The Invention of Nature

If the Spanish would hand over the territory that Jefferson claimed for the United States, Humboldt told him, it would be the size of two-thirds of France. It wasn’t the richest spot on earth, Humboldt said, because there were only a few scattered small farms, a lot of savanna, and no known port along the coast. There were some mines and a few indigenous people. This was the kind of intelligence that Jefferson needed. The next day the President wrote to a friend that he had just received ‘treasures of information’.

Humboldt gave Jefferson nineteen tightly filled pages of extracts from his notes, sorted under headings such as ‘table of statistics’, ‘population’, ‘agriculture, manufacturers, commerce’, ‘military’ and so on. He also added two pages that focused on the border region with Mexico and in particular on the disputed area that so interested Jefferson, between the Sabine River and the Rio Grande. This was the most exciting and fruitful visit Jefferson had received in years. Less than a month later, he held a Cabinet meeting about US strategy towards Spain in which they discussed how the data they had received from Humboldt might influence their negotiations.

Humboldt was happy to assist because he admired the United States. The country was moving towards a ‘perfection’ of society, Humboldt said, while Europe was still gripped by monarchy and despotism. He didn’t even mind the unbearable humidity of the Washington summer, because the ‘best air of all is breathed in liberty’. He loved this ‘beautiful land’, he said repeatedly, and promised to return in order to explore.

During this one week in Washington, the men talked about nature and politics – about crops and soils and the shaping of nations. Humboldt, like Jefferson, believed that only an agrarian republic brought happiness and independence. Colonialism, by contrast, brought destruction. The Spanish had arrived in South America to obtain gold and timber – ‘either by violence or exchange’, Humboldt said, and motivated only by ‘insatiable avarice’. The Spanish had annihilated ancient civilizations, native tribes and stately forests. The portrait that Humboldt brought back from Latin America was painted in the vivid colours of a brutal reality – all underpinned by hard facts, data and statistics.

When he had visited mines in Mexico, Humboldt had not only investigated their geology and productivity, but also the crippling effect that mining was having on large parts of the population. At one mine, he had been shocked to see how indigenous labourers were made to climb some 23,000 steps laden with huge boulders in one shift alone. They were used like a ‘human machine’, slaves in all but name because of a labour system – the so-called repartimiento – that made them work for little or nothing for the Spanish. Forced to buy over-priced goods from the colonial administrators, the labourers were sucked into an escalating spiral of debt and dependency. The Spanish king even enjoyed a monopoly on snow in Quito, Lima and other colonial towns, so that it could be used for the production of sorbet for the wealthy elites. It was absurd, Humboldt said, that something that ‘fell from the sky’ should belong to the Spanish crown. To his mind the politics and economics of a colonial government were based on ‘immorality’.

During his travels Humboldt had been amazed at how colonial administrators (as well as their guides, hosts and missionaries) had constantly encouraged him – the former mining inspector – to search for precious metals and stones. Many times Humboldt had explained to them how misguided this was. Why, he asked, would they need gold and gems, when they lived on land that had only to be ‘slightly raked to produce abundant harvests’? That was surely their avenue to freedom and prosperity?

All too often Humboldt had seen how the population was starving and how once fertile land had been relentlessly over-exploited and turned barren. In the valley of Aragua at Lake Valencia, for example, he had observed how the world’s lust for colourful clothing brought poverty and dependency to the local people because indigo, an easily grown plant that produced blue dye, had replaced maize and other edible crops. More than any other plant, indigo ‘impoverishes the soil’, Humboldt had noted. The land looked exhausted and in a few years, he predicted, nothing would grow there any more. The soil was being exploited ‘like a mine’.