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Introduction [uncorrected proof]
In August 1804, on his return from his great journey to the Americas, Alexander von Humboldt was very much the hero of the hour. After five years of travelling, his coffers were full of the scientific treasures of the New World, and regular bulletins about his progress, published in the papers, had ensured that his exploits had not gone unappreciated by the public. The thirty-four-year-old, tanned, confident, and gifted with social ease, had, everybody knew, climbed the highest mountain in the world, the Chimborazo in the Andes. He had walked in untouched forests, spoken to the people who lived there, and discovered a secret natural canal, the Casiquiare, that linked the great water-systems of the Amazon and the Orinoco. He would have returned to Europe some months earlier had not Thomas Jefferson, the president of the United States, personally asked to make his acquaintance and to profit from his advice.
Alexander von Humboldt was the most celebrated scientist of the nineteenth century. Jefferson called Humboldt ‘one of the greatest ornaments of the age.’ Charles Darwin, who took his copy of Humboldt’s account of his travels in South America with him on his voyage on the Beagle, declared, ‘my whole course of life is due to having read & reread as a youth his Personal Narrative.’ Edgar Allen Poe dedicated a poem to Humboldt, Lord Byron mocked him in one of his, and the great German poet Goethe invoked him in a novel.
An astonishing number of places and things have been named after Humboldt, more, in fact, than after any other human being. Just a small selection includes an ocean current, three counties (in California, Iowa, and Nevada), several universities, an oak, a penguin, a squid, an asteroid, and a crater on the moon.
And yet, the fabric of Humboldt’s life does not settle easily into a narrative defined by superlative achievements and public honours. Here, after all, is a man who recoiled in dread when told that a statue was to be erected in his honour. What is more, many of the claims made for him don’t quite hold up when pressed into the framework of a heroic narrative.
The Chimborazo, of course, turned out not to be the highest mountain in the world at all. And while Humboldt had probably climbed to a greater height than anybody before him, he did not reach the summit, but had to turn back at around 5,600 metres. The existence of the Casiquiare canal had not only been known to local people, but also to the Académie française, thanks to reports from the explorer Charles Marie de La Condamine, who had described it in 1745. The claim that is sometimes made for Humboldt—that he anticipated the discovery of the theory of evolution—distorts his vision, and sells short its distinctiveness. While Darwin did cite Humboldt’s account of his travels as a personal inspiration, Humboldt’s interest in unity in nature was in the tradition of Goethe’s search for an underlying synthetic plan, a project fundamentally different from Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection. (An eventual encounter between the two men in 1842 failed to reveal much common ground: Darwin reported later that he could not remember anything particular about their conversation, except that Humboldt had been ‘very cheerful and talked much.’)
If we change the focus and turn to presenting a man whose contradictions and ambiguous achievements are a function of his time, then a more nuanced, as well as a truer and more interesting picture emerges. Humboldt’s life was deeply in tune with the most significant and ambitious themes of early German Romanticism. It was an exceptional life, lived in no less exceptional times.
German Romanticism was a heady movement. The Enlightenment had brought about a weakening of religious and societal restrictions on a scale that had not been seen before. At the same time, the Romantic focus on the individual placed a new value on feeling, legitimising the pursuit of personal needs and desires. With established ways of living often deeply unsatisfying, German Romantics discovered the thrill of living differently. There were new and often daring experimental set-ups, aimed at fashioning ways of life that better chimed with people’s ideas of themselves than those prescribed for them by a still restrictive social order. In Berlin, salons sprang up, enthusiastically attended by the young Humboldt, where different segments of society mixed. People entertained the idea of trying out triangular arrangements, as did Humboldt’s friend and mentor Georg Forster, who lived—for a while—with his wife, Therese, and her lover. Women rebelled against the idea that they had to persevere with unsuitable and often loveless marriages, and, if they found the economic means of escaping them, they often did. Caroline Michaelis and Dorothea Schlegel—both women of letters and part of Humboldt’s circle—divorced their husbands, remarried, and discovered that societal disapproval was something they were able to live with.
Real life, of course, had a way of paling in comparison with an unachieved ideal. It was therefore in the nature of the project of finding new and better forms of living that the goal should never be quite reached, but should remain in the realm of the absolute. The unfulfilled was programmatic. The Blue Flower, the mysterious, ethereal symbol of German Romanticism, is so vaguely defined as to be forever elusive, and generally there is a preference for the absolute over the tangible.
Alexander von Humboldt was deeply committed to the Romantic project, both in his science as well as in the bold way that he chose to live his life.
The person who had introduced the motif of the Blue Flower was Friedrich von Hardenberg, who wrote under his better-known pen name, Novalis. Like Humboldt, he was a mining inspector, and, also like him, an alumnus of Germany’s foremost mining academy. A number of Romanticism’s leading figures worked in mining or wrote about it, and the connection left a mark on the thinking of the time. Going inside the earth became a metaphor for turning inside, towards the self and its dark depths, in the search for personal enlightenment and truth.
The turn to the interior also meant that the most objective criterion was, eventually, found in the most subjective one: what Humboldt’s own senses told him. From his mining days onwards, Humboldt began to look at his own body as his most reliable and most decisive instrument. He conducted galvanic experiments on himself until the pain became so overwhelming that he had to stop; he tested the amount of dangerous mine gas his newly-developed miner’s safety lamp could take before going out—and almost extinguished himself in the process, having to be dragged out of a mine by his feet, unconscious. An ascent of the volcano Pichincha, near Quito, had to be abandoned when Humboldt came to the point of fainting. On the banks of the Orinoco, he contemplated the idea that the essence of a natural phenomenon could be grasped in its truest form through an emotional response. For this, it was necessary to go beyond the purely quantitative, the mere collecting of data, and gain what he called a ‘total impression.’ This thought finds echoes in some of the ideas of the Romantic philosopher Friedrich Schelling, Humboldt’s acquaintance and sometime collaborator. If nature was an independent entity with agency of its own, and constructed on similar lines as the self, then its phenomena could be understood by intuition—a process that would merge nature and self, the objective and the subjective.
Once a limit had been established, be it that of one’s own body, experience, or tradition, the Romantic impulse was to go beyond it—to widen the scope, and to open the view to the infinite. There was a predilection for the unfinished and incomplete, matched by an instinctive aversion to anything that was predictable and clearly delineated.
At the point of having secured a career that was destined to make him one of the most powerful men in the Prussian state administration, Alexander von Humboldt threw it away for an idea of almost spectacular vagueness—something that amounted, at that stage, to little more than an ill-defined yearning to travel.
On the Chimborazo, a crevasse forced him to turn around, but, in better weather, a different route might have been tried. However, when conditions improved the next day, Humboldt declined to try again. He did not seem to see this as a failure, and after his journey he kept having himself painted against the Chimborazo as a background. He preferred to have his favourite mountain winking in the distance rather than have it underfoot.
When he came to evaluate and write up the results of his journey, many of the volumes he planned were never completed. This was not for lack of time—he died in his ninetieth year. Most importantly, Humboldt failed to finish what was meant to be the synthesis of all his scientific achievements, his great work: Cosmos (Kosmos). The missing section was to deal with human beings; he intended it to be the culmination of Cosmos, and it would have completed his project. Leaving a fragment was perhaps a more satisfying way to hint at a greater whole, just beyond grasp.
The great hope of Romantic science is not just to understand nature as an object. There is an idea that nature, elevated into a subject, should in turn affect a transformation in the observer. Goethe hinted at this most pithily when he wrote, with Humboldt in mind, that ‘nobody walks under palm trees unpunished.’
Humboldt achieved this ambition—he was transformed by his experience of nature. In the Americas, he encountered a world that was defined almost in opposition to all he had known, and in it, more truly found his own self. He returned to Europe at peace with the person he was. His last decades found him in a domestic arrangement that was unusual, slightly mysterious, frowned on by his brother Wilhelm’s family—and, it seems, wholly agreeable to him.
Although Alexander von Humboldt kept many of the exact circumstances of this life to himself, the signs are that he succeeded in going beyond the boundaries of ordinary life, and discovered the possibility of a more benign, and a more generous dispensation.
Chapter 1: ‘A Citizen of the World’
The crossing from Havana to Philadelphia was perilous. On the evening of May 6, 1804, the sun, a pallid disk, grotesquely swollen, had sunk into the sea behind bottle green clouds—‘a sight I will never forget,’ Humboldt recalled later, who thought it was a portend of disaster. He was right—the next morning brought a heavy storm, one that would rage for six days. The rain came down so fast that it was more like a sort of dense, icy fog: ‘drops fell like snow. It was impossible to turn the face to the wind.’ Everybody was wet to the skin, water sloshed down the cabin stairs, and portside, cooking pots, with the meals half-cooked, could be seen floating out of the galley. The sight of circling sharks did nothing to help the general mood. The sailors seemed to have little confidence about their prospects—they kept asking for more brandy, following the logic that if one was to be drowned, one might as well drown one’s sorrows first.
Three days into this, on the morning of May 9, things got so bad that Humboldt believed that all was lost. He felt strangely exhilarated. His life, he reflected, had been full and happy. After a journey that had exceeded all that he had been hoping and wishing for, perhaps it was only fair that he should now pay the price.
But he also reproached himself. He had explored the interior of South America, faced countless dangers, and yet emerged unscathed. Was he now, so close to the finishing line, to go down together with all the treasures he had gathered, his notes and his plant specimens, many of them of species new to science? What was more, his decision to travel to the United States, he knew and admitted freely, had been ‘in no way necessary.’
After his time in South America, from July 1799 to early 1803, Humboldt had spent a year in Mexico, and then sailed on to Cuba, to pick up some of his collections that he had stored there earlier. While he was preparing them for shipping to Europe, the American consul in Havana, Vincent F. Gray, approached him and invited him to visit the United States, and to meet President Jefferson.
There was no shortage of reasons why it would have been expedient to decline and return to Europe without further delay, and compelling ones, too: while Humboldt couldn’t have predicted how close to disaster the passage from Havana to the United States would come, he did know that, with the approaching hurricane season, it would not be without risk. And after all these years of travelling, and having pushed at the borders of physical endurance, he was weary, and wanted to be home. Also, there was a concern that, with his active research completed, his findings might lose their immediacy, or be overtaken. Now was the time to present the fruits of his journey to the scientific world back home. ‘I think of nothing but of preserving and publishing my manuscripts,’ Humboldt had written. ‘How I long to be in Paris!’
And yet, when the chance presented itself to visit the United States, Humboldt grasped at it without hesitation.
An idea of his motivation can be glimpsed in the letter he wrote to Jefferson: ‘In spite of my intense desire to be back in Paris [. . .], I could not resist the moral interest to see the United States and to enjoy the comforting aspect of a people who appreciate the precious gift of freedom.’
The notion of freedom had always held a place of special, almost sacred importance in the firmament of Humboldt’s ideals. He took great pride in the fact that, on passing through Paris on the first anniversary of the French Revolution, he had helped cart some sand to the Temple of Liberty with his own hands. Conversely, having witnessed on his travels the suffering of indigenous people subjugated by colonists and the church, he had been confirmed in his belief that lack of freedom and autonomy was one of the most insidious causes of human misery.
The United States, on the other hand, was the first nation in the Americas that had successfully liberated itself from the yoke of colonial rule. While France, where Napoleon was preparing to have himself crowned as emperor, had strayed far from the ideals of the Revolution, it seemed to have fallen to the United States to show that there could be another model. After all, the man he had been invited to meet, Thomas Jefferson, had drafted the Declaration of Independence, with its ringing emphasis on equality and freedom. Both these lofty notions, of course, might have suffered some qualification due to the fact that Jefferson himself was a slaveholder. However, Humboldt seems to have opted for leaving such thorny questions aside for the moment.
*
The storm did not sink the ship, and on May 19, Humboldt had the chance to form his first impression of the United States from the sea. Compared to the lush tropical coastlines he had become used to, the vegetation seemed sparse—like strokes of pen on paper. It was magnificent in a different way though: travelling up the Delaware River, Humboldt admired ‘its banks adorned with villages, the majestic stream covered with ships.’
In Philadelphia, Humboldt encountered an enthusiastic welcome. He was inducted into the American Philosophical Society, the scholarly institution founded by Benjamin Franklin, whose members also included Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, John Adams, Thomas Paine, Benjamin Rush, and of course Jefferson—who, as president of the society, personally signed Humboldt’s membership certificate.
The visit to Washington was, if anything, even more successful: Humboldt was received by Jefferson in the White House (then still known as ‘the President’s House’), and the two men soon fell into an easy familiarity. He had a standing invitation to come to the President’s House whenever he liked, and once, when making an unannounced appearance, found Jefferson sitting on the floor of the drawing room with his grandchildren clambering over him. The president is reported to have risen, shaken Humboldt’s hand, and told his visitor: ‘You have found me playing the fool, Baron, but I am sure to you I need make no apology.’
Hostesses went to great lengths to outdo each other when catering for the star guest: one, Anna Maria Brodeau Thornton, had noted down the lengths she had gone to: she ordered fish, strawberries, vegetables, peppers, bacon, half a gallon of Madeira, and a half dozen claret. Humboldt, in turn, didn’t disappoint. We have a taste of the impression he made from Dolley Madison, who reported, ‘We have lately had a great treat in the company of a charming Prussian Baron von Humboldt. All the ladies say they are in love with him [. . .]. He had with him a train of philosophers, who, though clever and entertaining, did not compare with the Baron.’ Another hostess, Margaret Bayard Smith, was ready to claim Humboldt for her own country. He was ‘a charming man,’ she pronounced, whose ‘enlightened mind has already made him an American, and we are not without hopes, that after having scratched his curiosity with travel he will spend the remainder of his days in the United States.’
Humboldt returned the compliment: the days he had spent in Washington, he wrote to James Madison, were ‘the most delightful of his life.’
But Mrs. Smith recognised that Humboldt’s vision went beyond any nation, even the United States. ‘He was most truly a citizen of the world & wherever he went he felt himself perfectly at home,’ she wrote. More importantly, she added, ‘in all climes, he recognized man as his brother.’
