The Invention of Nature

The prospect of Bonpland emigrating had been particularly exciting for the revolutionaries, given his extensive knowledge of Latin America. Everybody was ‘impatiently waiting for you’, one of them had told Bonpland. In spring 1815, as royalist troops were regaining much of the territory along the Río Magdalena in New Granada and the revolutionary army was decimated by desertion and disease, Bolívar himself had found time to write and offer Mutis’s position in Bogotá to Bonpland. But in the end Bonpland had been too worried about the brutal civil war that had been raging in New Granada and Venezuela. Instead he had left France at the end of 1816 for Buenos Aires.

Twelve years after he had left South America with Humboldt, Bonpland was sailing back – this time loaded with fruit tree saplings, vegetable seeds, grapes and medicinal plants to start a new life. After a couple of years in Buenos Aires, though, Bonpland had had enough of city life. He had never enjoyed the orderly work of a studious scholar. He was a field botanist who loved finding rare plants but was useless when it came to sorting them. Over the years he assembled 20,000 dried plants but his herbarium was a complete mess with specimens piled into boxes, loosely bound together and not even mounted on paper. In 1820 Bonpland settled in Santa Ana on the Paraná River in Argentina near the border with Paraguay where he collected plants and grew yerba mate – leaves that were brewed like tea and a popular drink in South America.

On 25 November 1821, exactly five years after Bonpland had left France for Argentina, Humboldt wrote to him, sending some money but also complaining that he hadn’t heard from his ‘old companion-in-fortune’. Bonpland never received the letter. On 8 December 1821, two weeks after Humboldt had posted his letter, 400 Paraguayan soldiers crossed the border into Argentina and stormed Bonpland’s farm in Santa Ana. On the orders of José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia, the dictator of Paraguay, the men killed Bonpland’s workers and put him in chains. Francia accused Bonpland of agricultural espionage and feared that his flourishing plantation would be in competition with the Paraguayan yerba mate trade. Bonpland was dragged into Paraguay where he was imprisoned.

Old friends tried to help. Bolívar, who was by then in Lima attempting to purge the Spanish from Peru, wrote to Francia, requesting Bonpland’s freedom as well as threatening to march to Paraguay to rescue him. Francia could count on him as an ally, Bolívar said, but only if the ‘innocent whom I love, will not become the victim of injustice’. Humboldt also did what he could through his European contacts. He dispatched letters to Paraguay signed by famous scientists and asked his old London acquaintance George Canning (who by now was the Foreign Secretary) to involve the British consul in Buenos Aires – but Francia refused to release Bonpland.

Meanwhile Humboldt’s own travel plans had come to a standstill. Despite the support of the Prince Regent and of George Canning, the East India Company continued to refuse Humboldt entrance to India. It felt as if he had been going round in circles in the past few years. Whereas his years in Latin America, and those just after, had been marked by breathless activity and a constant forward trajectory, Humboldt now felt choked by stagnation. He was no longer the dashing, heroic young explorer who was celebrated for his adventures but a distinguished and respected scientist in his fifties. Most of his middle-aged contemporaries would have been glad to be admired and courted for their knowledge, but Humboldt was not ready to settle. There was still so much to do. He was so fretful that one friend called his restlessness a ‘maladie centrifuge’ – Humboldt’s centrifugal illness.

Frustrated, annoyed and upset, Humboldt felt cheated and unappreciated. He now announced that he would turn his back on Europe. He would move to Mexico where he planned to establish an institute for the sciences. In Mexico, he would surround himself with scholarly men, he told his brother in October 1822, and enjoy the ‘liberty of thought’. At least there, he was ‘greatly respected’. He was absolutely certain that he would spend the rest of his life outside Europe. A few years later, Humboldt told Bolívar that he still planned to move to Latin America. No one really knew what Humboldt wanted or where he intended to go. Wilhelm summed it up when he said: ‘Alexander always envisages things as being huge, and then not even half of it happens.’