The Invention of Nature

As Buffon’s theories and arguments had spread over the past decades, the natural world of America had become a metaphor for its political and cultural significance or insignificance – depending on the point of view. Besides economic strength, military exploits or scientific achievements, nature had also become an indicator of the importance of a country. During the American Revolution, Jefferson had been furious about Buffon’s assertions and had spent years trying to refute them. If Buffon used size as a measure of strength and superiority, Jefferson only needed to show that everything was in fact larger in the New World in order to elevate his country above those in Europe. In 1782, in the midst of the American War of Independence, Jefferson had published Notes on the State of Virginia in which the flora and fauna of the United States became the foot-soldiers of a patriotic battle. Under the banner of the-bigger-the-better, Jefferson listed the weights of bears, buffalos and panthers to prove his point. Even the weasel, he wrote, was ‘larger in America than in Europe’.

When he moved to France as the American Minister four years later, Jefferson had boasted to Buffon that the Scandinavian reindeer was so small that it ‘could walk under the belly of our moose’. Jefferson had then, at great personal expense, imported a stuffed moose from Vermont to Paris, an enterprise that in the end failed to impress the French because the moose had arrived in Paris in a sorry state of decay with no fur on the skin and exuding a foul smell. But Jefferson had not given up and had asked friends and acquaintances to send him details of ‘the heaviest weights of our animals … from the mouse to the mammoth’. Later, during his presidency, Jefferson had dispatched huge fossil bones and tusks from the North American mastodon to the Académie des Sciences in Paris to show the French just how enormous North American animals were. At the same time, Jefferson was hoping that one day they would find living mastodons roaming somewhere in the yet unexplored parts of the continent. Mountains, rivers, plants and animals had become weapons in the political arena.¹

Humboldt did the same for South America. Not only did he present the continent as one of unrivalled beauty, fertility and magnificence, but he also attacked Buffon directly. ‘Buffon was entirely mistaken,’ he wrote, and later questioned how the French naturalist could have dared to describe the American continent when he had never even seen it. The indigenous people were anything but feeble, Humboldt said; one look at the Carib nation in Venezuela rebutted the wild musings of the European scientists. He had encountered the tribe on his way from the Orinoco to Cumaná and thought they were the tallest, strongest and most beautiful people he had ever seen – like bronze statues of Jupiter.

Humboldt also dismantled Buffon’s idea that South America was a ‘new world’ – a continent that had only just risen from the ocean without history or civilization. The ancient monuments he had seen and then depicted in his publications bore testimony to cultured and refined societies – palaces, aqueducts, statues and temples. In Bogotá, Humboldt had found some old pre-Inca manuscripts (and read their translations) which revealed a complex knowledge of astronomy and mathematics. Equally, the Carib language was so sophisticated that it included abstract concepts such as future and eternity. There was no evidence of the poverty of language that previous explorers had remarked on, Humboldt said, because these languages brought together richness, grace, power and tenderness.

These were not wild savages as the Europeans had portrayed them for the past three centuries. Bolívar, who owned several of Humboldt’s books, must have been delighted when he read in Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain that Buffon’s theories on degeneracy had only become popular because they ‘flattered the vanity of Europeans’.

Humboldt continued to educate the world about Latin America. His views were repeated across the globe through articles and magazines that were peppered with comments such as ‘M. de Humboldt observes’ or ‘informed us’. Humboldt had ‘done America more good than all of the conquerors’, Bolívar said. Humboldt had presented the natural world as a reflection of South America’s identity – a portrait of a continent that was strong, vigorous and beautiful. And that was exactly what Bolívar was doing when he used nature to galvanize his compatriots or to explain his political views.