The Invention of Nature

As so often, Humboldt had then made some last-minute changes and decided to postpone his voyage home by a few more weeks. He wanted to sail via North America in order to meet Thomas Jefferson, the third President of the United States. For five long years, Humboldt had seen nature at its best – lush, magnificent and awe-inspiring – and now he wanted to see civilization in all its glory, a society built as a republic and on the principles of liberty.

From a young age Humboldt had been surrounded by Enlightenment thinkers who had planted the seeds of his life-long belief in liberty, equality, tolerance and the importance of education. But it had been the French Revolution in 1789, just before his twentieth birthday, that had determined his political views. Unlike the Prussians who were still ruled by an absolute monarch, the French had declared all men equal. Since then Humboldt had always carried the ‘ideas of 1789 in his heart’. He had visited Paris, in 1790, where he had seen the preparations for the celebration of the first anniversary of the revolution. So enthused had Humboldt been that summer that he had helped to cart sand for the building of a ‘temple of liberty’ in Paris. Now, fourteen years later, he wanted to meet the people who had forged a republic in America and ‘who understood the precious gift of liberty’.

After a week at sea, the hurricane abated and the winds eventually calmed. Then, at the end of May 1804, four weeks after their departure from Havana, Humboldt and his small team disembarked in Philadelphia, with its 75,000 inhabitants the largest city in the United States. On the eve of his arrival, Humboldt wrote a long letter to Jefferson, expressing his desire to meet in Washington, DC, the nation’s new capital. ‘Your writings, your actions, and the liberalism of your ideas,’ Humboldt wrote, ‘have inspired me from my earliest youth.’ He brought a wealth of information from Latin America, Humboldt informed Jefferson, where he had collected plants, made astronomical observations, found hieroglyphs of ancient civilizations deep in the rainforest and had amassed important data from the colonial archives of Mexico City.

Humboldt also wrote to James Madison, the Secretary of State and Jefferson’s closest political ally, declaring that ‘having witnessed the great spectacle of the majestic Andes and the grandeur of the physical world I intended to enjoy the spectacle of a free people.’ Politics and nature belonged together – an idea that Humboldt would be discussing with the Americans.

At sixty-one, Jefferson was still standing ‘straight as a gun barrel’ – a tall thin and almost gangly man with the ruddy complexion of a farmer and an ‘iron constitution’. He was the President of the young nation, but also the owner of Monticello, a large plantation in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia, a little more than one hundred miles south-west of Washington. Although his wife had died more than two decades earlier, Jefferson had a tightly knit family life and greatly enjoyed the company of his seven grandchildren. Friends commented how they often climbed on to his lap as he talked. At the time Humboldt arrived in the United States, Jefferson was still grieving for his younger daughter, Maria, who had died just a few weeks previously, in April 1804, after giving birth to a baby girl. His other daughter, Martha, often spent long periods at the White House and later moved permanently to Monticello with her children.

Jefferson hated idleness. He rose before dawn, read several books at the same time and wrote so many letters that he had bought a letter-copying machine to keep a record of his correspondence. He was a restless man who warned his daughter that ennui was ‘the most dangerous poison of life’. In the 1780s, after the War of Independence, Jefferson had lived in Paris for five years as the American Minister to France. He had used the posting to travel widely across Europe, returning home with trunks full of books, furniture and ideas. He suffered from what he called the ‘malady of Bibliomanie’, constantly buying and studying books. In Europe, he had also made time between his duties to see the finest gardens in England, as well as observing and comparing agricultural practices in Germany, Holland, Italy and France.