On September 14, 1869, the centenary of Alexander von Humboldt’s birth was commemorated in New York—a city Humboldt had never visited—with a parade, a torchlight procession, a proclamation by the mayor, a formal banquet, and the unveiling of a bronze bust in Central Park. The following day, the Times devoted its entire front page to chronicling the festivities. The unveiling was scheduled for 2 P.M., but long before the appointed hour, the paper reported, “an immense throng of people had gathered,” and when the statue was finally revealed “there were not less than 25,000 persons” in attendance. Flags waved from public buildings, military bands played, and homes were decorated with Humboldt’s portrait. The whole city, according to the Times, “seemed to be in holiday dress.”
In Boston, another city Humboldt had never set foot in, the centenary was marked with a two-hour address delivered by Louis Agassiz. This was attended by, among many others, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, and Oliver Wendell Holmes. After the address, the crowd retired to the Horticultural Hall, where a palm frond that had rested on Humboldt’s coffin was displayed and, in the words of a Times correspondent, “an elegant collation was served.” President Ulysses S. Grant attended the revelries in Pittsburgh, and former President Millard Fillmore presided over the ceremony in Buffalo. Similar commemorations were held in Albany, Chicago, Baltimore, Cleveland, Memphis, and San Francisco. Humboldt mania hit Melbourne and Moscow, not to mention Hamburg, Dresden, and Frankfurt. In Berlin—Humboldt’s home town—eighty thousand people showed up to celebrate in the pouring rain.
What, exactly, was all the hoopla about? At a distance of almost a hundred and fifty years, it’s hard to say, not just because Humboldt’s individual triumphs have faded but because there were so many of them. In 1802, Humboldt climbed nineteen thousand four hundred feet up Chimborazo, in what’s now Ecuador. At the time, the mountain was believed to be the tallest peak in the world, and nineteen thousand four hundred feet was the highest anyone had ever climbed. (In fact, Chimborazo is nowhere near the world’s tallest mountain, although, owing to the globe’s oblate spheroid shape, its peak is the farthest from the center of the earth.) Humboldt was, in this way, the Edmund Hillary of his generation. He was also a naturalist, an inventor, a prolific author, and a republican, in the French Revolutionary sense of the word. Several of his books became international best-sellers. Humboldt’s writings on his adventures in South America inspired figures as diverse as Charles Darwin and Simón Bolívar, who called him the “discoverer of the New World.” As one of his translators put it, “It would need another Humboldt to encompass such a life and its works.”
But Humboldt was, by the time of his death, at the age of eighty-nine, already an anachronism—a generalist in a period of increasing specialization and a Romantic in the Victorian era. Those he influenced quickly went on to overshadow him. Just a few months after Humboldt’s funeral, in May, 1859, “On the Origin of Species” came out. It upended the Weltanschauung that Humboldt had promoted, and his books began to fall out of print. (When I went to the nearest college library in search of some of his thirty-odd published works, all I found on the shelves was a desiccated edition from 1853.) By the time the bicentennial of his birth rolled around, in the English-speaking world, at least, Humboldt had been nearly forgotten.
As his sestercentennial approaches, a new biography has appeared—“The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World” (Knopf), by Andrea Wulf, an author and design historian who lives in Britain. Wulf argues that Humboldt’s long, eventful life deserves another look. Indeed, she maintains, the more damage that is done to the world he explored, the more relevant his ideas become.
Alexander von Humboldt was born to a wealthy family in the Prussia of Frederick the Great, and from an early age he chafed at the restrictions of upper-class life. Instead of applying himself to his lessons, like his dutiful older brother, Wilhelm, he roamed the woods, collecting herbs and insects; his parents nicknamed him, not altogether kindly, “the little apothecary.” When Humboldt wrote letters from the family estate, Schloss Tegel_,_ he sometimes used the tagline Schloss Langweil—“Castle of Boredom.”
In his early twenties, Humboldt became friendly with Georg Forster, a German who had sailed to Tahiti with Captain Cook. Forster took Humboldt to London, where he introduced him to the naturalist Joseph Banks, who had also sailed with Cook, and who had assembled the world’s largest collection of plant specimens. On the return trip, the pair stopped in Paris, where preparations were under way for the first anniversary of the storming of the Bastille. Humboldt was hooked—on travel, on botany, on revolution—and he resolved to have his own Cook-like adventure. But Humboldt’s mother—his father had died by then—had no interest in funding adventures. She wanted her son to become a bureaucrat. As a compromise, he agreed to study mining.
For the next half-decade, Humboldt worked as a mine inspector for the Prussian government. Dismayed by what he encountered, he used his own money to open a miners’ school. He also invented a new kind of respirator, designed a better safety lamp, and published a book on subterranean flora. Meanwhile, he began to experiment, even on himself. Fascinated by the work of Luigi Galvani, who’d made animals’ muscles jump by running a current through them, Humboldt cut open his back and stuck wires into the wounds. In the process of these gruesome probes—Humboldt wrote that he was starting to look like “a man who had been running the gauntlet”—he came close to creating the first electric battery. But he neglected to draw the crucial inferences from his own work, and the battery was instead invented, shortly afterward, by Alessandro Volta. According to Douglas Botting, the author of a 1973 biography, “Humboldt and the Cosmos,” he “never forgave himself this failure.”
The death of Humboldt’s mother, in 1796, freed him from her disapproval and, at the same time, provided him with a fortune. He soon signed on to an around-the-world voyage being underwritten by the French government, but it was called off, when the government decided that it needed the money to fight the Austrians. Next, Humboldt set off for Madrid, where he managed to secure a meeting with the Spanish king Carlos IV. A well-known imbecile, Carlos seems to have imagined that sending a mining expert to the New World would yield new riches for the Crown. He gave Humboldt the go-ahead to travel anywhere he wanted in Spain’s American colonies. Equipped with forty-two crates of scientific instruments, including a cyanometer, for measuring the blueness of the sky, Humboldt set sail. His goal, he wrote to a friend on the eve of the voyage, was to discover “the unity of nature.”
This was either a very grand plan or no plan at all. Humboldt thought he was bound for Havana, but, because of a shipboard outbreak of typhoid, he ended up being deposited in Cumaná, in present-day Venezuela. Unfazed, he set off across the Llanos, the vast plain east of the Andes, where he was excited to encounter rivers filled with electric eels. Naturally, he decided to renew his experiments. “If by chance you get a shock before the fish is wounded, or exhausted by a long chase, the pain and numbness are so extreme that it is hard to describe the nature of the sensation,” he observed.
From the Llanos, Humboldt travelled by canoe along the Rio Apure and the Orinoco. The heat was unbearable and the mosquitoes were worse. “People who have not navigated the great rivers of equinoctial America can scarcely conceive how, at every instant, without intermission, you may be tormented by insects flying in the air,” Humboldt wrote. Nevertheless, he was enchanted. Jaguars, tapirs, and peccaries came down to the river to drink:
A year and a half after leaving Europe, Humboldt finally made it to Havana. He was planning to sail from there to Mexico when, once again, chance intervened. Humboldt read in a newspaper that the French expedition he’d hoped to join had set off after all, and was on its way to Australia. He reasoned that the expedition would stop in Lima before crossing the Pacific, and decided to catch up with it there. This entailed sailing back to South America, to Cartagena, then trekking across the Andes, a journey of some twenty-five hundred miles. When Humboldt reached Quito, nine months later, he learned that the French expedition had travelled in the opposite direction, around the Cape of Good Hope. “Any other man would have despaired,” Wulf notes. Humboldt’s response was to climb Chimborazo.
He ended up spending five years in South America. Everywhere he went, he took measurements with his instruments, at least those which hadn’t been lost on the Orinoco or smashed in the Andes. These led him to the concept of isotherms—lines connecting points on a map with the same average temperature—and to the discovery of the magnetic equator: the line along which earth’s magnetic field is parallel to its surface. By the time the trip was over, he’d collected some sixty thousand plant specimens. He’d also become convinced of the sophistication of South America’s pre-Columbian cultures and of the evils of slavery, which he felt obligated to publicize.
“It is for the traveler who has been an eyewitness of the degradation of human nature, to make the complaints of the unfortunate reach the ear of those by whom they can be relieved,” he wrote. On his way back to Europe, Humboldt stopped in Washington, D.C., where he met with President Thomas Jefferson. Humboldt sometimes referred to himself as “half American,” and was initially a big admirer of the American experiment. But, as the decades wore on, he grew disenchanted. In the eighteen-fifties, he told the Times’ correspondent in Germany, “I don’t like the present position of your politics. The influence of slavery is increasing, I fear. So, too, is the mistaken view of Negro inferiority.”
The trip to South America had cost Humboldt much of his fortune. Publishing his findings cost him the remainder. Settling in Paris, he wrote and wrote—about his personal experiences, about the landscape he had seen, about the plants he’d collected, about the people and politics of the Spanish colonies. (Humboldt was such a Francophile that he wrote in French rather than in his native German.) His books, much like his travels, were full of energy but, at the same time, unfocussed and digressive.
“You write endlessly,” Humboldt’s good friend and possible romantic interest, the astronomer François Arago, told him. “But what comes out of it is not a book, but a portrait without a frame.” (Humboldt never married, and it’s often speculated that he was gay, though how many—if any—of his intense relationships were sexual is unknown.) Humboldt hired a small army of artists and engravers to illustrate his works. As a consequence, they were phenomenally expensive; in the U.S., a complete edition cost two thousand dollars—something like thirty thousand dollars in today’s money. According to Botting, “Not even Humboldt could afford to possess a set.”
As he scribbled away, Humboldt continued to search for the elusive “unity of nature.” He visited with the naturalists Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and Georges Cuvier, at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris. He helped Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac with his pioneering studies of the behavior of gases. He assisted Arago with his experiments at the Paris Observatory. “Humboldt dashed from one meeting to another and from one dinner to the next,” Wulf reports. Some evenings, he attended as many as five salons. He was known around Paris for his good looks, his breadth of knowledge, and his volubility. A pianist who was asked to perform for him at a party described the invitation as a highlight of his career. But as soon as he started to play, the pianist complained, Humboldt “began to hold forth” and did not shut up for the entire piece.
In 1827, after Humboldt had been living in Paris for more than two decades, the king of Prussia, now Frederick the Great’s grandnephew, insisted that he return to Berlin. By this time, Humboldt depended on a stipend from the king to pay his expenses, so he had no choice but to agree. (It was an irony not unremarked upon by his contemporaries that the great champion of freedom was reduced to being a courtier.) Humboldt had been back in the city for only a few months when he decided to deliver a series of lectures on the theme of, well, everything. He expatiated on meteorology, geology, plant geography, and ocean currents, as well as on fossils, magnetism, astronomy, human migration, and poetry. The lectures, originally given at the University of Berlin, proved so popular that Humboldt delivered them all over again, in a concert hall. There was such a crush to get into the hall that, on the days when he spoke, traffic in the neighborhood practically ground to a halt. He was offered a big advance to publish the talks, but turned it down in order to rewrite them, a process that ended up taking him two decades. The first volume of the resulting work, “Kosmos,” was a huge hit, the second even huger. Booksellers in Hamburg and Vienna pirated shipments to make sure their shelves were stocked. Humboldt delivered the fifth and final installment of “Kosmos” just a few days before he died.
Almost no one actually reads Humboldt anymore. Still, according to his admirers, he has never ceased to be relevant, though the reasons for this have varied over time. During the Weimar Republic, Humboldt was celebrated as a progressive thinker. Then, during the Third Reich, he became the explorer who established German claims in Latin America. In East Germany, he was the revolutionary who labored on behalf of ordinary miners. After reunification, he was recast as a global citizen.
The latest variation on this theme is the green Humboldt. As Nicolaas Rupke, a historian of science at Washington and Lee University, puts it in “Alexander von Humboldt: A Metabiography” (2008), “Humboldt-the-environmentalist” is now “part of the standard narrative.”
This is what Andrea Wulf sees as Humboldt’s claim on our attention. Long before the advent of chainsaws, she notes, he was warning about the dangers of deforestation. And, already in the early nineteenth century, he recognized a connection between forest health and hydrology; when trees were cut down, he observed, evaporation from the soil increased, and the area dried out. “As Humboldt described how humankind was changing the climate, he unwittingly became the father of the environmental movement,” Wulf writes. In her view, he “invented the web of life, the concept of nature as we know it today.”
Humboldt’s love for and fascination with the natural world certainly were profound. And that love, which animated his writings, was passed on to his many devoted fans. When, for example, Thoreau climbed Mt. Wachusett, he claimed to be “with Humboldt” as he “measured the more modern Andes.” (Mt. Wachusett, north of Worcester, has an elevation of two thousand and six feet.)
But Humboldt waxed poetic about many subjects, and the green Humboldt probably reflects our priorities at least as much as it does his. Among Humboldt’s many gifts was that of self-knowledge. He recognized that he had spread himself too thin, that in all his travels and experiments and books and lectures there had been no single great insight or discovery that changed man’s view of the cosmos. What he offered the world was his enthusiasm, which, if a frail basis for an intellectual history, is nonetheless a deeply appealing trait.
“In eight days of reading books, one couldn’t learn as much as what he gives you in an hour,” Goethe said of Humboldt, whom he counted as a good friend. When Darwin finished his own Humboldtian travelogue, “The Voyage of the Beagle,” he nervously sent his hero a copy. “You have an excellent future ahead of you,” the older man reassured him.
“My life has been useful to science less through the little I have contributed myself than through my efforts to let others profit of the advantages of my position,” Humboldt wrote not long before his death. “I like to think that, while I was at fault to tackle from intellectual curiosity too great a variety of scientific interests, I have left on my route some trace of my passing.” ♦
