The Invention of Nature (26 page)

Both Wordsworth and Coleridge were ‘walking poets’ who not only needed to be out in nature but also wrote outdoors. Like Humboldt, who insisted that scientists had to leave their laboratories to truly understand nature, Wordsworth and Coleridge believed that poets had to open the doors of their studies and walk through meadows, over hills and beside rivers. An uneven path, or tangled woods were Coleridge’s preferred places to compose, he claimed. A friend estimated that Wordsworth, by the time he was in his sixties, had covered around 180,000 miles. They were part of nature, searching for the unity within but also between man and his environment.

Like Humboldt, Coleridge admired Immanuel Kant’s philosophy – ‘a truly great man’ as he called him – and enthused initially about Schelling’s Naturphilosophie for its search of unity between the Self and nature – the internal and the external world. It was Schelling’s belief in the role of the creative ‘I’ in the understanding of nature that resonated with Coleridge. Science needed to be infused with imagination or, as Schelling said, they had ‘to give once again wings to physics’.

Fluent in German, Coleridge had for long been immersed in German literature and science.2 He had even suggested a translation of Goethe’s masterpiece Faust to Humboldt’s publisher, John Murray. More than any other contemporary play, Faust addressed issues that occupied Coleridge intensely. Heinrich Faust saw how everything hung together: ‘How it all lives and moves and weaves / Into a whole! Each part gives and receives,’ Faust declares in the first scene, a sentence that could have been written by either Humboldt or Coleridge.

Coleridge was lamenting the loss of what he called the ‘connective powers of the understanding’. They lived in an ‘epoch of division and separation’, of fragmentation and the loss of unity. The problem, he insisted, lay with philosophers and scientists such as René Descartes or Carl Linnaeus, who had turned the understanding of nature into a narrow practice of collecting, classification or mathematical abstraction. This ‘philosophy of mechanism’, Coleridge wrote to Wordsworth, ‘strikes Death’. It was the naturalist with his urge to classify, Wordsworth agreed, who was a ‘fingering slave, / One that would peep and botanize / Upon his mother’s grave?’ Coleridge and Wordsworth were turning against the idea of extorting knowledge from nature with ‘screws or levers’ – in Faust’s words – and against the idea of a Newtonian universe made up of inert atoms that followed natural laws like automata. Instead they saw nature as Humboldt did – dynamic, organic and thumping with life.

Coleridge called for a new approach to the sciences in reaction to the loss of the ‘spirit of Nature’. Neither Coleridge nor Wordsworth turned against science itself but against the prevailing ‘microscopic view’. Like Humboldt, they took issue with the division of science into ever more specialized approaches. Coleridge called these philosophers the ‘Little-ists’, while Wordsworth wrote in The Excursion (1814):

For was it meant

That we should pore, and dwindle as we pore,

For ever dimly pore on things minute,

On solitary objects, still beheld

In disconnection dead and spiritless,

And still dividing and dividing still

Break down all grandeur …

Humboldt’s idea of nature as a living organism animated by dynamic forces fell on fertile ground in England. It was the guiding principle and the leading metaphor for the Romantics. Humboldt’s works, the Edinburgh Review wrote, were the best proof of the ‘secret band’ that united all knowledge, feeling and morality. Everything was connected and ‘found to reflect on each other’.

But no matter how successful his books were and how much his work was admired by British poets, thinkers and scientists, Humboldt had still not received permission to travel to India from the colonial administrators. The East India Company remained stubbornly uncooperative. Humboldt, however, continued to make detailed plans. He proposed to stay for four or five years in India, he told Wilhelm, and on his eventual return to Europe he would finally leave Paris. He intended to write his books about his Indian travels in English, and for that he would settle in London.

1 The first volume of the Personal Narrative was published in 1814, the same year as the English translation of Humboldt’s Vues des Cordillères. In Britain his books were published by a consortium including John Murray, who at that time was the most fashionable publisher in London – with Lord Byron as his most commercially successful author.

2 Coleridge might have read some of Humboldt’s books in German before they were translated because he had travelled and studied in Germany. Exactly ten years after Humboldt had studied at the University of Göttingen, Coleridge had enrolled there, in 1799, under the tutelage of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, the same man who had taught Humboldt about vital forces.

14

Going in Circles

Maladie Centrifuge

ON 14 SEPTEMBER 1818, the day of his forty-ninth birthday, Humboldt boarded the stagecoach in Paris to travel once again to London – his third visit in only four years. Five days later, he arrived in the middle of the night at Wilhelm’s house in Portland Place. By now he was so famous that the London papers announced his visit in the column ‘Fashionable Arrivals’. He was still trying to organize his expedition to India, and Wilhelm’s diplomatic status in London helped to open some important doors. Wilhelm, for example, facilitated a private audience with the Prince Regent who assured Alexander of his support for the venture. Humboldt also met the British government official who oversaw the activities of the East India Company – George Canning, the president of the Board of Control, who pledged help. After these meetings Humboldt was certain that any hurdles that the East India Company could ‘place in my way’ would be removed. After more than a decade of cajoling and pleading, India finally seemed to be within his reach. Convinced that the directors would give their permission, Humboldt now turned his attention to King Friedrich Wilhelm III who had mentioned in the past that he might be willing to finance the voyage.

At the time of Humboldt’s London visit, the Prussian king was conveniently at the Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle, today’s Aachen in Germany. On 1 October 1818 the four Allied powers – Prussia, Austria, Britain and Russia – had convened in Aachen to discuss the withdrawal of their troops from France as well as a future European alliance. With Aachen only 200 miles east of Calais, travelling directly there from London would save Humboldt a dreaded visit to Berlin – a city he had not visited for eleven years – and around 1,000 miles of unnecessary travelling.

On 8 October, less than three weeks after his arrival in London, Humboldt was on his way again, but trailed by rumours. There were reports in British newspapers that Humboldt was rushing to the congress in Aachen to ‘be consulted on the affairs of South America’. The French secret police had similar suspicions, believing that Humboldt carried a detailed report about the rebelling colonies. A Spanish minister had also been dispatched to Aachen in the hope of securing European support for Spain in its battle against Simón Bolívar’s army. But by the time Humboldt arrived, it had become clear that the Allies had no interest in meddling with Spanish colonial ambitions – the balance of power in post-Napoleonic Europe was a much more pressing concern. Instead Humboldt could focus on what The Times called his ‘own affair’ – extracting money from the Prussians for his expedition to India.

In Aachen Humboldt informed the Prussian Chancellor, Karl August von Hardenberg, that the difficulties regarding his expedition had been almost entirely removed. The only hindrance for the ‘complete guarantee of my enterprise’, Humboldt claimed, was financial. Within twenty-four hours Friedrich Wilhelm III had granted Humboldt the money. Humboldt was ecstatic. After fourteen years in Europe, he would finally be able to leave. He would be able to climb the mighty Himalaya and extend his Naturgemälde across the globe.

When Humboldt returned to Paris from Aachen, he began his preparations in earnest. He bought books and instruments, corresponded with people who had travelled to Asia and worked on his exact route. He would first visit Constantinople, and then the snow-capped dormant volcano Mount Ararat near today’s border between Iran and Turkey. From there he would go south, travelling overland across the whole of Persia to Bandar Abbas on the Persian Gulf from where he would sail to India. He was taking language lessons in Persian and Arabic, and one wall of his bedroom in his small Parisian apartment was covered with a huge map of Asia. But, as always, everything took longer than Humboldt had initially thought.

He had still not published the full results from his Latin American exploration. Together all the books would eventually become the thirty-four-volume Voyage to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent – it included the multi-volume travel account Personal Narrative but also more specialized books on botany, zoology and astronomy. Some, such as Personal Narrative and the Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain, had few or no illustrations and were affordable for a wider audience while others, such as Vues des Cordillères with its stunning depictions of Latin America’s landscapes and monuments, were large volumes that cost a fortune. In its entirety Voyage to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent would become the most expensive work ever privately published by a scientist. Humboldt had employed mapmakers, artists, engravers and botanists for years now and the expenses were so high that they ruined him financially. He still had his income from the Prussian king and from his book sales but had to live frugally. His inheritance had been completely used up. He had spent 50,000 thalers on his expedition and about double that on his publications and life in Paris.

None of this stopped Humboldt. He received loans from friends and banks, and mostly chose to ignore his financial situation, his debt growing steadily.

While he was working on his books, Humboldt continued his preparations for India. He dispatched Karl Sigismund Kunth to Switzerland, the nephew of his old childhood teacher Gottlob Johann Christian Kunth and the botanist who had taken over the botanical publications when Bonpland had slowed down too much. The plan was that Kunth was going to accompany Humboldt to India but was first to examine plants in the Alps, so that he could compare them to those on Mount Ararat and in the Himalaya. Humboldt’s old travel companion, Aimé Bonpland, was no longer available. When Joséphine Bonaparte had died in May 1814, Bonpland had stopped working in her garden at Malmaison. Bored with his life in Paris – ‘my whole existence is too predictable,’ Bonpland had written to his sister – he had been keen to embark on new adventures but had become impatient with Humboldt’s delayed travel plans.

Bonpland had always wanted to return to South America. He travelled to London to meet Simón Bolívar’s men and other revolutionaries who had come to Britain in order to rally support for their fight against Spain. Bonpland had even supplied them with books and a printing press, as well as smuggling weapons. Soon the South Americans were competing for Bonpland’s services. Francisco Antonio Zea, the botanist who would become Vice-President of Colombia under Bolívar, had asked Bonpland to continue the work of the deceased botanist José Celestino Mutis in Bogotá. At the same time the representatives from Buenos Aires hoped Bonpland would establish a botanic garden there. Bonpland’s knowledge of potentially useful plants held economic possibilities for the new nations. Just as the British had founded a botanical garden in Calcutta as a storehouse for the empire and for useful crops, so was the Argentinians’ plan. Bonpland was to help them to introduce ‘new methods of practical agriculture’ from Europe.

The revolutionaries were trying to lure European scientists to Latin America. Science was like a nation without borders, it united people and – so they hoped – would place an independent Latin America on an equal footing with Europe. When Zea was appointed as Colombia’s Plenipotentiary Minister to Britain, he received instructions not only to obtain support for their political struggle but also to promote the immigration of scientists, craftsmen and farmers. ‘The illustrious Franklin obtained more good in France for his country through the natural sciences than through all the diplomatic efforts,’ Zea was reminded by his superiors.

The prospect of Bonpland emigrating had been particularly exciting for the revolutionaries, given his extensive knowledge of Latin America. Everybody was ‘impatiently waiting for you’, one of them had told Bonpland. In spring 1815, as royalist troops were regaining much of the territory along the Río Magdalena in New Granada and the revolutionary army was decimated by desertion and disease, Bolívar himself had found time to write and offer Mutis’s position in Bogotá to Bonpland. But in the end Bonpland had been too worried about the brutal civil war that had been raging in New Granada and Venezuela. Instead he had left France at the end of 1816 for Buenos Aires.

Twelve years after he had left South America with Humboldt, Bonpland was sailing back – this time loaded with fruit tree saplings, vegetable seeds, grapes and medicinal plants to start a new life. After a couple of years in Buenos Aires, though, Bonpland had had enough of city life. He had never enjoyed the orderly work of a studious scholar. He was a field botanist who loved finding rare plants but was useless when it came to sorting them. Over the years he assembled 20,000 dried plants but his herbarium was a complete mess with specimens piled into boxes, loosely bound together and not even mounted on paper. In 1820 Bonpland settled in Santa Ana on the Paraná River in Argentina near the border with Paraguay where he collected plants and grew yerba mate – leaves that were brewed like tea and a popular drink in South America.

On 25 November 1821, exactly five years after Bonpland had left France for Argentina, Humboldt wrote to him, sending some money but also complaining that he hadn’t heard from his ‘old companion-in-fortune’. Bonpland never received the letter. On 8 December 1821, two weeks after Humboldt had posted his letter, 400 Paraguayan soldiers crossed the border into Argentina and stormed Bonpland’s farm in Santa Ana. On the orders of José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia, the dictator of Paraguay, the men killed Bonpland’s workers and put him in chains. Francia accused Bonpland of agricultural espionage and feared that his flourishing plantation would be in competition with the Paraguayan yerba mate trade. Bonpland was dragged into Paraguay where he was imprisoned.