Free The Invention of Nature by Andrea Wulf Page B

South America and continued to do so. Every morning young African men and women were put on sale. They were forced to rub themselves with coconut oil to make their skin shiny black. They were then paraded for prospective buyers, who jerked open the slaves’ mouths to examine their teeth like ‘horses in a market’. The sight made Humboldt a lifelong abolitionist.
    Then, on 4 November 1799, less than four months after their arrival in South America, Humboldt for the first time felt the danger that might threaten his life and his plans. It was a hot and humid day. At midday dark clouds rolled in and by 4 p.m. thunderclaps reverberated across the town. Suddenly the ground began to tremble, almost knocking Bonpland to the floor as he was leaning over a table to examine some plants, and violently rocking Humboldt in his hammock. People ran screaming through the streets as houses crumbled, but Humboldt remained calm and climbed out of his hammock to set up his instruments. Even with the earth shaking nothing would prevent him from conducting his observations. He timed the shocks, noted how the quake rippled from north to south and took electric measurements. Yet for all his outward composure, Humboldt experienced inner turmoil. As the ground moved beneath him, it destroyed the illusion of a whole life, he wrote. Water was the element of motion, not the earth. It was like being woken, suddenly and painfully, from a dream. Until that moment he had felt an unwavering faith in the stability of nature, but he had been deceived. Now ‘we mistrust for the first time a soil, on which we had so long placed our feet with confidence,’ he said, but he was still determined to continue his travels.
    He had waited for years to see the world and knew that he was putting his life in danger, but he wanted to see more. Two weeks later and after an anxious wait to draw money with his Spanish credit note (when it failed, the governor gave Humboldt money from his private funds), they left Cumaná for Caracas. In mid-November Humboldt and Bonpland – together with an Indian servant called José de la Cruz – chartered a small open thirty-foot local trading boat to sail westwards. They packed their many instruments and trunks, which were already filled with more than 4,000 plant specimens as well as insects, notebooks and tables of measurements.
    Situated 3,000 feet above sea level, Caracas was home to 40,000 people. Founded by the Spanish in 1567, it was now the capital of the Captaincy General of Venezuela. Ninety-five per cent of the city’s white population were criollos, or as Humboldt called them ‘Hispano-Americans’ – white colonists of Spanish descent but born in South America. Though a majority, these South American creoles had been excluded from the highest administrative and military positions for decades. The Spanish crown had sent Spaniards to control the colonies, many of whom were less educated than the creoles. The wealthy creole plantation owners found it infuriating to be ruled by merchants dispatched from a distant mother country. The Spanish authorities treated them, some creoles complained, ‘as if they were vile slaves’.
    Caracas lay nestled in a high valley skirted by mountains, near the coast. Once again Humboldt rented a house as a base from which to launch shorter excursions. From here Humboldt and Bonpland set out to scale the double-domed Silla, a mountain so close that they could see it from their house but which, to Humboldt’s surprise, no one he met in Caracas had ever climbed. On another day they rode into the foothills where they found a spring of the clearest water tumbling down a wall of shimmering rock. Observing a group of girls there, fetching water, Humboldt was suddenly struck by a memory of home. That evening he wrote in his journal: ‘Memories of Werther, Göthe and the king’s daughters’ – a reference to The Sorrows of Young Werther, in which Goethe had described a similar scene. On other