, he wrote to a friend, as if he were living on the moon. In March 1804 they had sailed from Mexico to Cuba for a brief stopover in order to pick up the collections that they had stored in Havana three years earlier.

Humboldt returned from Mexico with detailed observations from nature but also with notes from archives and monuments such as this Mexican calendar which for him was proof of the sophistication of ancient civilizations (Illustration Credit 8.1)