2.
In the summer of 1799, a twenty-nine-year-old German by the name of Alexander von Humboldt set sail from the Spanish port of La Coruna, bound for the South American continent on a voyage of exploration.
‘From my earliest days I had felt the urge to travel to distant lands seldom visited by Europeans,' he would later recall. ‘The study of maps and the perusal of travel books aroused in me a secret fascination that was at times almost irresistible.' The young German was ideally suited to follow up on his fascination. Along with great physical stamina, he had expertise in biology, geology, chemistry, physics and history. As a student at the University of Göttingen, he had befriended Georg Forster, the naturalist who had accompanied Captain Cook on his second voyage, and mastered the art of classifying plant and animal species. Since finishing his studies, Humboldt had been looking for opportunities to travel to someplace remote and unknown. Plans to go to Egypt and Mecca had fallen through at the last moment, but in the spring of 1799, Humboldt had had the good fortune to meet King Charles IV of Spain and had persuaded him to underwrite his exploration of South America.
Humboldt was to be away from Europe for five years. On his return, he settled in Paris and over the next twenty years published a thirty-volume account of his travels, entitled Journey to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent. The length of the work was an accurate measure of Humboldt's achievements. Surveying these, Ralph Waldo Emerson was to write, ‘Humboldt was one of those wonders of the world, like Aristotle, like Julius Caesar, like the Admirable Crichton, who appear from time to time as if to show us the possibilities of the human mind, the force and range of the faculties—a universal man.'
Much about South America was still unknown to Europe when Humboldt set sail from La Coruna: Vespucci and Bougainville had travelled around the shores of the continent, and La Condamine and Bouguer had surveyed the streams and mountains of the Amazon and of Peru, but there were still no accurate maps of the region, and little information had been gathered on its geology, botany and indigenous peoples. Humboldt transformed the state of knowledge. He travelled fifteen thousand kilometres around the northern coastlines and interior, on the way collecting some sixteen hundred plants and identifying six hundred new species. He redrew the map of South America based on readings supplied by accurate chronometers and sextants. He researched the Earth's magnetism and was the first to discover that magnetic intensity declined the further one got from the poles. He gave the first account of the rubber and cinchona trees. He mapped the streams connecting the Orinoco and Negro river systems. He measured the effects of air pressure and altitude on vegetation. He studied the kinship rituals of the people of the Amazon Basin and inferred connections between geography and cultural characteristics. He compared the
Eduard Ender, Alexander von Humboldt andAtmeBonplandtn Venezuela, e. 1S50
salinity of water from the Pacific and the Atlantic and conceived the idea of sea currents, recognising that the temperature of the sea owed more to drifts than to latitude.
Humboldt's early biographer, F. A. Schwarzenberg, subtitled his life of Humboldt What May Be Accomplished in a Lifetime. He summarised the areas of his subject's extraordinary curiosity as follows: ‘I) The knowledge of the Earth and its inhabitants. 2) The discovery of the higher laws of nature, which govern the universe, men, animals, plants and minerals. 3) The discovery of new forms of life. 4) The discovery of territories hitherto but imperfectly known, and their various productions. 5) The acquaintance with new species of the human race—their manners, their language and the historical traces of their culture.'
What may be accomplished in a lifetime—and seldom or never is.
3.
It was a maid who was ultimately responsible for my own voyage of exploration around Madrid. Three times she burst into my room with a broom and basket of cleaning fluids and, at the sight of a huddled shape under the sheets, exclaimed with theatrical alarm ‘Hola, perdone!' before leaving again, taking care to let her utensils collide loudly with the door as she slammed it. Because I did not wish to encounter this apparition a fourth time, I dressed, ordered a hot chocolate and a plate of batter sticks in the hotel bar and made my way to a part of town identified by one of my guidebooks as ‘Old Madrid':
When Felipe II chose Madrid as his capital in 1561, it was a small Castilian town with a population of barely twenty thousand. In the following years, it was to grow into the nerve centre of a mighty empire. Narrow streets with houses and medieval churches began to grow up behind the old Moorish fortress, which was later replaced by a Gothic palace and eventually by the present-day Bourbon palace, the Palacio Real. The sixteenth-century city is known as the ‘Madrid de los Austrias ‘ after the Habsburg dynasty. At this time, monasteries were endowed and churches and palaces were built. In the seventeenth century, the Plaza Mayor was added and the Puerta del Sol became the spiritual and geographical heart of Spain.
I stood on the corner of the Calle de Carretas and the Puerta del Sol, an undistinguished half-moon-shaped junction in the middle of which Carlos III (1759—1788) sat astride a horse. It was a sunny day, and crowds of tourists were stopping to take photographs and listen to guides. And I wondered, with mounting anxiety, What am I supposed to do here? What am I supposed to think?
4.
Humboldt was never pursued by such questions. Everywhere he went, his mission was unambiguous: to discover facts and to carry out experiments towards that end.
Already on the ship carrying him to South America, he had begun his factual researches. He measured the temperature of the seawater every two hours from Spain to the ship's destination, Cumanä, on the coast of New Granada (part of modern Venezuela). He took readings with his sextant and recorded the different marine species that he saw or found in the net he had hung from the stern. And once he landed in Venezuela, he threw himself into an exhaustive study of the vegetation around Cumanä. The hills of calcareous rock on which the town stood were dotted with cacti and opuntia, their trunks branching out like candelabras coated with lichen. One afternoon, Humboldt measured a cactus {Tuna macho) and noted its circumference: 1.54 metres. He spent three weeks cataloguing many more plants on the coast, then ventured inland into the jungle-covered New Andalusia mountain range. He took with him a mule bearing a trunk containing a sextant, a dipping needle, an instrument for calibrating magnetic variation, a thermometer and a Saussure's hygrometer, which measured humidity and was made of hair and whalebone. He put all of these to good use. In his journal he wrote, ‘As we entered the jungle the barometer showed that we were gaining altitude. Here the tree trunks offered us an extraordinary view: a gramineous plant with verticillate branches climbed like a liana to a height of eight to ten feet, forming garlands that crossed our path and swung in the wind. At about three in the afternoon we stopped on a small plain known as Quetepe, some 190 toises above sea level. A few huts stood by a spring whose water was known by the Indians to be fresh and healthy. We found the water delicious. Its temperature was only 22.5°C, while the air was 28.7°C.'
5.
But in Madrid everything was already known; everything had already been measured. The northern side of the Plaza Mayor is 101 metres, 52 centimetres long. It was built by Juan Gómez de Mora in 1619. The temperature that day was 18.5 degrees centigrade, the wind from the West. The equestrian statue of Philip III in the middle of the Plaza Mayor is 5 metres, 43 centimetres high and was crafted by Giambologna and Pietro Tacca. The guidebook occasionally seemed impatient in presenting its facts. It sent me to the Pontificia de San Miguel, a grey building apparently designed to repel the casual glances of passersby and declared: