The Invention of Nature

The timing could not have been better. A month later, on the evening of 12 August, as Humboldt regaled a group of Germans who were visiting Naples with stories from the Orinoco and the Andes, Vesuvius erupted in front of their eyes. Humboldt couldn’t believe his luck. As one scientist commented, it was a ‘compliment that Vesuvius chose to give Humboldt’. From the balcony of his host’s house, Humboldt saw the glowing lava snaking down the mountain destroying vineyards, villages and forests. Naples was thrown into an eerie light. Within minutes Humboldt was ready to ride towards the spewing volcano to observe the eruption as closely as possible. During the next few days he climbed Vesuvius six times. It was all very impressive, Humboldt wrote to Bonpland, but nothing compared to South America. Vesuvius was like an ‘asteroid next to Saturn’ in comparison to Cotopaxi.

An eruption of Mount Vesuvius (Illustration Credit 9.4)

Meanwhile in Rome, on a particularly hot day in mid-August, Bolívar, Rodríguez and another South American friend walked to the top of the hill Monte Sacro. There, with the city at their feet, Rodríguez recounted the story of the plebeians in ancient Rome who – on that very hill – had threatened to secede from the republic in protest against the rule of the patricians. Hearing this story, Bolívar fell to his knees, grabbed Rodríguez’s hand and vowed that he would liberate Venezuela. He would not stop, Bolívar declared, until ‘I have broken the shackles’. This was a turning point for Bolívar and from now on his country’s freedom was the guiding torch of his life. Two years later, when he arrived in Caracas, he was no longer the party-loving dandy but a man driven by ideas of revolution and liberty. The seeds of South America’s liberation were germinating.

By the time Humboldt returned to Rome at the end of August, Bolívar had already left. Feeling restless, Humboldt also wanted to move on and decided to travel through Europe to Berlin. He rushed north, stopping briefly in Florence, Bologna and Milan. He couldn’t go to Vienna as planned because Gay-Lussac still travelled with him, and, with Austria and France at war, it would have been too dangerous for the Frenchman. The sciences, Humboldt complained, no longer provided a safeguard in this volatile climate.

As it turned out Humboldt’s decision to skip Vienna was a wise one because the French army had crossed the Rhine and marched through Swabia to take Vienna in mid-November. Three weeks later Napoleon defeated the Austrians and Russians at the Battle of Austerlitz (today’s Slavkov u Brna in the Czech Republic). Napoleon’s decisive victory at Austerlitz marked the end of the Holy Roman Empire and of Europe as it had hitherto existed.

¹ After the revolution, the Académie des Sciences was incorporated into the National Institute of Sciences and Arts (Institut National des Sciences et des Arts). A few years later, in 1816, it once again became the Académie des Sciences – and part of the Institut de France. For the sake of consistency, it will be the Académie des Sciences throughout the book.

² It was probably Carlos Montúfar who introduced Humboldt to the South Americans in Paris – but Humboldt and Bolívar also had several mutual acquaintances. There was Bolívar’s childhood friend Fernando del Toro – the son of the Marquis del Toro with whom Humboldt had spent time in Venezuela. In Caracas Humboldt had also met Bolívar’s sisters and his former tutor, the poet Andrés Bello.

³ Montúfar returned to South America in 1810 where he joined the revolutionaries. He was imprisoned and executed in 1816.

10

Berlin

IN A DESPERATE attempt to avoid the battlefields, Humboldt altered his route to Berlin. He went via Lake Como in northern Italy where he met Alessandro Volta, an Italian scientist who had just invented the electric battery. Humboldt then crossed the Alps as fierce winter storms were raging. Rain, hail and snow pounded down – Humboldt was in his element. As he journeyed north and across the German states, he visited old friends along the way as well as his former professor, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, in Göttingen. On 16 November 1805, more than a year after his return to Europe, Alexander von Humboldt arrived in Berlin with Gay-Lussac.

After Paris and Rome, Berlin felt provincial, and the flat countryside around the city seemed plain and dull. For a man who loved the heat and humidity of the rainforest, Humboldt had chosen the worst time of the year to arrive. Berlin was freezing cold during those first harsh winter months. Within weeks Humboldt was ill, covered in a measles-like rash, and weakened by a high fever. The weather, he wrote to Goethe in early February 1806, was unbearable. He was of a more ‘tropical nature’, Humboldt said, and no longer suited for the cold and damp north German climate.