The Invention of Nature

The high mountains of Central Asia had lured him for years. His ambition was to climb the Himalaya so that he could correlate his observations from the Andes. Humboldt had endlessly pestered the British to give him permission to enter the Indian subcontinent. And almost two decades earlier he had even questioned a Russian diplomat in Paris if there was a way to get from the Russian Empire into India or Tibet without becoming entangled in border skirmishes.

Nothing had happened until Humboldt suddenly received a letter from the Russian Finance Minister, the German-born Count Georg von Cancrin. In autumn 1827, as Humboldt prepared his lecture series in Berlin, Cancrin wrote to request information about platinum as a possible Russian currency. Platinum had been found in the Ural Mountains five years previously and Cancrin hoped that Humboldt would be able to provide him with information about the platinum currency that was used in Colombia. He knew that Humboldt still had close connections in South America. Humboldt immediately saw a new opportunity. He answered Cancrin’s query in great detail and over many pages, and then added a short postscript explaining that a visit to Russia was his ‘most burning desire’. The Ural Mountains, Mount Ararat and the Baikal Lake were ‘the sweetest images’ to his mind, he explained.

Though this was not India, if he could get permission to see the Asian part of the Russian Empire, it would probably provide him with enough data to complete his Naturgemälde. Humboldt assured Cancrin that though he had white hair, he could endure the deprivations of a long expedition, and could walk for nine or ten hours without a break.

Less than a month after Humboldt’s reply, Cancrin had spoken to Tsar Nicholas I who invited Humboldt to Russia on an all-expenses-paid expedition. The close relationships between the Prussian and the Russian courts had probably also helped, because Friedrich Wilhelm III’s sister, Alexandra, was Tsar Nicholas I’s wife. Humboldt was finally going to Asia.

¹ Humboldt organized this conference for the German Association of Naturalists and Physicians.

16

Russia

THE SKY WAS clear and the air was warm. Empty plains stretched out towards the distant line of the horizon, baking in the summer sun. A convoy of three carriages drove along the so-called Siberian Highway, a road that went several thousand miles east from Moscow.

It was mid-June 1829, and Alexander von Humboldt had left Berlin two months earlier. As the Siberian landscape unfolded, the fifty-nine-year-old stared out of the carriage window, watching as the low-growing grasses of the steppes alternated with endless stretches of forest that mainly consisted of poplars, birches, limes and larch trees. Now and again, a dark green juniper stood out against the peeling white stems of birches. The wild roses were in bloom, as were the small lady’s slipper orchids with their bulging pouch-like blossoms. Though pleasant enough, this was not quite how Humboldt had imagined Russia. The scenery looked a little too similar to the countryside around the Humboldt family estate at Tegel.

It had been the same for weeks now – all vaguely familiar. The roads were made of clay and gravel like those he knew from England, while the vegetation and animals were more or less ‘ordinary’, he thought. There were few animals: sometimes a small rabbit or squirrel, and never more than two or three birds. This was a quiet landscape, with little birdsong. It was all slightly disappointing. A Siberian expedition was certainly ‘not as delightful’, Humboldt said, as one to South America, but at least he was outside and not cooped up at court in Berlin. This was as close as he could get to what he wanted – which was, as he liked to say, a ‘life in wild nature’.

The country rushed past as they sped along. Every ten or twenty miles the horses were changed at way stations in the scattered villages that lined this transit route to the east. The road was wide and well maintained – so good in fact that their coaches raced at an alarming speed. With few taverns or inns along the way, they travelled most nights and Humboldt slept in his carriage as one mile after another rolled by.

Humboldt’s carriage speeding through Russia (Illustration Credit 16.1)