Alexander Von Humboldt's 250th Anniversary Landschaften und Kartographien der Humboldt'schen Wissenschaft; Alexander von Humboldt: The Complete Drawings from the American Travel Diaries; The Adventures of Alexander von Humboldt

Ottmar Ette and Julian Drews, eds. Hildesheim, Germany: Georg Olms Verlag, 2017. 344 pp., illustrations. €68.00 paper (ISBN 978-3-487-15506-7).

Ottmar Ette and Julia Maier, eds. Munich, Germany: Prestel, 2018. 736 pp., 600 color illustrations, color maps, facsimiles. $195.00 cloth in box (ISBN 978-3-7913-8354-5).

Andrea Wulf and Lillian Melcher. New York, NY: Pantheon, 2019. 272 pp., color illustrations, color maps. $29.95 cloth (ISBN 978-1-5247-4737-4).

2019 marked the 250th anniversary of a number of places and people: the cities of San Diego and Santa Cruz in California, Dartmouth College, Napoleon Bonaparte, the founder of modern Egypt Muhammed Ali, the English writer and abolitionist Amelia Opie, the French zoologist George Cuvier, and the German naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt. Whereas some semiquincentennial celebrations are often on a modest scale or limited to regional commemorations, others involve whole nations, as in the case of Napoleon and Humboldt. German scientific and cultural institutions pronounced 2019 as the Humboldt-Jahr. Academic and popular events, exhibitions, and a flood of books made a tribute to the life and work of Humboldt, following the celebrations of his older brother Wilhelm's birthday in 2017. The book market showed itself very receptive to a plethora of new publications on diverse Humboldt-related topics and aspects: popular biographies for young and adult readers (Holl 2017; Mehnert and Lieb 2018; Meinhardt 2018, 2019), Humboldt's relation to his home state Prussia (von Schaper 2018), annotated compendia on his drawings from the Humboldt Collection at the Berlin State Library and other sources (Lack 2018; Erdmann and Lubrich 2019; Lubrich and Möhl 2019), a selection of good-humored anecdotes from his life (Nolte 2018), and a complete Humboldt handbook on his life, works, and influence (Ette 2018), just to mention a few of the most recent releases.

Although the prestigious Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities did not spare words of praise for the Prussian scholar and organized a three-day international conference with the ambitious title “Alexander von Humboldt: The Whole World, the Whole of Human Condition,” Humboldt is not always seen in the bright light of a brilliant scientist with universal knowledge. Concurrently to the German celebrations, on the other side of the ocean, in Quito, Ecuador, a two-day symposium on the invention of Humboldt made an allusion to Wulf's (2016) bestselling book The Invention of Nature, which was awarded the Royal Society's Science Book Prize in 2016. The scientific event aimed at deconstructing the exaggerated iconic image of the German scholar and the Eurocentric dimension of “Humboldtism” from a postcolonial point of view.

Whatever the point of view of Humboldt as a person or as a scientist, be it as a figurehead of scientific achievements or as a symbol of neocolonial thoughts, the interest in the German scholar and his life and works has been waxing and waning through time (Nichols 2006). The festivities of Humboldt's centenary in 1869 around the world, including in the United States, had parades, eulogies, processions, and banquets on the agenda. A large bronze bust of the German nobleman was inaugurated in Central Park, and the New York Times (1869) dedicated the front page of its 15 September edition to “the one hundredth birthday of the philosopher.”

Is Humboldt still relevant in the twenty-first century? Was he that big? Are his contributions overrated? What is his real significance? As a scientist? As a source of stories? Three recent publications on Humboldt and Humboldtian science that use distinct approaches to the life and work of the German naturalist might provide further insights into these questions: an anthology of scientific papers, a literally heavyweight book with the complete drawings from his America diaries, and a graphic novel on his travels in the New World.

The first of the three publications on Humboldt is the result of the Third Humboldt Symposium that took place in Potsdam, Germany, in November 2016, with a focus on genealogies, chronologies, and epistemologies inserted in the broader context of the exploration of Humboldt's America diaries, a project supported by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research. The collection, edited by the eminent Humboldt scholar Ottmar Ette and his collaborator Julian Drews, is a follow-up of a previously published anthology on “horizons in Humboldt research” (Ette and Drews 2016). It gathers thirteen papers that reflect on landscapes and cartographic practices related to the German naturalist, his travels and writings, and Humboldtian modes of “doing” science. The central idea is to conceive Humboldt's writings as a “space-opening movement” (raumerschließende Bewegung), in other words, concepts of representation such as landscapes and maps were epistemological and aesthetic principles and guidelines for his studies. In this context, movement refers to the geographical mobilities of knowledge in two ways: the physical translocation during his travels and the dissemination and transfer of his ideas. An international and interdisciplinary ensemble of scholars from a wide range of areas, from history, landscape architecture, and comparative literature to German studies, art history, and geography, accepted the challenge to engage with these Humboldtian movements from the perspective of their own disciplinary fields.

Despite its title, the anthology is not limited to contributions in the German language. Two chapters are in French, and another two are in English. The book is divided into three sections: “Landscape I,” “Landscape II,” and “Maps.” In the first part, the contributions address landscapes as geographical features and metaphors. The authors discuss the relations between landscapes and Humboldt's texts as a play of Apollonian and Dionysian influences, compare “textual” landscapes of his descriptions of his visits to the Ataruipe and Guácharo caves in Venezuela, interpret the “line landscapes” of his maps as “decolonial” cartographic poetics, and link Humboldt's conceptions of landscape to slavery, aesthetics, and personal experience.

The following, more thought-provoking part with the uninspiring header “Landscape II” addresses Humboldt's engagement with Portuguese America, which he was unable to visit during his travels; his physiognomic approach to reading landscapes, especially mist, clouds, and volcanoes; and, as an oddity among the contributions, a cartographic diary and field experience performed by three landscape architects who literally followed Humboldt's footsteps on the Canary Islands.

The last and shortest section deals with maps and mappings: Humboldt's cartographic renderings of landscapes as panoramic views, insights into his drawing practices and techniques on the move, his maps as illustration devices of geographical problems, and Humboldt's relevance as a historian of science in the present.

The anthology is a dense and complex collection of papers on Humboldt and his works and worlds. Whereas some of the papers are a refreshing take on Humboldtian science and might deserve a translation into English to allow access to a broader audience, others are very specific and extremely academic, almost enigmatic. I confess that I have struggled with some of the chapters of the book that I had to reread. Unfortunately, the editors did not help to guide the reader through the book, which gives the impression of being stitched together with little diligence and without deeper thoughts about structure and content. There is no general introduction to the papers, only a thin two-and-a-half-page preface that vaguely addresses the “new landscapes” in Humboldt research. I wish the editors had written a comprehensive and more engaging general introduction to the themes and chapters so that the reader would be able to contextualize the contents. Despite these issues that might also be related to language barriers and specific academic writing styles, Landschaften und Kartographien delivers its main message: exploring landscapes and maps from a Humboldtian perspective.

The second book in this review, Alexander von Humboldt: The Complete Drawings from the American Travel Diaries, focuses on the German explorer himself rather than on the analysis of his works. In 2013, the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation purchased Humboldt's America diaries and other archival material for €12 million from a private source. The travel diaries themselves reveal an interesting story (Erdmann and Weber 2015). In a will from 1838, Humboldt wrote that the diaries should remain in Berlin. With the confusions of World War II, however, the papers were seized by the Russians, taken to the Soviet Union, transferred to the Jagiellonian Library in Cracow and then to the State Library in East Berlin, and ended up with the von Heinz family, the descendants of Wilhelm von Humboldt at Schloss Tegel, who decided to sell the collection in 2013.

The Complete Drawings come as a bulky ten-pound hardcover in a slipcase that contains all the graphical elements and depictions found in his personal annotations on the Americas, from sketches and simple geometric figures to maps and drawings of animals. The text on the cover of the protective case informs the reader that the book features “reproductions in facsimile quality, original text excerpts, and commentary by renowned experts on Humboldt's work.” The editors explain the purpose of the volume in their introductory notes, stressing the importance of looking into Humboldt's use of words and images that “complement one another and ought not to be taken separately” and “fill important gaps in the largely textual analysis of earlier editions of the diaries” (p. 33).

So what's in the book? Everything from Humboldt's America diaries that looks somehow graphical, from simple lines to sophisticated drawings, found their way into the volume. The editors divided the nonverbal components into six thematic categories: trigonometry and surveying, sky and cosmos, surface and interior of the earth, living beings, culture, and materiality. The first three thematic clusters, about two thirds of the reference material, entail observations of physical phenomena, their descriptions, and measurements. This includes triangles, angles, lines, circles, and arcs randomly drawn at the margins of pages or embedded in a description. They complement texts and calculations to determine the height of mountains, the width of rivers, or the diameter of a volcano crater.

There is a long list of items and themes that Humboldt depicted in his diaries: planetary constellations, halos around the moon and sunspots, barometric measurements, meteors, refraction of sunlight and color changes, changing water levels of lakes, ocean currents, elevation profiles, transects, rock formations, coastlines, and mountains. Humboldt was particularly fascinated by volcanoes. Profiles, routes, and vertical views are common features on the pages.

The category of “living beings” is less common on the pages: a few leaves, plants, fruits, worms, the head of a Cuba flamingo, patterns on the back of a coral snake, the anatomical depiction of the brain of an iguana and the leg of a capybara, an electric eel in profile, a piranha and its bladder, and a stingray. Human and culture artifacts are restricted to artifacts, archeology, and architecture: building blocks from Inca ruins, hieroglyphs, floor plans, mine shafts, and furnaces for amalgamating rocks.

Maps and cartographic sketches were prominent features in Humboldt's diaries. He drew outlines of the Caribbean coast, Trinidad, Cuba, very detailed drafts of the missions of Caura, and the Orinoco and its tributaries. The Rio Madalena is sketched out over four pages. Some place names are crossed out and put in a different location.

A few pages even include drawings that are not from Humboldt's pen; for example, the “cartographic practice drawings” by his Venezuelan travel companion Carlos de Montúfar, who used the diary pages to train his skills at drawing roads, mountains, and symbols for settlements and buildings. Years later, Montúfar joined Simon Bolivar's forces and was executed by the Spanish in 1816.

The editors left the most extraordinary curiosities to the end. About a dozen diary pages with blue or brown ink stains show that Humboldt's writing was not always accident-free. Ink smears or marks that look like Rorschach blots cover parts of the pages, but still keep the written text visible. One of the pages labeled as “brown watery ink mark, and scale indicating the depth of the Orinoco water” (p. 663) supposedly preserved the original water splashes from the river.

The drawings come in many different sizes, forms, and techniques. Some line tracings occupy entire pages, whereas others are minuscule, almost negligible scribbles at the margins. Humboldt was not famous for his calligraphy. The handwritten annotations in his diaries are in German or French and not easy to read. In the book, complete texts or passages that accompany the drawings are translated into English, and the original quotations in the foreign language are reproduced in the appendix.

Page by page and note by note, the diaries have since been scanned by the State Library in Berlin and are now available online. Hundreds of pages of barely legible scribbles, sprinkled with sketches, drawings, and addenda do not transmit the image of a systematic and organized naturalist, but the afflicted mind of someone whose thoughts were always about more than one problem or phenomenon at the same time. Humboldt's diaries are not a personal account of his voyage, but a scrapbook with annotations. Those readers who have read his Personal Narratives (Humboldt 1814–1829) or other accounts from his America journey will easily endorse what critics wrote more than 200 years ago: Humboldt's writings were “immeasurably tedious, and made up of a variety of scientific observations put together in the least attractive form” (Anonymous 1816, 3) and “the materials are so jumbled and broken, that they resemble truly the elements of the poetic chaos” (Anonymous 1818, 234–35). Despite the critique, the reviewers still recognize the importance of Humboldt's studies: “Notwithstanding these animadversions on the composition of M. de Humboldt, we are perfectly ready to acknowledge the value of his discoveries, and to consider them as forming an important addition to our stock of knowledge on topics of geography, natural history, and natural philosophy” (Anonymous 1816, 15).

This is a coffee table book for Humboldt aficionados and a great opportunity not only to gain insights into his diaries, but also into his mapping, surveying, and writing on the move that show his incredible perceptive skills, his restlessness, his obsession for measurements, and what Livingstone (1992, 28) called the “situated messiness” of geographical knowledge. The Complete Drawings is not a “diary in the strict sense of the term,” borrowing this expression from the posthumously published diaries by the anthropologist Malinowski (1967) that shocked the world for revealing the portrait of a grumpy researcher who despised his subjects of study. Do not expect intimacies, bold statements, or any kind of humor. It seems Humboldt was incapable of confiding his feelings and emotions even to himself. This is unfiltered science writing that will attract not only historians of science, but also the general audience interested in Humboldt's personality as naturalist and explorer.

The third book on Humboldt discussed in this review is a pictorial interpretation of Humboldt's America travel diaries. It is the new opus by the German-born science writer and emerging Humboldt specialist Andrea Wulf. For this project, Wulf is joined by the aspiring Bostonian illustrator Lillian Melcher to present the Humboldt readership community with The Adventures of Alexander von Humboldt, an unpaged graphic novel that recounts Humboldt's travels to the Americas between 1799 and 1804. Wulf herself classifies the book as a “work of graphic nonfiction (for lack of a better term),” based on primary and secondary sources and archival research. The graphic novel, based on true facts, is a colorful mix of pictures, conversations, reflections, and descriptions based on Wulf's interpretations. Her caveat is that “[o]nly the dialogues are imagined but based as closely as possible on Humboldt's own descriptions” (p. 264).

The pages of the book are content-laden collages from diaries, letters, notes, sketches, drawings of herbarium specimens, and even present-day samples from the New York Botanical Garden. The all-caps texts for the narrative appear in reader-friendly font size and in call-out boxes. The format of the book is generous: 9.8 inches by 12.2 inches.

Step by step and place by place, Wulf reconstructs the journey. As an omniscient I-narrator, Humboldt provides firsthand accounts of his observations and travels. As a time traveler, he can even see into the future, mentioning people long after his time who took his writings as inspiration for their life projects. John Muir, the acclaimed father of the National Parks in the United States, shouts out, “How intensely I desire to be a Humboldt!” (p. 47).

Willingly or not, Wulf and Melcher add funny anecdotes to the plot. A fish caught to be dissected ends up as an oven-baked dinner rather than a sample for Humboldt's collection (p. 8). On another occasion, he discovers a unique tomato plant and experiments with one of the red fruits. Bonpland tells him that “the locals call them ‘arse blockers’ because they cause constipation!” (p. 49). Humboldt immediately spits it out in a gush and starts laughing about this scene, not without mentioning that after his return to Europe, the plant was named in his honor. Crossing the Quindío Pass high in the mountains of Colombia at almost 12,000 feet, Humboldt takes a rest and maps his foot, which almost resembles a map, and indicates the “location” of piranha bites, cactus thorns, cuts from bamboo, and infected spots (p. 134).

Wulf sometimes gets carried away when she interprets Humboldt's behavior. When he arrives with Bonpland at Cumaná in present-day Venezuela in July 1799, the reader can see the German scholar happily jumping around on the beach like a child measuring the temperature of the sand (“37.7°C”), admiring the colors of flora, fauna, and the landscape (“Look at the blossoms, the birds, even the crayfish are blue and yellow”) and uprooting his first plant sample from American soils, exclaiming “our first specimen of South America!” (p. 14). Another example is Humboldt's famous vegetation map of the Chimborazo, which appears as a centerfold over four pages (pp. 166–67). The caricatured figures of the travel party on the upper slopes are almost an aesthetic insult to the original picture.

The representation of Humboldt is no acritical worshiping. Wulf addresses several controversies surrounding the Prussian scholar and the Eurocentric interpretation of his travels. For example, halfway through the book, the spread-out pages show Frederic Church's “Heart of the Andes,” a five-by-ten-foot painting of an Andean landscape with the snowcapped Chimborazo in the background. Church intended to send the painting to Berlin without knowing that Humboldt had died a few days earlier. The reproduction of the painting in Wulf's book shows a powerful image of nature at the foothills of the Andes. Curiously, maybe purposely, a text bubble in the lower left quarter hides a detail from the original: A large cross appears above the call-out, hiding what is below: two indigenous people in front of the cross, conjuring the presence of the Catholic church in Latin America during the colonial times (pp. 132–33).

Was Humboldt gay or not? There are still a lot of people around who think that they need to know, although sexual orientation is certainly the personal right of any individual. Wulf speculates on this topic, too (see also Aldrich 2003, 24–29). The local damsels in Quito talk about the prominent European guest, but lament that he has only eyes for his instrument and the young Creole aristocrat Carlos de Montúfar (p. 142), whom Humboldt, through Wulf's imagination, describes in the following way: “He's twenty-two and keen to join our adventures … and very handsome, I might add” (p. 143). On the following pages, Humboldt takes care of a fever-stricken Montúfar and lies down close to him on a bed of straw (p. 145). Relatives and friends gossip about his sexual inclinations. Wulf's penny for a thought on Humboldt's sexuality is not conclusive: “Yes, I never had a wife, but I've always been too busy for a family. To me a married man is a lost man. Many of my trusted friends got married, wasting their time on tittle-tattle instead of scientific discoveries” (p. 146).

Wulf is also at pains to paint a picture of Humboldt's relations to indigenous people and his local aides and porters, who remain invisible in his narratives. On the one hand, she emphasizes Humboldt's rejection of slavery. When looking out of the window of his room in Cumaná, he is shocked by the existence of a local slave market: “How awful—the traders are even checking the slaves' teeth … like horses in a market. Utterly appalling” (p. 16).

On the other hand, his own servants remain in the background and are not well treated. Wulf mentioned that Humboldt had several servants, among them José de la Cruz, Carlos del Pino, and Felipe Aldas (Biermann and Schwarz 1999), but she took the liberty to “conflate three servants into one” (p. 264). That is the reason why the persona José is accompanying the German everywhere. Humboldt treats him in a bossy way, adverting him to be careful with the instruments. One of the catch phrases in the book appears on several pages: “José, is the barometer safe?” (pp. 59, 162, 230).

The book ends with a wizened, moribund, and bitter Humboldt in his reading room in Berlin in 1858, a year before his death, reflecting on his achievements and honors. In a combination of famous last words, flashbacks, and the future, he complains, “Suddenly, I was completely forgotten…. My daring adventures, my discoveries, my ideas of nature as a web of life … and my prescient warnings about the destruction of nature … Has it all been forgotten? Was it really all for nothing?” (p. 263).

The Adventures of Alexander von Humboldt is a creative and enjoyable take on depicting the German naturalist's journey to the New World. Wulf's intention is clear. She wants to popularize science, and Humboldt's American “adventures” will certainly find an ample readership. The general tone of the book is distractive and humorous, although not everyone will agree with this approach. After all, science is supposed to be a serious business. Some episodes remind the reader of the notorious liar Baron von Munchausen rather than a no-nonsense Prussian nobleman. In addition, the playfulness of the narrative makes it easy to overlook incorrect details, as in the case of the influence of the German naturalist on the South American liberator Simón Bolívar. Wulf claims that Humboldt's “descriptions might have helped to invigorate his revolution” (p. 42), endorsing what other scholars might have read into history: Humboldt as a key actor “who aroused the young Bolivar to the epochal determination to change the political status of Spanish America” (Rippy and Brann 1947, 697; Zeuske 2013). Wulf quotes Bolívar's famous words that might never have been spoken at all: “Humboldt is the discoverer of the New World” (p. 43). The German scholar appears as an idealized character. It is not the noble savage, but the noble European on a quest to explore and explain nature.

The three books in this review essay address different ideas, approaches, and representations of Humboldt and Humboldtian science and show the diversity of the intellectual landscape of historians of science who study his life, work, and influences. How much weight or importance should be given to Humboldt? Opinions differ between the status of an idolized cult figure and a critical image of a conservative German personality who only contributed to enforcing the Eurocentric vision of the Americas (see Cañizares-Esguerra 2001). Humboldt? What Humboldt? The debate has not come to an end, but will definitely result in an increasing corpus of extremely readable literature.