The Book of the Dead (15 page)

Humboldt’s early life has some similarities to Peary’s. His father, a major in the Prussian army and one of Frederick the Great’s closest advisers, died when he was ten. His mother loomed large in his life as Peary’s had done, but far from smothering him with love, Maria von Humboldt drafted in a corps of private tutors to educate Alexander and his older brother, Wilhelm, to an appropriate standard. Alexander did not meet it. He was an inattentive student, preferring to spend time poring over his collections of plants, insects, and rocks, earning himself the nickname “the little apothecary.” He also had a gift for languages and could draw beautifully, particularly landscapes, but Maria was unimpressed. She wanted him to be a politician. Carted off to a succession of universities, he failed to graduate from any of them. Toiling away at finance and economics to please his mother, he quietly developed his languages and studied geology, botany, and history on the side.

At Göttingen University he made friends with Georg Forster, son of Johann Reinhold Forster, the naturalist on James Cook’s second voyage to the South Pacific. Talking with Georg, Humboldt suddenly realized what he wanted to do: Scientific exploration was to be his destiny. Sensing that geology was the quickest way to get there, he entered the Freiberg School of Mines, a new and progressive establishment with a growing international reputation. Humboldt was the star student of his year, staggering everyone with his ability to memorize immense
amounts of technical information and with his capacity for hard work. Once again, he didn’t graduate, but he didn’t need to: The Prussian government offered him a job as an assessor of mines. Posted to rural Bavaria, he spent five years reorganizing a series of semiredundant gold and copper mines, reequipping them, hiring new staff, and introducing the latest mining technology. He invented a safety lamp, and using his own money, founded a technical school for young miners. The government was so taken with him they sent him on several diplomatic missions to France. Louis Philippe, king of the French, always looked forward to his visits. Then in 1796 Alexander von Humboldt’s mother died.

Like Mary Kingsley at a similar age, Humboldt all at once found himself free of family obligations. What’s more, he had been left a sizable inheritance. He began to plan, but a chance meeting with a diplomat led to an introduction to Charles IV of Spain. The Spanish empire was sitting on a vast hoard of mineral wealth in South America and Humboldt made a favorable impression on the king, talking him through the latest developments in mining. The result was an invitation to visit the Spanish colonies in South America, at that time completely closed to the rest of the world. This was the break that Humboldt had waited for, and he immediately went out and spent a fortune on scientific and astronomical instruments. He set sail from Marseilles with the French botanist Aimé Bonpland in 1799. Together they spent five years in Central and South America, covering six thousand miles on horseback, in canoes, and on foot. It was a journey that would change our understanding of the world.

The revolutionary general and liberator of South America, Simón Bolívar (1783–1830), called Humboldt the true discoverer of the continent. Before him no one had guessed that the Amazon
rain forest was the planet’s richest and most diverse habitat. With Bonpland he collected more than 60,000 samples and discovered over 3,500 new species: No single trip has ever yielded as many. Humboldt’s vision went far beyond the work of his contemporaries, who were busily filling in branches on the sprouting tree of species devised by Linnaeus. He was intent on uncovering the hidden connections between apparently unconnected phenomena. He wasn’t just interested in what a plant looked like. He wanted to know why it lived where it lived, the type of rocks that produced the soil it grew in, the prevailing climatic conditions, the other species that grew near it—as well as the species that fed on it, near it, or under it and how the whole ecological cycle it was part of worked. That was why he had to travel. It was not enough to give his samples a label and a Latin name: He had to understand the context. One of the pleasures of reading Humboldt is that he never lost his childlike sense of awe: “The stars as they sparkle in the firmament fill us with delight and ecstasy,” he wrote, “and yet they all move in orbit marked out with mathematical precision.”

Humboldt was incapable of noticing anything without then asking “why?” When he observed the “brilliant fireworks” of the Leonid meteor shower in northern Venezuela, he went on to calculate when they would next return. Confronted with volcanoes, he perceived that they were lined up along subterranean fissures in the earth’s crust and was able to demonstrate the course of those faults. He proved that many mountain ranges were volcanic in origin, destroying the then fashionable theory of Neptunism, which suggested that all rocks were originally oceanic sediments. He was the first to show that the earth’s magnetic field weakens as you travel from the poles toward the
equator. He covered so much ground he was able to plot lines linking places with the same temperature to map the planet’s climate, for which he coined the word “isotherm.” His discovery of the guano deposits on the Peruvian coast revolutionized agriculture in Europe and America, providing entrepreneurs with a lucrative and potent source of fertilizer.

His scientific curiosity extended to human culture, too. In South America he saw that the continent’s startling range of plant and animal species was mirrored by its ethnic diversity: “A traveler, however great his talent for languages, can never hope to learn enough to make himself understood along the navigable rivers.” On the Orinoco he found a parrot that was the last remaining speaker of a language belonging to a tribe exterminated by its neighbors, and dutifully recorded the bird’s forty-word vocabulary. Aztec and Inca ruins led him to suggest, heretically for his time, that their cultures had once rivaled the ancient civilizations of Europe and the Middle East—and he was the first to speculate that the native peoples of South America had originally come from Asia, a hypothesis now confirmed by genetics. Wherever Humboldt looked, new possibilities emerged.

He was a remarkably hands-on scientist. While still a mining inspector back in Bavaria, his fascination with Luigi Galvani’s theories of animal magnetism had led him to conduct more than four thousand experiments, many on himself, in which he attached electrodes to his skin and recorded the sometimes excruciating pain they caused. In South America he and Bonpland climbed to 19,260 feet (5,870 meters) on Chimborazo, the Ecuadorian volcano then thought to be the world’s highest mountain. Although they didn’t quite make the summit, no one had ever climbed so high before. Humboldt, his nose streaming
blood, became the first person to note down the effects (and correctly guess the cause) of altitude sickness. In the jungle he reported being unable to breathe because of the dense clouds of mosquitoes. Seeing how the Orinoco Indians prepared curare, a poison from plants, he tested it on himself, then on captured monkeys, giving them gradated doses and even resorting to mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to keep them alive. To penetrate the mystery of electric eels, he “imprudently” placed both his bare feet on one (“the pain and the numbness are so violent it is impossible to describe the nature of the feeling they excite”) and then asked the Indians how to collect specimens safely. They showed him how by driving a herd of thirty wild horses into an eel-infested lake. As the water crackled with electric charge, the terrified horses lunged frantically about with bulging eyes; several succumbed to the shocks and drowned, but gradually the eels ran out of battery. Once the horses were calm (or dead), Humboldt could pick up the exhausted eels (using dry lengths of wood to act as an insulator) and begin his dissections, meticulously noting down all the various shocks he received in the process.

Humboldt arrived back in Paris to find himself famous. It wasn’t altogether a surprise: He had shrewd marketing instincts. He had sent back many of his most exciting samples well in advance. He had also written letters to friends that began “By the time you receive this I will probably be dead …”—all of which helped to create a sense of anticipation.

As Bonpland embarked on cataloging the contents of the teetering stacks of sample cases, Humboldt set out to turn his notes and sketches into a book. His initial estimate of two years’ work proved hopelessly optimistic. The thirty volumes of
Personal Narrative: A Voyage to the Equinoctial Regions of a New Continent 1799–1804
took him almost thirty years (and almost all of his money) to complete. It is one of the great milestones of scientific literature and one of the very few that reads with the mounting excitement of an adventure story.

One of the reasons the book took so long to finish is that Humboldt had so much else to do. Over the next three decades, he climbed Vesuvius three times, went under the Thames in the diving bell used by Isambard Kingdom Brunel during the construction of the Thames Tunnel, and led a six-month expedition across Russia to the Chinese border. This didn’t quite match the South American journey for new discoveries or excitement, but it did lead to the establishment of a network of meteorological stations that stretched first across Russia and then around the world. The data they collected transformed our understanding of the weather and the operation of the earth’s magnetic field. The 1911 edition of
Encyclopedia Britannica
described it as “the first truly international scientific collaboration.”

Little is known of Humboldt the private man. The mask of the suave diplomat rarely slipped, although his close friend and fellow scientist François Arago hinted at a more unbuttoned Humboldt behind closed doors: “He has the most malicious tongue of any man I know and the best heart.” He never married. His close friendships with men have led many to suppose he was gay, but he destroyed all his personal papers so the evidence either way is thin. Firsthand testimonies of his participation in the lively subculture of nineteenth-century Berlin mostly consist of dark mutterings about his consorting with “obscene, dissolute youths” and tend to come from the more conservative and religious-minded of his younger colleagues. There is also the mystery of why he bequeathed his whole estate to an elderly male
valet, but again that hardly offers conclusive proof of anything, especially as he had no immediate heirs. We’ll never know for sure. It may have been that, like Mary Kingsley, he suppressed whatever sexual urges he had in order to concentrate on his work. This was a man, after all, who survived for eight decades on no more than four hours’ sleep a night.

Humboldt ended his life in triumph. As he approached seventy, after most of us have retired, he conceived his crowning achievement: “I have the crazy idea to represent in one work the entire material universe.” The five volumes of
Kosmos
pulled together his experience of more than half a century at the front line of scientific research. The product of what he called his “improbable years,” it was a magnificent achievement, rap rously received across Europe and in America. Humboldt lived to see all but the last volume published and died quietly in his sleep just a few months short of his ninetieth birthday.

After his death, Humboldt’s reputation plummeted rapidly. His works were hardly read at all in the first half of the twentieth century and far more people today recognize the names of Linnaeus and Darwin. Given the preeminence he had enjoyed during his lifetime, this is hard to understand. It may be that Humboldt’s work, for all its density and richness of detail, lacks what his greatest disciple, Charles Darwin, could offer: a simple, organizing theory that binds it all together. Fascinating as
Kosmos
is to read, most of the science in it has been superseded by more recent research. Nevertheless, if the last 150 years of biology have been a series of footnotes to Darwin’s theory of natural selection, Humboldt’s time is now. Faced with the possibility of catastrophic global warming, we can see just how prescient he had been about the earth as a single system. Darwin might have helped us join the
dots in the tree of life, but to comprehend the climatic and geological forces that create and sustain it, Humboldt is still the man.

His work is imbued with the spirit of liberty and freedom that had animated the revolutions in America and France. His experiences in South America left him with a strong distaste for colonialism, for much the same reason as Mary Kingsley: It demeaned both parties. And
Kosmos
makes his views on race plain: “While we maintain the unity of the human species, we at the same time repel the depressing assumption of superior and inferior races of men…. All are in like degree designed for freedom.”

Darwin enthusiastically endorsed this sentiment, but one of the unforeseen consequences of his evolutionary theory was that it encouraged the idea that human beings were “improvable.” In the last paragraph of
The Descent of Man
(1871) Darwin writes: “Man may be excused for feeling some pride at having risen, though not through his own exertions, to the very summit of the organic scale.” The crucial phrase here is
“not through his own exertions.”
Man has been “improved” by the operations of natural selection, not by the imposition of his own will. Darwin’s point is that for all man’s noble qualities and achievements, he still bears the “the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.”