The Invention of Nature

It wasn’t surprising that Chimborazo became Bolívar’s metaphor for his revolution and destiny – even today the mountain is depicted on the Ecuadorian flag. As so often, Bolívar turned to the natural world to illustrate his thoughts and beliefs. Three years previously, Bolívar had told the congress in Angostura that nature had bestowed great riches on South America. They would be showing the Old World ‘the majesty’ of the New World. More than anything else, Chimborazo – which had become famous across the world through Humboldt’s books – became the perfect articulation for the revolution. ‘Come to Chimborazo,’ Bolívar wrote to his former teacher Simón Rodríguez, to see this crown of earth, this staircase to the gods and this unassailable fortress of the New World. From Chimborazo, Bolívar insisted, one had unobstructed views of the past and the future. It was the ‘throne of nature’ – invincible, eternal and enduring.

Bolívar was at the height of his fame when he wrote ‘My Delirium on Chimborazo’ in 1822. Almost 1 million square miles of South America were under his leadership – an area much bigger than Napoleon’s empire had ever been. The northern South American colonies – much of the area covering modern Colombia, Panama, Venezuela and Ecuador – had been freed with only Peru remaining under Spanish control. But Bolívar wanted more. He dreamed of a pan-American federation that would stretch down from the isthmus of Panama to the southern tip of the Peruvian Viceroyalty, and from Guayaquil at the Pacific coast in the west to the Caribbean Sea on the Venezuelan coast in the east. Such a union would be like ‘a colossus’, he said, and would ’cause the earth to quake with a glance’ – the mighty neighbour that Jefferson so worried about.

In the previous year Bolívar had written a letter to Humboldt that underlined how important his descriptions of South America’s nature had been. It had been Humboldt’s evocative writing that had ‘uprooted’ him and his fellow revolutionaries from ignorance, Bolívar wrote; it had made them proud of their continent. Humboldt was the ‘discoverer of the New World’, Bolívar insisted. And it may well have been Humboldt’s obsessive interest in South American volcanoes that also inspired Bolívar’s rallying call to unite his country in their fight: ‘a great volcano lies at our feet … [and] the yoke of slavery will break.’

Bolívar continued to use metaphors drawn from the natural world. Liberty was a ‘precious plant’, for example, or later, as chaos and disunity descended on the new nations, Bolívar warned that the revolutionaries were ‘tottering on the edge of an abyss’ and about to ‘drown in the ocean of anarchy’. One of his most used metaphors remained that of a volcano. The danger of a revolution, Bolívar said, was like standing on one that was ‘ready to explode’. He declared that South Americans were marching along a ‘volcanic terrain’, evoking at the same time the splendour and hazards of the Andes.

Humboldt had been wrong about Bolívar. When they had first met in Paris in the summer of 1804, and then a year later in Rome, he had dismissed the excitable creole as a dreamer – but as he watched his old friend succeed, he had changed his mind. In July 1822 Humboldt wrote a letter to Bolívar, praising him as the ‘founder of your beautiful fatherland’s freedom and independence’. Humboldt also reminded him how South America was his own second home. ‘I reiterate my vow for the glory of the people of America,’ he told Bolívar.

Nature, politics and society formed a triangle of connections. One influenced the other. Societies were shaped by their environment – natural resources could bring riches to a nation, or, as Bolívar had experienced, an untamed wilderness such as the Andes could inspire strength and conviction. This idea, however, could also be applied quite differently, as several European scientists had done. Since the mid-

eighteenth century some thinkers had insisted on the ‘degeneracy of America’. One such was the French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, who in the 1760s and 1770s had written that in America all things ‘shrink and diminish under a niggardly sky and unprolific land’. The New World was inferior to the Old World, Buffon asserted in the most widely read natural history work of the second half of the century. According to Buffon, plants, animals and even people were smaller and weaker in the New World. There were no large mammals or any civilized people, he said, and even the savages there were ‘feeble’.