The Invention of Nature

Rather than be inspired by abstract theory or philosophy, Bolívar reminded his countrymen that they should learn from forests, rivers and mountains. ‘You will also discover important guides to action in the very nature of our country which includes the lofty regions of the Andes and the burning shores of the Orinoco,’ he told the congress in Bogotá. ‘Study them closely, and you will learn there,’ he urged, ‘what Congress should decree for the happiness of the people of Colombia.’ Nature, Bolívar said, was the ‘infallible teacher of men’.

¹ Jefferson was not the first American to take up the dispute. In the 1780s Benjamin Franklin, during his time as the American Minister in Paris, had attended a dinner party together with Abbé Raynal, one of the offending scientists. Franklin noted that all the American guests were sitting on one side of the table with the French opposite. Seizing the opportunity, he offered his challenge: ‘Let both parties rise, and we will see on which side nature had degenerated.’ As it happened all the Americans were of the ‘finest stature’, Franklin later told Jefferson, while the French were all diminutive – in particular Raynal who was ‘a mere shrimp’.

13

London

WHILE SIMÓN BOLÍVAR fought bloody battles to break the colonial chains, Humboldt was trying to convince the British to let him travel to India. In order to complete his Naturgemälde of the world, Humboldt wanted to investigate the Himalaya to collect the data he needed to compare the two majestic mountain ranges. No scientist had ever climbed the Himalaya. Since the British had arrived on the subcontinent, it hadn’t even occurred to them to measure these magnificent mountains, Humboldt said. They had just ‘thoughtlessly looked at them without even asking themselves how high these colossal Himalaya were’. Humboldt intended to determine heights, understand geological features and examine plant distribution there – just as he had in the Andes.

Since the day he had set foot on French soil after his expedition in 1804, Humboldt had longed to leave Europe again. His wanderlust was his most faithful companion. Knowledge could not be gained from books alone, Humboldt believed. To understand the world, a scientist had to be in nature – to feel and experience it – a notion that Goethe had explored in Faust when he depicted Heinrich Faust’s assistant Wagner as a single-minded and one-dimensional character who saw no reason to learn from nature itself but only from books.

One soon grows tired of forests and fields;

I never envied any bird its wings.

But the pursuit of intellectual things

From book to book, from page to page – what joy that yields!

Goethe’s Wagner is the epitome of the narrow-minded scholar locked up in his laboratory and buried in a prison of books. Humboldt was the opposite. He was a scientist who did not just want to make sense of the natural world intellectually but also wanted to experience nature viscerally.

The only problem was that Humboldt would need the permission of the British East India Company which controlled much of India. Founded in 1600 as a cartel of merchants who pooled their resources in order to create a trade monopoly, the company had extended its reach across the subcontinent through its private armies. Over the past century the East India Company had risen from being a commercial enterprise that imported and exported goods to a formidable military power. By the first decade of the nineteenth century, when Humboldt began to think about an expedition to the Himalaya, the East India Company had become so powerful that it functioned like a state within a state. Just as Humboldt had needed permission from the Spanish king to travel to South America, he now required approval from the directors of the East India Company.

A view of the Himalaya (Illustration Credit 13.1)

The first volume of the Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain had been published in English in 1811, and Humboldt’s fierce attack on Spanish colonialism had not gone unnoticed in London. What were they to think of a man who talked of the ‘cruelty of the Europeans’? It can’t have helped that Humboldt, in his constant effort to find correlations, had many times compared Spanish rule in Latin America with that of the British in India. The history of conquest in South America and India, Humboldt wrote in the Political Essay of New Spain, was an ‘unequal struggle’, or – again pointing at Britain – the South Americans and ‘Hindoos’, he accused, ‘have long groaned under a civil and military despotism’. Reading these remarks can’t have enamoured the directors of the East India Company to Humboldt’s travel plans.