The Invention of Nature

Although surrounded by people all day, Humboldt remained emotionally distant. He was quick in his judgement of people, too quick and indiscreet, he admitted. There was certainly a streak of Schadenfreude in him and he enjoyed exposing people’s missteps. Always quick-witted, he would occasionally get carried away, inventing derogative nicknames or gossiping behind people’s backs. The King of Sicily, for example, he renamed the ‘pasta king’ while a conservative Prussian minister was declared ‘a glacier’ who was so icy, Humboldt joked, that he had given him rheumatism in the left shoulder. But behind Humboldt’s ambition, hectic activity and sharp comments, his brother Wilhelm believed, was a great gentleness and a vulnerability that no one really noticed. Though Alexander hankered after fame and recognition, Wilhelm explained to Caroline, it would never make him happy. During his explorations nature and physical exertion had fulfilled him, but now that he was back in Europe, Humboldt was feeling lonely again.

As much as he was forever connecting and relating everything in the natural world, he was strangely one-dimensional when it came to his personal relationships. When Humboldt heard, for example, that a close friend had died while he had been away, he wrote the widow a letter of philosophy rather than of condolences. In it Humboldt talked more about Jewish and Greek opinions of the concept of death than about the widow’s late husband – he had also written the letter in French which he knew she didn’t understand. When, a few weeks after his arrival in Paris, Caroline and Wilhelm’s own three-month-old daughter died after a smallpox vaccination – the second child they had lost in a little more than a year – Caroline fell into a deep melancholy. Alone in her grief and with her husband far away in Rome, Caroline hoped for some emotional support from her busy brother-in-law but felt that his expressions of sympathy were just ‘demonstrations of sentiments rather than deep feelings’.

But Caroline, despite her own misery, worried about Humboldt. Though he had survived his expedition, he was less capable when it came to the more practical aspects of his day-to-day life. He ignored, for example, the extent to which the five-year voyage had eaten into his fortune. Caroline thought him so naïve about his financial situation that she asked Wilhelm to write a serious letter from Rome to explain the true nature of Alexander’s dwindling funds. Then, in the autumn of 1804, as Caroline prepared to leave Paris to return to Rome, she found herself reluctant to see Alexander stay behind. To ‘leave him by himself without any restraint’, she wrote to Wilhelm, would be disastrous. ‘I trembled for his inner peace.’ Hearing her degree of concern, Wilhelm suggested that she stay on a little longer.

Alexander was as restless as ever, Caroline reported to her husband, constantly concocting new travel plans. Greece, Italy, Spain – ‘all European countries are wandering through his head.’ Fired up by his visit to Philadelphia and Washington earlier that year, he was also hoping to explore the North American continent. He wanted to go west, he wrote to one of his new American acquaintances, a plan for which Thomas Jefferson ‘would be just the right man to aid me’. There was so much to see. ‘I have my mind set on Missouri, the Arctic circle, and Asia,’ he wrote, and ‘one must make the most of one’s youth.’ But before setting out on yet another adventure, it was also time to start writing up the results of his previous expedition – but where to begin?

Humboldt was not thinking of just one book. He envisaged a series of large and beautifully illustrated volumes that would, for example, depict the great peaks of the Andes, exotic blooms, ancient manuscripts and Inca ruins. He also intended to write some more specialized books: botanical and zoological publications that described the plants and animals of Latin America precisely and scientifically, as well as some on astronomy and geography. He planned an atlas that would include his new maps showing plant distribution across the globe, the locations of volcanoes and mountain ranges, rivers and so on. But Humboldt also wanted to write more general and cheaper books that would explain his new vision of nature to a broader audience. He put Bonpland in charge of the botanical books, but all the others he would have to write himself.

With a mind that worked in all directions, Humboldt could often hardly keep up with his own thoughts. As he wrote, new ideas would pop up which were squeezed on to the page – here was a little sketch or some calculations jotted into the margins. When he ran out of space, Humboldt used his large desk on which he carved and scribbled ideas. Soon the entire table top was completely covered with numbers, lines and words, so much so that a carpenter had to be called to plane it clean again.