The Invention of Nature

Marie Elisabeth von Humboldt sent eighteen-year-old Alexander to university in Frankfurt an der Oder. Some seventy miles west of Berlin, this provincial institution had only 200 students, and she had probably chosen it for its closeness to Tegel rather than its academic merit. After Alexander had completed a semester of government administration studies and political economy there, it was decided that he was ready to join Wilhelm in Göttingen, one of the best universities in the German states. Wilhelm studied law and Alexander focused on science, mathematics and languages. Though the brothers were in the same town, they spent little time together. ‘Our characters are too different,’ Wilhelm said. While Wilhelm studied hard, Alexander dreamed of the tropics and adventures. He longed to leave Germany. As a boy Alexander had read the journals of Captain James Cook and Louis Antoine de Bougainville, both of whom had circumnavigated the globe, and imagined himself far away. When he saw the tropical palms at the botanical garden in Berlin, all he wanted to do was see them in their natural environments.

This youthful wanderlust became more serious when Humboldt joined an older friend, Georg Forster, on a four-month trip across Europe. Forster was a German naturalist who had accompanied Cook on his second voyage around the world. Humboldt and Forster had met in Göttingen. They often talked about the expedition, and Forster’s lively descriptions of the South Pacific islands made Humboldt’s longing to travel even stronger.

In the spring of 1790, Forster and Humboldt went to England, the Netherlands and France but the highlight of their journey was London, where everything made Humboldt think of distant countries. He saw the Thames choked with vessels bringing goods from all corners of the globe. Some 15,000 ships entered the port every year loaded with spices from the East Indies, sugar from the West Indies, tea from China, wine from France and timber from Russia. The whole river was a ‘black forest’ of masts. In between the large trading ships were hundreds of barges, wherries and smaller boats. Undoubtedly crowded and congested, it was also a magnificent portrait of Britain’s imperial might.

A view of London and the Thames (Illustration Credit 1.2)

In London, Humboldt was introduced to botanists, explorers, artists and thinkers. He met Captain William Bligh (of the infamous mutiny on the Bounty), and Joseph Banks, Cook’s botanist on his first voyage around the world, and by now the president of the Royal Society, the most important scientific forum in Britain. Humboldt admired the beguiling paintings and sketches that William Hodges, the artist who had joined Cook’s second voyage, had brought back. Wherever Humboldt turned, new worlds were conjured up. Even in the early mornings, the first things he saw when he opened his eyes were the framed engravings of the East India Company ships that decorated the bedroom walls in his lodgings. Humboldt often wept when he saw these painful reminders of his unfulfilled dreams. ‘There is a drive in me,’ he wrote, ‘that often makes me feel as if I’m losing my mind.’

When the sadness became unbearable, he went on long solitary walks. On one such excursion through the countryside in Hampstead just north of London, he saw a recruiting notice nailed to a tree, calling for young sailors. For a brief moment he thought he had found an answer to his wishes but then he remembered his strict mother. Humboldt felt an inexplicable pull towards the unknown, what the Germans call Fernweh – a longing for distant places – but he was ‘too good a son’, he conceded, to turn against her.

He was slowly going crazy, he believed, and began to write ‘mad letters’ to his friends back home. ‘My unhappy circumstances,’ Humboldt wrote to one friend on the eve of his departure from England, ‘force me to want what I can’t have, and to do what I don’t like.’ But he still didn’t dare to challenge his mother’s expectations of what an upbringing in the Prussian elite entailed.

Back home Humboldt’s misery became a frantic energy. He was impelled by a ‘perpetual drive’, he wrote, as if chased by ’10,000 pigs’. He darted back and forth, jumping from one subject to another. No longer did he feel insecure about his intellectual abilities or think himself lagging behind his older brother. He was proving to himself, his friends and family just how clever he was. Forster was convinced that Humboldt’s ‘brain has been sadly overworked’ – and he was not the only one. Even Wilhelm von Humboldt’s fiancée, Caroline von Dachröden, who had only met Alexander recently, was concerned. She liked Alexander, but she feared that he was going to ‘snap’. Many who knew him often remarked on this restless activity and how fast he spoke – at ‘race-horse speed’.