The Invention of Nature

British scientists also came to Paris, and whenever they arrived, they knocked on Humboldt’s door. A former secretary of the Royal Society, Charles Bladgen, visited, as did a future president, Humphry Davy. Maybe more than anybody else, Davy lived what Humboldt was preaching because he was a poet and a chemist. In his notebooks, for example, Davy filled one side with the objective accounts of his experiments, while on the other page he wrote his personal reactions and emotional responses. His scientific lectures at the Royal Institution in London were so famous that the streets around the building were jammed on the days he performed. The poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge – another great admirer of Humboldt’s work – attended Davy’s lectures, as he wrote, to ‘enlarge my stock of metaphors’. Like Humboldt, Davy believed that imagination and reason were necessary to perfect the philosophic mind – they were the ‘creative source of discovery’.

Humboldt enjoyed meeting other scientists to exchange ideas and share information, but life in Europe increasingly frustrated him. Throughout these years of political upheaval he had remained restless and, with Europe so deeply torn, he felt that there was little holding him. ‘My view of the world is dismal,’ he told Goethe. He missed the tropics and was only going to feel better ‘when I live in the hot zone’.

¹ In 1810 Humboldt moved into an apartment that he shared with Karl Sigismund Kunth, the nephew of his former tutor and a German botanist, whom he had commissioned to work on the botanical publications, relieving – after some discussions and rows – Bonpland from the task.

12

Revolutions and Nature

Simón Bolívar and Humboldt

I was coming along, cloaked in the mantle of Iris, from the place where the torrential Orinoco pays tribute to the God of waters. I had visited the enchanted springs of Amazonia, straining to climb to the watchtower of the universe. I sought the tracks of La Condamine and Humboldt, following them boldly. Nothing could stop me. I reached the glacial heights, and the atmosphere took my breath away. No human foot had ever blemished the diamond crown placed by Eternity’s hands on the sublime temples of this lofty Andean peak. I said to myself: Iris’s rainbow cloak has served as my banner. I’ve carried it through infernal regions. It has ploughed rivers and seas and risen to the gigantic shoulders of the Andes. The terrain had levelled off at the feet of Colombia, and not even time could hold back freedom’s march. The war goddess Bellona had been humbled by the brilliance of Iris. So why should I hesitate to tread on the ice-white hair of this giant on earth? Indeed I shall! And caught up in a spiritual tremor I had never before experienced, and which seemed to me a kind of divine frenzy, I left Humboldt’s tracks behind and began to leave my own marks on the eternal crystals girding Chimborazo.

Simón Bolívar, ‘My Delirium on Chimborazo’, 1822

IT WAS NOT Humboldt but his friend Simón Bolívar who returned to South America. Three years after they had first met in Paris in 1804, Bolívar had left Europe, burning with Enlightenment ideas of liberty, the separation of powers and the concept of a social contract between a people and their rulers. As he had stepped on South American soil, Bolívar had been fuelled by his vow on Monte Sacro in Rome to free his country. But the fight against the Spanish would be a long battle fed by the blood of patriots. It would be a rebellion that saw close friends betray each other. Brutal, messy and often destructive, it would take almost two decades to remove the Spanish from the continent – and it would eventually see Bolívar rule as a dictator.

It was also a fight that was invigorated by Humboldt’s writings, almost as if his descriptions of nature and people made the colonists appreciate how unique and magnificent their continent was. Humboldt’s books and ideas would feed into the liberation of Latin America – from his criticism of colonialism and slavery to his portrayal of the majestic landscapes. In 1809, two years after its first publication in Germany, Humboldt’s Essay on the Geography of Plants had been translated into Spanish and published in a scientific journal founded in Bogotá by Francisco José de Caldas, one of the scientists whom Humboldt had met during his expedition in the Andes. ‘With his pen’ Humboldt had awakened South America, Bolívar later said, and had illustrated why South Americans had many reasons to be proud of their continent. To this day Humboldt’s name is much more widely known in Latin America than in most of Europe or the United States.

Chimborazo and Carquairazo in today’s Ecuador – one of the many striking illustrations in Humboldt’s Vues des Cordillères (Illustration Credit 12.1)