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Abstract
In his day, Alexander von Humboldt was hugely famed for the journey he made between 1799 and 1804 with the botanist Bonpland through the mainland tropics of America and the Caribbean. The account he gave of it, the 30-volume Voyages aux régions équinoxiale du Nouveau Continent, published over as many years, is interestingly shaped by the Atlas pittoresque of 1810, which comprises volumes XV and XVI. Better known under the title Vues des Cordillères et monuments indigènes de l’Amérique, this latter text consists of 69 engraved plates, several in colour, balanced between the terms of the title, on which the author offers commentaries. Contrasted, the two statements (Voyages and Vues) reveal much about Humboldt's ambitions and strategies as a travel writer, about his changing sense of the continent's cultural geography and even the general direction of his own five-year journey.
Notes
Notes
1. Part II of Mary Louise Pratt's Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 1992) is dedicated to highly informed discussion of Humboldt and his work. As well as the sources referred to here, it takes account of the Ansichten der Natur, his favourite work (Views of Nature [1806]), and the three volumes of the Relation historique du voyage (1814–25). He destroyed the manuscript of a fourth volume and abandoned the project out of distaste for ego-centred narrative. Chosen for the cover, illustration 28 of Pratt's work shows the explorer as exploiter encapsulated in the Andean cargero who earns his keep carrying travellers in a chair strapped to his back. This practice appalled Humboldt when he witnessed it in the Quindio pass, as Ottmar Ette notes in his careful and fine edition of the original plates for Enzensberger's Die Andere Bibliothek: Alexander von Humboldt, Ansichten der Kordilleren und Monumente der eingeborenen Völker Amerikas (Frankfurt: Eichborn, 2004).
2. See Eduardo Góes Neves, Arqueologia da Amazônia (Rio de Janeiro: Azahar, 2006).
3. In his Chavin and the Origins of Andean Civilization (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1992), Richard L. Burger draws on Carib stories of the food-bearing caiman heard today by Peter Rivière and published in his Marriage among the Trio (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969). At the same time Burger traces the high pass that links Chavin to the ocean and to the spondylus seen on the Tello obelisk.
4. See Peter G. Roe, The Cosmic Zygote. Cosmology in the Amazon Basin (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1982). In Munro S. Edmonson, The Book of the Counsel: The Popol Vuh of the Quiché Maya of Guatemala (New Orleans, LA: Tulane University Press, 1971), the English translation accompanies the Quiche text, which is not the case in Dennis Tedlock's more generally known Popol Vuh. The Definitive Edition of the Mayan Book of the Dawn of Life and the Glories of Gods and Kings (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996).
5. Alexander von Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland, Vues des Cordillères et monumens des peuples indigènes de l’Amérique (Paris: F. Schoell, 1810).
6. Charles Minguet, Alexandre de Humboldt. Voyages dans l’Amérique équinoxiale: I Itinéraire; II Tableaux de la nature et des hommes (Paris: Maspero, 1980). Translations from this text are mine and are included in the text in parentheses.
7. In sighting these granite massifs (Minguet I: 102), which with Roraima are the highest mountains east of the Andes, and in acknowledging their indigenous names, Humboldt put to rest cartographical incompetence that still in the high Enlightenment would assign to this area the city El Dorado with its lake and its streets of gold. At the same time, with his mapping of the Casiquiare, like his intuitions of the Pacaraima ridge, Humboldt paved the way, as they recognised, for such successors as the Schomburgks in the 1840s, Koch-Grünberg before the First World War, and the Franco-Venezuelan expedition of 1950.
8. On the whole question of the provenance and authority of Carib and related South American texts, see Lúcia Sá, Rainforest Literature: Amazonian Texts and Latin American Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004).
9. Rafael Caldera, Biblioteca Americana 1823 (Caracas: Presidencia de la República, 1972, facsimile edition). Tequendama (Minguet I: 182) went on to reappear at the start of Pablo Neruda's epic poem, Canto general (1950). In many details, the Virgilian Americanism of Bello's diction owes a great deal to clerical predecessors in New Spain, like Fray José Gil.
10. Celebrated in Tupi songs collected in nineteenth-century Manaos, depicted in late Classic Yojoa ceramics, and emulated by the Twins in the Popol vuh, the tatu leads to safety deep in the forest a chorus of Amazonian midwives proclaiming practices and principles of birth that explicitly refute the biblical genesis, as Augusto and Haroldo de Campos argue in their Revisão de Sousândrade (São Paulo: Perspectiva, 2002), which reproduces this and other key passages of the epic. When he arrived in Cunamá on July 13, 1799, seeing ‘la cuirasse écailleuse d’un tatou’ on his pirogue held a special charm for Humboldt because it assured him that they had arrived in the torrid zone they had struggled to reach for so long (Minguet I: 40).
11. In his excellent Bolívar: A Life (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), John Lynch notes reasons (320) for doubting the authenticity of this document, first known in 1822 but published posthumously in 1833.
12. Eduard Seler began his career as Americanist ethnographer and decipherer of codices with perceptive readings, inspired in part by comments made by Humboldt in Vues, on the fragments he had brought back from Mexico, which appeared in Historische Hieroglyphen der Azteken (Berlin: Köngliche Bibliothek, 1893).
13. Scion of the royal family deposed by the Inca, Leandro Zapla showed Humboldt this manuscript, which had been translated by an ancestor into Spanish. After his experience of seismic activity in the Andes, Humboldt finds himself less readily sceptical of how long this history said the earth was darkened by volcanic ash, and sums up: ‘This manuscript, the traditions I gathered in the Parime, and the hieroglyphs that I have seen in the Cassiquiare desert where today there remains no human vestige, all that added to the notions of Clavijero about the emigration of the Mexicans towards the middle of America has given me ideas about the origin of these peoples, which I propose to develop as soon as I have the time’ (Minguet I: 204).