The Invention of Nature

The man who had been granted rare permission by Carlos IV to explore the Spanish Latin American territories went on to publish a harsh criticism of the colonial rule. His book was filled, Humboldt told Jefferson, with the expressions of his ‘independent sentiments’. The Spanish had incited hatred between the different racial groups, Humboldt accused. The missionaries, for example, treated the indigenous Indians brutally and were driven by ‘culpable fanaticism’. Imperial rule exploited the colonies for raw materials and destroyed the environment as it went along. European colonial policies were ruthless and suspicious, he said, and South America had been destroyed by its conquerors. Their thirst for wealth had brought the ‘abuse of power’ to Latin America.

Humboldt’s criticism was based on his own observations, supplemented with information he had received from the colonial scientists whom he had met during his expedition. All this was then underpinned with the statistical and demographic data from governmental archives, mainly in Mexico City and Havana. In the years after his return, Humboldt evaluated and published these results, first in the Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain and later in the Political Essay on the Island of Cuba. These scathing indictments of colonialism and slavery showed how everything was interrelated: climate, soils and agriculture with slavery, demographics and economics. Humboldt claimed that the colonies could only be liberated and self-sufficient when they were ‘freed from the fetters of the odious monopoly’. It was the ‘European barbarity’, Humboldt insisted, that had created this unjust world.

Humboldt’s knowledge of the continent was encyclopaedic, Bolívar wrote in September 1815 in his so-called ‘Letter from Jamaica’ in which he referred to his old friend as the greatest authority on South America. Written in Jamaica, where he had fled four months previously when the Spanish armada had arrived, the letter was the distillation of Bolívar’s political thought and his vision for the future. In it, he also echoed Humboldt’s criticism about the destructive impact of colonialism. His people were enslaved and confined to cultivating cash crops and mining in order to feed Spain’s insatiable appetite, Bolívar wrote, but even the lushest fields and greatest ores would ‘never satisfy the lust of that greedy nation’. The Spanish destroyed vast regions, Bolívar warned, and ‘entire provinces are transformed to deserts’.

Humboldt had written about soils that were so fertile that they only needed to be raked to produce rich harvests. In much the same vein Bolívar now asked how a land so ‘abundantly endowed’ by nature could be kept so desperately oppressed and passive. And just as Humboldt had claimed in the Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain that the vices of the feudal government had passed from the northern to the southern hemisphere, so Bolívar now compared the Spanish grip on their colonies to ‘a kind of feudal ownership’. But the revolutionaries would continue to fight, Bolívar asserted, because ‘the chains have been broken’.

Bolívar also realized that slavery stood at the centre of the conflict. If the enslaved population was not on his side, as he had painfully experienced during the brutal civil war with José Tomás Boves and his Legions of Hell, they were against him and against the creole plantation owners who relied on slave labour. Without the help of the slaves there would be no revolution. It was a subject that he discussed with Alexandre Pétion, the first President of the Republic of Haiti – the island where Bolívar had escaped to after an assassination attempt on him in Jamaica.

Haiti had been a French colony but after a successful slave rebellion in the early 1790s, the revolutionaries had declared independence in 1804. Pétion, who was mixed race – the son of a wealthy Frenchman and a mother of African ancestry – was one of the founding fathers of the republic. He was also the only ruler and politician who promised to help Bolívar. When Pétion pledged arms and ships in exchange for the promise to free the slaves, Bolívar agreed. ‘Slavery,’ he said, ‘was the daughter of darkness.’