The Invention of Nature (24 page)

Over the next few years Bolívar continued his battle. He won Caracas back in the summer of 1821, and a year later, in June 1822, he arrived triumphantly in Quito. He rode through the same rugged landscape that had stirred Humboldt’s imagination so profoundly two decades previously. Bolívar himself had never seen this part of South America before. In the valleys the fertile soil produced luxurious trees covered in exquisite blossoms and banana trees laden with fruit. On the higher plains herds of the small vicuñas were grazing, and above them condors were gliding effortlessly with the winds. South of Quito one volcano after another lined the valleys almost like an avenue. At no other place in South America, Bolívar thought, had nature been so ‘generous in gifts’. But as beautiful as the scenery here was, it also made him reflect on what he had given up. After all, he could have lived peacefully, working his fields surrounded by glorious nature. Bolívar was deeply touched by this monumental landscape – emotions he put into words when he wrote a rapturous prose poem called ‘My Delirium on Chimborazo’. It was his allegory for the liberation of Latin America.

In his poem Bolívar follows Humboldt’s footsteps. As he ascends the majestic Chimborazo, Bolívar uses the volcano as an image of his fight to free the Spanish colonies. As he climbs up further, he leaves behind Humboldt’s tracks and imprints his own into the snow. Then, as he battles with each step in the oxygen-deprived air, Bolívar has a vision of Time itself. Overcome by a feverish delirium, he sees the past and future emerging before him. High above him against the vaulted sky lay infinity: ‘I grasp the eternal with my hands,’ he cries, and ‘feel the infernal prisons boiling beneath my footsteps’. With the land rolled out below, Bolívar used Chimborazo to place his life within the context of South America. He was Gran Colombia, the new nation he had wrought, and Gran Colombia was in him. He was El Libertador, the saviour of the colonies and the man who held their destiny in his palms. Here on the icy slopes of Chimborazo, ‘the tremendous voice of Colombia cries out to me’, Bolívar ends his poem.

It wasn’t surprising that Chimborazo became Bolívar’s metaphor for his revolution and destiny – even today the mountain is depicted on the Ecuadorian flag. As so often, Bolívar turned to the natural world to illustrate his thoughts and beliefs. Three years previously, Bolívar had told the congress in Angostura that nature had bestowed great riches on South America. They would be showing the Old World ‘the majesty’ of the New World. More than anything else, Chimborazo – which had become famous across the world through Humboldt’s books – became the perfect articulation for the revolution. ‘Come to Chimborazo,’ Bolívar wrote to his former teacher Simón Rodríguez, to see this crown of earth, this staircase to the gods and this unassailable fortress of the New World. From Chimborazo, Bolívar insisted, one had unobstructed views of the past and the future. It was the ‘throne of nature’ – invincible, eternal and enduring.

Bolívar was at the height of his fame when he wrote ‘My Delirium on Chimborazo’ in 1822. Almost 1 million square miles of South America were under his leadership – an area much bigger than Napoleon’s empire had ever been. The northern South American colonies – much of the area covering modern Colombia, Panama, Venezuela and Ecuador – had been freed with only Peru remaining under Spanish control. But Bolívar wanted more. He dreamed of a pan-American federation that would stretch down from the isthmus of Panama to the southern tip of the Peruvian Viceroyalty, and from Guayaquil at the Pacific coast in the west to the Caribbean Sea on the Venezuelan coast in the east. Such a union would be like ‘a colossus’, he said, and would ’cause the earth to quake with a glance’ – the mighty neighbour that Jefferson so worried about.

In the previous year Bolívar had written a letter to Humboldt that underlined how important his descriptions of South America’s nature had been. It had been Humboldt’s evocative writing that had ‘uprooted’ him and his fellow revolutionaries from ignorance, Bolívar wrote; it had made them proud of their continent. Humboldt was the ‘discoverer of the New World’, Bolívar insisted. And it may well have been Humboldt’s obsessive interest in South American volcanoes that also inspired Bolívar’s rallying call to unite his country in their fight: ‘a great volcano lies at our feet … [and] the yoke of slavery will break.’

Bolívar continued to use metaphors drawn from the natural world. Liberty was a ‘precious plant’, for example, or later, as chaos and disunity descended on the new nations, Bolívar warned that the revolutionaries were ‘tottering on the edge of an abyss’ and about to ‘drown in the ocean of anarchy’. One of his most used metaphors remained that of a volcano. The danger of a revolution, Bolívar said, was like standing on one that was ‘ready to explode’. He declared that South Americans were marching along a ‘volcanic terrain’, evoking at the same time the splendour and hazards of the Andes.

Humboldt had been wrong about Bolívar. When they had first met in Paris in the summer of 1804, and then a year later in Rome, he had dismissed the excitable creole as a dreamer – but as he watched his old friend succeed, he had changed his mind. In July 1822 Humboldt wrote a letter to Bolívar, praising him as the ‘founder of your beautiful fatherland’s freedom and independence’. Humboldt also reminded him how South America was his own second home. ‘I reiterate my vow for the glory of the people of America,’ he told Bolívar.

Nature, politics and society formed a triangle of connections. One influenced the other. Societies were shaped by their environment – natural resources could bring riches to a nation, or, as Bolívar had experienced, an untamed wilderness such as the Andes could inspire strength and conviction. This idea, however, could also be applied quite differently, as several European scientists had done. Since the mid-eighteenth century some thinkers had insisted on the ‘degeneracy of America’. One such was the French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, who in the 1760s and 1770s had written that in America all things ‘shrink and diminish under a niggardly sky and unprolific land’. The New World was inferior to the Old World, Buffon asserted in the most widely read natural history work of the second half of the century. According to Buffon, plants, animals and even people were smaller and weaker in the New World. There were no large mammals or any civilized people, he said, and even the savages there were ‘feeble’.

As Buffon’s theories and arguments had spread over the past decades, the natural world of America had become a metaphor for its political and cultural significance or insignificance – depending on the point of view. Besides economic strength, military exploits or scientific achievements, nature had also become an indicator of the importance of a country. During the American Revolution, Jefferson had been furious about Buffon’s assertions and had spent years trying to refute them. If Buffon used size as a measure of strength and superiority, Jefferson only needed to show that everything was in fact larger in the New World in order to elevate his country above those in Europe. In 1782, in the midst of the American War of Independence, Jefferson had published Notes on the State of Virginia in which the flora and fauna of the United States became the foot-soldiers of a patriotic battle. Under the banner of the-bigger-the-better, Jefferson listed the weights of bears, buffalos and panthers to prove his point. Even the weasel, he wrote, was ‘larger in America than in Europe’.

When he moved to France as the American Minister four years later, Jefferson had boasted to Buffon that the Scandinavian reindeer was so small that it ‘could walk under the belly of our moose’. Jefferson had then, at great personal expense, imported a stuffed moose from Vermont to Paris, an enterprise that in the end failed to impress the French because the moose had arrived in Paris in a sorry state of decay with no fur on the skin and exuding a foul smell. But Jefferson had not given up and had asked friends and acquaintances to send him details of ‘the heaviest weights of our animals … from the mouse to the mammoth’. Later, during his presidency, Jefferson had dispatched huge fossil bones and tusks from the North American mastodon to the Académie des Sciences in Paris to show the French just how enormous North American animals were. At the same time, Jefferson was hoping that one day they would find living mastodons roaming somewhere in the yet unexplored parts of the continent. Mountains, rivers, plants and animals had become weapons in the political arena.1

Humboldt did the same for South America. Not only did he present the continent as one of unrivalled beauty, fertility and magnificence, but he also attacked Buffon directly. ‘Buffon was entirely mistaken,’ he wrote, and later questioned how the French naturalist could have dared to describe the American continent when he had never even seen it. The indigenous people were anything but feeble, Humboldt said; one look at the Carib nation in Venezuela rebutted the wild musings of the European scientists. He had encountered the tribe on his way from the Orinoco to Cumaná and thought they were the tallest, strongest and most beautiful people he had ever seen – like bronze statues of Jupiter.

Humboldt also dismantled Buffon’s idea that South America was a ‘new world’ – a continent that had only just risen from the ocean without history or civilization. The ancient monuments he had seen and then depicted in his publications bore testimony to cultured and refined societies – palaces, aqueducts, statues and temples. In Bogotá, Humboldt had found some old pre-Inca manuscripts (and read their translations) which revealed a complex knowledge of astronomy and mathematics. Equally, the Carib language was so sophisticated that it included abstract concepts such as future and eternity. There was no evidence of the poverty of language that previous explorers had remarked on, Humboldt said, because these languages brought together richness, grace, power and tenderness.

These were not wild savages as the Europeans had portrayed them for the past three centuries. Bolívar, who owned several of Humboldt’s books, must have been delighted when he read in Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain that Buffon’s theories on degeneracy had only become popular because they ‘flattered the vanity of Europeans’.

Humboldt continued to educate the world about Latin America. His views were repeated across the globe through articles and magazines that were peppered with comments such as ‘M. de Humboldt observes’ or ‘informed us’. Humboldt had ‘done America more good than all of the conquerors’, Bolívar said. Humboldt had presented the natural world as a reflection of South America’s identity – a portrait of a continent that was strong, vigorous and beautiful. And that was exactly what Bolívar was doing when he used nature to galvanize his compatriots or to explain his political views.

Rather than be inspired by abstract theory or philosophy, Bolívar reminded his countrymen that they should learn from forests, rivers and mountains. ‘You will also discover important guides to action in the very nature of our country which includes the lofty regions of the Andes and the burning shores of the Orinoco,’ he told the congress in Bogotá. ‘Study them closely, and you will learn there,’ he urged, ‘what Congress should decree for the happiness of the people of Colombia.’ Nature, Bolívar said, was the ‘infallible teacher of men’.

1 Jefferson was not the first American to take up the dispute. In the 1780s Benjamin Franklin, during his time as the American Minister in Paris, had attended a dinner party together with Abbé Raynal, one of the offending scientists. Franklin noted that all the American guests were sitting on one side of the table with the French opposite. Seizing the opportunity, he offered his challenge: ‘Let both parties rise, and we will see on which side nature had degenerated.’ As it happened all the Americans were of the ‘finest stature’, Franklin later told Jefferson, while the French were all diminutive – in particular Raynal who was ‘a mere shrimp’.

13

London

WHILE SIMÓN BOLÍVAR fought bloody battles to break the colonial chains, Humboldt was trying to convince the British to let him travel to India. In order to complete his Naturgemälde of the world, Humboldt wanted to investigate the Himalaya to collect the data he needed to compare the two majestic mountain ranges. No scientist had ever climbed the Himalaya. Since the British had arrived on the subcontinent, it hadn’t even occurred to them to measure these magnificent mountains, Humboldt said. They had just ‘thoughtlessly looked at them without even asking themselves how high these colossal Himalaya were’. Humboldt intended to determine heights, understand geological features and examine plant distribution there – just as he had in the Andes.

Since the day he had set foot on French soil after his expedition in 1804, Humboldt had longed to leave Europe again. His wanderlust was his most faithful companion. Knowledge could not be gained from books alone, Humboldt believed. To understand the world, a scientist had to be in nature – to feel and experience it – a notion that Goethe had explored in Faust when he depicted Heinrich Faust’s assistant Wagner as a single-minded and one-dimensional character who saw no reason to learn from nature itself but only from books.

One soon grows tired of forests and fields;

I never envied any bird its wings.

But the pursuit of intellectual things

From book to book, from page to page – what joy that yields!

Goethe’s Wagner is the epitome of the narrow-minded scholar locked up in his laboratory and buried in a prison of books. Humboldt was the opposite. He was a scientist who did not just want to make sense of the natural world intellectually but also wanted to experience nature viscerally.

The only problem was that Humboldt would need the permission of the British East India Company which controlled much of India. Founded in 1600 as a cartel of merchants who pooled their resources in order to create a trade monopoly, the company had extended its reach across the subcontinent through its private armies. Over the past century the East India Company had risen from being a commercial enterprise that imported and exported goods to a formidable military power. By the first decade of the nineteenth century, when Humboldt began to think about an expedition to the Himalaya, the East India Company had become so powerful that it functioned like a state within a state. Just as Humboldt had needed permission from the Spanish king to travel to South America, he now required approval from the directors of the East India Company.