The Invention of Nature

Over the next few days, they met several times. One early evening, just as dusk settled over the capital and the first candles were lit, Humboldt entered the drawing room at the White House to find the President surrounded by half a dozen of his grandchildren, laughing and chasing each other around. It took a moment before Jefferson noticed Humboldt, who was quietly watching the boisterous family scene. Jefferson smiled. ‘You have found me playing the fool,’ he said, ‘but I am sure to you I need make no apology.’ Humboldt was delighted to find his hero ‘living with the simplicity of a philosopher’.

For the next week Humboldt and Bonpland were passed from meeting to dinner and to yet more meetings. Everybody was excited to meet the intrepid explorers and hear their tales. Humboldt was the ‘object of universal attention’, one American said – so much so that Charles Willson Peale, a painter from Philadelphia and the organizer of the trip to DC, handed out a great number of silhouettes that he had made of Humboldt (and Bonpland), including one for Jefferson. Humboldt was introduced to the Secretary of the Treasury, Albert Gallatin, who thought listening to his tales was an ‘exquisite intellectual treat’. The next day Humboldt travelled to Mount Vernon, George Washington’s estate, some fifteen miles south of the capital. Though Washington had died four and a half years previously, Mount Vernon was now a popular tourist destination and Humboldt wanted to see the home of the revolutionary hero. The Secretary of State, James Madison, hosted a party in Humboldt’s honour, and his wife, Dolley, professed herself charmed and said that ‘all the ladies say they are in love with him’.

During their days together Jefferson, Madison and Gallatin bombarded Humboldt with questions about Mexico. None of the three American politicians had been to the Spanish-controlled territory but now, surrounded by maps, statistics and notebooks, Humboldt briefed them on the peoples of Latin America, their crops and the climate. Humboldt had worked intensely to improve existing maps by calculating again and again his exact geographical positions. The results were the best maps that could be had at the time – some locations, he boasted to his new friends, had been wrongly placed in the old maps by up to 2 degrees in latitude – around 140 miles. In fact, Humboldt had more information on Mexico than was available on some European countries, Gallatin told his wife, hardly able to contain his excitement. Even better, Humboldt allowed them to transcribe his notes and to copy the maps. His knowledge was ‘astonishing’, the Americans agreed, and in return Gallatin provided Humboldt with all the information he wanted about the United States.

For months Jefferson had tried to procure any scrap of information he could get about their new Louisiana Territory and about Mexico, and suddenly he held so much more in his hands than he could ever have hoped for. With the Spanish watching closely over their territories, and rarely granting a foreigner permission even to travel to their colonies, Jefferson had not been able to find out much until Humboldt’s visit. The Spanish colonial archives in Mexico and Havana had remained firmly closed to the Americans and the Spanish Minister in Washington had refused to furnish Jefferson with any data – but now Humboldt delivered plenty.

Humboldt talked and talked, Gallatin noted, ‘twice as fast as anybody I know’. Humboldt spoke English with a German accent but also German, French and Spanish, ‘mixing them together in rapid Speech’. He was a ‘fountain of knowledge which flows in copious streams’. They learned more from him in two hours than they would from reading books for two years. Humboldt was a ‘very extraordinary man’, Gallatin told his wife. Jefferson agreed – Humboldt was ‘the most scientific man of his age’.

The most pressing question for Jefferson was the disputed border between Mexico and the United States. The Spanish claimed it was marked by the Sabine River, which runs along today’s eastern border of Texas, while the Americans insisted it was the Rio Grande, which forms part of today’s western border of Texas. The ownership of a huge swathe of land was at issue, because in between those two rivers lies the whole of modern Texas. When Jefferson asked about the native population, soils and mines in the area ‘between those lines’, Humboldt had no qualms about passing on the observations he had made under the protection and exclusive permission of the Spanish crown. Humboldt believed in scientific generosity and in the free exchange of information. The sciences were above national interests, Humboldt insisted, as he handed over vital economic information. They were part of a republic of letters, Jefferson said, paraphrasing Joseph Banks’s words that the sciences were always at peace even if ‘their nations may be at war’; the sentiment no doubt suited the President perfectly in this instance.