Free The Invention of Nature by Andrea Wulf Page A

interest in those who govern’ the colonies, Humboldt was certain, he would face ‘numberless inconveniences’ during his time in the New World.
    Two pages from Humboldt’s Spanish passport, including signatures of several administrators from across the colonies (Illustration Credit 3.4)
    Yet, before presenting his paperwork to the governor of Cumaná, Humboldt soaked up the tropical scenery. Everything was so new and spectacular. Each bird, palm or wave ‘announced the grand aspect of nature’. It was the beginning of a new life, a period of five years in which Humboldt would change from a curious and talented young man into the most extraordinary scientist of his age. It was here that Humboldt would see nature with both head and heart.

PART II
Arrival: Collecting Ideas
    4
    South America
    WHEREVER HUMBOLDT AND Bonpland turned during those first weeks in Cumaná, something new caught their attention. The landscape held a spell over him, Humboldt said. The palm trees were ornamented with magnificent red blossoms, the birds and fish seemed to compete in their kaleidoscopic hues, and even the crayfish were sky blue and yellow. Pink flamingos stood one-legged at the shore and the palms’ fanned leaves mottled the white sand into a patchwork of shade and sun. There were butterflies, monkeys and so many plants to catalogue that, as Humboldt wrote to Wilhelm, ‘we run around like fools.’ Even the usually unruffled Bonpland said that he would go ‘mad if the wonders don’t stop soon’.
    Having always prided himself on his systematic approach, Humboldt found it difficult to come up with a rational method of studying his surroundings. Their trunks filled so quickly that they had to order more reams of paper on which to press their plants, and sometimes they found so many specimens that they could hardly carry them back to their house. Unlike other naturalists, Humboldt was not interested in filling taxonomic gaps – he was collecting ideas rather than just natural history objects, he said. It was the ‘impression of the whole’, Humboldt wrote, that captivated his mind more than anything.
    Humboldt compared everything he saw with what he had previously observed and learned in Europe. Whenever he picked up a plant, a rock or an insect, his mind raced back to what he had seen at home. The trees that grew in the plains around Cumaná, with their branches forming parasol-like canopies, reminded him of Italian pines. When seen from a distance, the sea of cacti created the same effect as the grasses in the marshes in the northern climates. Here was a valley that made him think of Derbyshire in England, or caverns similar to those in Franconia in Germany, and those in the Carpathian Mountains in eastern Europe. Everything seemed somehow connected – an idea that would come to shape his thinking about the natural world for the rest of his life.
    Humboldt in South America (Illustration Credit 4.1)
    Humboldt had never been happier and healthier. The heat suited him and the fevers and nervous afflictions from which he had suffered in Europe disappeared. He even put on some weight. During the day he and Bonpland collected, in the evening they sat together and wrote up their notes and at night they took astronomical observations. One such night they stood awed for hours as a meteor shower drew thousands of white tails across the sky. Humboldt’s letters home burst with excitement and brought this wondrous world into the elegant salons of Paris, Berlin and Rome. He wrote of huge spiders that ate hummingbirds and of thirty-foot snakes. Meanwhile he amazed the people of Cumaná with his instruments; his telescopes brought the moon close to them and his microscopes transformed the lice in their hair into monstrous beasts.
    There was one aspect that dampened Humboldt’s joy: the slave market opposite their rented house, in Cumaná’s main square. Since the early sixteenth century the Spanish had imported slaves to their colonies in