Legends:THE FIVE-YEAR voyage of the Beagle, with a young naturalist by the name of Charles Darwin on board, is widely considered the greatest journey of scientific discovery. But more than 30 years before the Beagle set sail, another eager young naturalist set out on an intrepid five-year journey of discovery in the New World, also with major consequences for our understanding of the natural world.
The Prussian explorer and naturalist Alexander von Humboldt’s adventures in the Americas at the turn of the 19th century led to many major breakthroughs in fields as diverse as geography, mineralogy, astronomy, botany, zoology and meteorology: it also acted as an inspiration for the student Darwin.
Humboldt’s was the sort of adventure of discovery that belongs to a long-gone era of scientific inquiry, a voyage of new frontiers both physical and intellectual.
Born in Berlin in 1769 to a major in the Prussian army and a wealthy Huguenot mother, Humboldt didn’t shine academically as a child, but eventually he discovered a passion for botany, which sparked a desire to explore abroad.
First, though, he studied mineralogy and geology, quickly rising through the ranks of the Prussia’s mining department. In his 20s, he became involved with the Weimar circle of Goethe and Friedrich Schiller, contributing a piece to Schiller’s periodical in 1795 – Goethe once suggested that an hour with Humboldt was more educational than eight days of study, a fine epitaph in itself.
It was the death of his mother in 1796, and the considerable inheritance he came into as a result, that freed him to embark on what would be his greatest adventure.
Along with French botanist Aimé Bonpland, he obtained permission from the Spanish prime minister to explore the Spanish colonies in Central and South America. At the time, only Spanish officials and Catholic missionaries were permitted to travel there, meaning there were vast opportunities for fresh scientific research. In the summer of 1799, as the century of the Enlightenment drew to a close, the duo sailed on the Pizarro from Coruna, bound for South America. Unlike the original Pizarro, however, theirs was to be a journey of intellectual discovery rather than imperial conquest, armed with scientific instruments rather than guns.
The list of accomplishments and adventures during their five years in the Americas is staggering. A four-month journey undertaken at the start of 1800 saw Humboldt and Bonpland travel along the Orinoco River by canoe, enduring the humidity and mosquitoes of the rainforest.
The trip was a success – they proved that the Orinoco and Amazon river systems were in fact joined. Following that expedition, Humboldt and Bonpland visited Cuba, earning Humboldt the sobriquet “second discoverer of Cuba” for all the mineralogical and botanical research he conducted in his few months there.
Upon returning to South America, Humboldt and Bonpland journeyed to the Andes, where Humboldt conducted much of his groundbreaking research into the effects of altitude on climate, vegetation and, indeed, humans as well as investigating the Earth’s magnetic fields.
In the Andes, the pair of explorers climbed Mount Chimborazo, then considered the highest mountain in the world, to a height of 19,286 feet – just short of the summit but still a record ascent that would not be surpassed for more than three decades.
The pair spent a year in Mexico, conducting a close study of the colony, and in 1804 were invited to Washington by Thomas Jefferson – the president’s commitment to science had just been demonstrated when he sent another famous pair of explorers, Lewis and Clark, to chart the western United States.
Upon returning to Europe in 1804, Humboldt based himself in Paris where he published findings on his South American adventures, quickly acquiring extraordinary fame across Europe, though even the account of his travels was considered, by some contemporaries, to be little more than Jugendliterature, or “adventure stories for young people”.
His output was prolific, with more than 600 books and 50,000 articles, according to Nicolaas Rupke’s biography of Humboldt.
His status meant that he enjoyed a high-profile life in the salons of Paris, before reluctantly returning to Prussia after an appointment to the royal court in Berlin in 1827.
Bonpland, on the other hand, never enjoyed the same level of acclaim, and returned to South America for further exploration in 1816, was imprisoned in isolationist Paraguay for a decade, and lived in Argentina until his death in 1858.
Humboldt’s later years were marked by a pioneering expedition across Russia, and later his most ambitious work, Kosmos, a mammoth five-volume attempt at a grand unifying theory of natural science which he began to compose in his 70s.
“My intercourse with highly gifted men early led me to discover that, without an earnest striving to attain to a knowledge of special branches of study, all attempts to give a grand and general view of the universe would be nothing more than a vain illusion,” he wrote in Kosmos, a multi-disciplinary approach that is all too rare today but whose value Humboldt clearly demonstrated.
The remarkable fame he achieved eventually faded, and now the Humboldt name is arguably best remembered for his beloved older brother, the philosopher Wilhelm, who founded Berlin’s Humboldt University.
Alexander is, however, commemorated in numerous species, place names and institutes of learning across Europe and the Americas.
After his death in 1859 at the age of 89, Darwin described him as “the greatest scientific traveller who ever lived” – an epithet that, even now, few others can lay claim to.
