Humboldt in the Cono Sur of South America: writing, genre and the temptations of going native

Abstract

This article explores Alexander von Humboldt's legacy in the south of South America, which he did not visit, through the way he was read by Darwin and later friends and disciples like Moreno, Sarmiento, Bonpland, D’Orbigny, Rugendas, Catlin and Burmeister. Humboldt bequeathed a contradictory genre that implied frustration and failure to unite experience and knowledge into a narrative. I close by exploring an implicit desire in Humboldt's nature philosophy to become a local and return to the South American tropics.

Keywords:

• South America
• Alexander von Humboldt
• scientific travel writing
• genre
• scientist
• narrative
• realism
• reader
• tropics

Notes

Notes

1. See Charles Minuet's edition, Alexandre de Humboldt, Voyages dans l’Amérique Équinoxiale (Paris: Maspero, 1980), 28–31, for a description of Humboldt's complete Americanist publication.

2. Nicolaas Rupke, Alexander von Humboldt: A Metabiography (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2005). See my review in History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 28, no. 3 (2006): 436–438.

3. Laura Dassow Walls, The Passage to Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Shaping of America (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2009), 43.

4. Walls, The Passage to Cosmos, 42.

5. Ottmar Ette, ‘Las dimensiones del saber (geográfico). Los cuadros de la cultura de Alexander von Humboldt’, in Alexander von Humboldt. Estancia en España y viaje Americano, ed. Mariano Cuesta Domingo and Sandra Rebok (Madrid: Real Sociedad Geográfica/Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 2008), 307 and 321.

6. Christophe Cordonnier, ‘La relation historique du voyage aux régions équinoxiales du Nouveau Continent: un anti-récit du voyage’, in ‘Colloque Alexandre de Humboldt’, juin 6, 1999, Acta Geographica 123 (2000): 91.

7. For example, see my ‘Introduction’ to Alexander von Humboldt, Personal Narrative of a Journey to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent, ed. and trans. Jason Wilson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995), xxxvi–xxxvii, where I cite Darwin on xxxvii.

8. Darwin read Humboldt in Helen Maria Williams's translation, though I doubt that he took all seven volumes on board the Beagle, given such lack of space. For example, volume one ends on Cape Arraya and contains all that Darwin needed to stir him to travel to the tropics (the Dragon tree, the Tenerife volcano, etc.).

9. Humboldt, Personal Narrative, 5–13, for Darwin's lucid comments.

10. Alejandro de Humboldt, Cartas americanas, ed. Charles Minguet; trans. Marta Traba (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1980), 73.

11. Cited in Margarita Bowen, Empiricism and Geographical Thought from Francis Bacon to Alexander von Humboldt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 212.

12. Francisco P. Moreno, Viaje a la Patagonia austral, 1876–1877 (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Solar, 1969), 25. See my ‘Silence and Meaning in some Patagonian Travels: Darwin, Hudson, Moreno and Meyer’, in Patagonia. Myths and Realities, ed. Fernanda Peñaloza, Jason Wilson and Claudio Canaparo (New York: Peter Lang, 2010), 175–194.

13. Humboldt, Personal Narrative, 10.

14. Humboldt, Personal Narrative, xliv.

15. ‘Tengo delante más o menos los mismos vestigios que en medio de las lujuriosas selvas revelaron al ilustre Humboldt la existencia de un gran pueblo extinguido’ [I have before me more or less the same ruins which in the midst of the luxuriant jungles revealed to the illustrious Humboldt the existence of once-great extinct people] (Moreno, Viaje, 320).

16. According to Richard Holmes, the term ‘scientist’ replaced ‘natural philosopher’ by 1840 (The Age of Wonder. How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science [London: Harper Press, 2009], 450).

17. Malcolm Nicolson,‘Historical Introduction’ to Humboldt, Personal Narrative, x.

18. Mireille Gayet, Alexandre de Humboldt. Le dernier savant universel (Paris: Vribert, 2006), 16–17.

19. ‘La sublime ley de la armonía, que lo rige todo invisiblemente, pero penetrada por quien la observa’ [The sublime law of harmony, which rules everything invisibly, but is penetrated by the observer] (Moreno, Viaje, 170).

20. His role was similar to that of Joseph Banks in England, as narrated by Richard Holmes in The Age of Wonder. See also Ricardo Cicerchia, Journey, Rediscovery and Narrative: British Travel Accounts of Argentina (London: Institute of Latin American Studies, 1998) on Humboldt as the ‘paradigm for travel narratives’ (4).

21. I have restricted myself to Argentina, Paraguay and Bolivia, but even here there are further Humboldtian messengers like Amadeo Jacques (1813–65) who arrived in 1852 with a letter from Humboldt. He taught in the Colegio Nacional, then in Tucumán. For Humboldt's progeny in Chile, see Lorenzo Cubillos, ‘Epistolario de Alexander von Humboldt con personajes vinculados a Chile’, Revista Universum, 17 (2002): 37–52; citing letters related to José Juan Bruner, Rodolfo and Bernardo Philippi, Franz Fonck and Carlos Segeth. For example, Humboldt had asked Rodolfo Philippi to investigate volcanoes and potatoes. He then wrote some 349 articles in a Humboldian sweep of disciplines. He ended up as Director of Santiago's Museo de Historia Natural. Humboldt's presence in Brazil has been studied by Neil Safier in a forthcoming volume Alexander von Humboldt and the Hemisphere, edited by Vera Kutzinski, Laura Dassow Walls and Ottmar Ette.

22. Humboldt, Views of Nature or Contemplation on the Sublime Phenomena of Creation, trans. E. C. Otté (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1850), 2. Humboldt touched on these same issues in his Personal Narrative, 162–64.

23. Humboldt, Views of Nature, 21.

24. D.F. Sarmiento, Viajes. Europa. Africa. América (Buenos Aires: Editorial Universitaria de Buenos Aires, 1961), 40.

25. Sarmiento, Viajes, 98. He was repeating a set view. Hooker rated Humboldt as the ‘first of scientific travellers’, using the same words as Byron, ‘Humboldt, “the first of travellers”, but not / The last … ’; see my ‘Introduction’ to Humboldt, Personal Narrative, xxxviii.

26. Sarmiento, Viajes, 40.

27. Cited in Dawn Ades, Art in Latin America. The Modern Era 1820–1980 (London: The South Bank Centre, 1989), 50.

28. Ades, Art in Latin America, 50 and 52.

29. Bonifacio del Carril, Mauricio Rugendas (Buenos Aires: Museo Nacional de Buenos Aires, 1966), 2. Also cited in full in María Sáenz Quesada, Mariquita Sánchez. Vida política y sentimental (Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 1995), 203–4. Rugendas spent 10 years in Chile, two years in Uruguay and twice visited Argentina in 1838 and 1845. See also Graciela Silvestri, ‘Errante en torno de los objetos miro. Relaciones entre artes y ciencias de descripción en el siglo XIX rioplatense’, in Graciela Batticuore et al., Resonancias románticas. Ensayos sobre historia de la cultura argentina (1820–1890) (Buenos Aires: Eudeba, 2005), 225–243.

30. Gayet, Alexandre de Humboldt, 181. An example: the US painter Frederic Church (1826–1900) twice travelled to the Andes, painting Chimborazo as Humboldt had. Gerald Carr insisted that Church was inspired by Humboldt's ‘discipline of precision, of objectivity, of understanding exercised by the scientist's passion for truth’, words that echo what Ades wrote about Rugendas (Gerald L. Carr, Frederic Edwin Church. Catalogue Raisonné of the Works of Art [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994], xxxiv). See also Frank Baron, ‘From Alexander von Humboldt to Frederic Edwin Church: Voyages of Scientific Exploration and Artistic Creativity’, International Review for Humboltian Studies VI, no. 10 (2005) http://www.uni-potsdam.de/u/romanistik/humboldt/hin/hin10/baron.htm (accessed September 20, 2010).

31. See George Catlin, North American Indians, ed. Peter Matthiessen (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989).

32. George Catlin, Last Rambles amongst the Indians of the Rocky Mountains and the Andes (London: Sampson Low and Marston, 1868), 205.

33. George Catlin, The Lifted and Subsided Rocks of America, with their Influence on the Oceanic, Atmospheric and Land Currents and the Distribution of Races (London: Trübner & Co., 1870).

34. Catlin, Last Rambles, 155.

35. See Brian W. Dippie, Catlin and his Contemporaries: The Politics of Patronage (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990), 339.

36. See Maximilian, Prinz von Wied, Travels in the Interior of North America, trans. H. Evans Lloyd (London: Ackerman, 1843); and see William J. Orr, ‘Portraits of the Plains’, FMR no. 4 (September 1984): 91–116. Maximilian is one of many of Humboldt's friends and protégés who explored Brazil, beyond my scope here.

37. His first book Grundiss der Naturgeschichte (1833) reached nine editions in German by 1857. He corresponded with Humboldt over another widely read book, his Geschichte der Schofung (1843), translated into five languages.

38. Max Birabén, Germán Burmeister. Su vida (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Culturales Argentinas, 1968), 15.

39. Birabén, Germán Burmeister, 10.

40. Burmeister, Viaje por los estados del Plata; con referencia especial a la constitución física y al estado de la cultura de la Repúbica Argentina en los años 1857, 1858, 1859 y 1860, 3 vols (Buenos Aires: Unión Germánica en la Argentina, 1943–44; reissued by the Academia Nacional de la Historia/Union Académique Internationale, 2008).

41. José Gallardo, ‘Germán Burmeister, un sabio cabal’, La Nación, October 24, 1993, 2.

42. Detail and dates of all the letters in Luis Horacio Velázquez, Guillermo Enrique Hudson (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Culturales Argentinas, 1963), 87–96. I could add Burmeister's helping of further scientists like Carlos Berg, Paul Lorentz and Alfredo Stelzner: see José Babini, Historia de la ciencia en la Argentina (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Solar, 1986), 146–48.

43. Birabén, Germán Burmeister, 17.

44. Rodolfo Adelio Raffino, Burmeister, El Dorado y dos Argentinas (Buenos Aires: Editorial Dunken, 2006), 50–51.

45. Philippe de la Borde-Pédelahore and Chantal Boone, ‘Alcide d’Orbigny (1802–1857), dernier des naturalistes, premier des ethnologues’, in Les naturalistes français en Amérique du Sud, XVI–XIX siècles, 1770–1846, ed. Yves Laissus (Paris: Editions du CTHS, 1995), 249–59. Humboldt on his own barometer, cited in Douglas Botting, Humboldt and the Cosmos (London: Sphere Books, 1973), 146.

46. Darwin, The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, vol. 1, 1821–1836 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 462. See also his ‘I must have one more growl … ill luck the French gov. has sent one of its collectors to the Rio Negro – where he has been working for the last six months’ (280).

47. Darwin, Voyage of the Beagle [1839] (facsimile of the 1845 second edition, Geneva: Heron Books, 1968), 93.

48. D’Orbigny, Descripción geográfica, histórica y estadística de Bolivia (Paris: Librairie de los señores Gide, 1845), vii.

49. Cited by Phillipe de Laborde Pédelahore, Alicide D’Orbigny. A la découverte des nouvelles républiques sud-américaines (Biarritz: Atlantice, 2000), 6 and 9.

50. See Alexander von Humboldt, Aimé Bonpland, and Karl S. Kunth, Nova Genera et Species Plantarum … , seven folio volumes (Paris, 1816–26), 2386pp. See also William T. Stearn, ed., Humboldt, Bonpland, Kunth and Tropical American Botany (Lehre: Cramer, 1968).

51. See Alicia Lourteig, ‘Aimé Bonpland’, Bonplandia, n. 16, Universidad Nacional del Nordeste, October 1977, 271.

52. So much so that Richard Holmes refers to him as a mathematician (The Age of Wonder, 476). My biographical outline can now be fleshed out in meticulous detail in Stephen Bell, A Life in Shadow: Aimé Bonpland in Southern South America, 1817–1858 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010).

53. Gayet, Alexandre de Humboldt, 152–63.

54. See my essay ‘The Strange Fate of Aimé Bonpland’, London Magazine, April/May, 1994, vol. 34, 36–48. I am expanding this essay into a book.

55. ‘Notas para la utilidad de trabajar los yerbales, empleando un procedimiento distinto del que se emplea hasta hoy día por los rutineros que los benefician’, in Lourteig, Aimé Bonpland, 270–76.

56. Bell, A Life in Shadow, 217. Bonpland died on the May 11, 1858 and Humboldt heard about it on 9 August 1858. See also Nicolas Hossard, Aimé Bonpland 1773–1850, médecin, naturaliste, explorateur en Amérique du Sud. A l’ombre des arbres (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2001). Hossard has also edited the Bonpland/Humboldt Correspondance, 1805–1858 (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2004).

57. Stephen Bell revealed that his breeding of merino sheep was as crucial as his research into yerba mate. His flock reached 5000. His were ‘pioneer efforts’ as the merinos were only introduced into Argentina around 1814 (see Bell, ‘Aimé Bonpland and Merinomania in Southern South America’, The Americas 51, no. 3 [1995]: 303). E.T. Hamy, Aimé Bonpland, médecin et naturaliste, explorateur de l’Amérique du Sud: sa vie, son oeuvre, sa correspondence (Paris: E. Guilmoto, 1906), 124, 187 and 183.

58. Hamy, Aimé Bonpland, 187 and 199.

59. Hamy, Aimé Bonpland, 216.

60. My literal translation of: ‘Ce qu'on écrit en voyage ne peut jamais être complet. Les notes que prend le voyageur ne peuvent être bien rendues que par le voyageur lui-même qui conserve dans son esprit une multitude de choses qui lui rapellent même une note, une description très succinctes, et par consequent incomplètes’ (Hamy, Aimé Bonpland, 171).

61. ‘Acostumbrado a vivir a la sombra de árboles seculares; a oír el canto de las aves que se anidan en sus ramas; a ver deslizarse a mis pies las aguas cristalinas de un arroyo, con que compensaría estas pérdidas en el barrio más ruidoso y aristocrático de París encerrado en un desván, tendría que trabajar por cuenta de un librero, que quisiera encargarse de la publicación de mis obras, sin tener más consuelo que ver brotar de cuando en cuando alguna rosa en la ventana de mi aposento! Perdería lo que más aprecio – la compañía de las plantas con las que me he criado’ in Pierre Angelis, Noticia biográfica de M. Bonpland (Buenos Aires: Imprenta de la Revista, 1855), 12–13.

62. In an appendix to Marcos Sastre, El tempe argentino [1853] (Buenos Aires: Ivaldi y Checchi, n.d.), 269.

63. Humboldt, Personal Narrative, 293 and Atlas pittoresque (Paris: F. Schoell, 1810), ‘Volcan d’air de Turbaco’, planche XLI, 239–41.

64. Humboldt, Personal Narrative, 38.

65. Humboldt, Personal Narrative, 295.

66. See J.H. Lindquist, ‘Threats to the European Subject in Humboldt's Personal Narrative’, International Review for Humboldtian Studies, 9 (2004): ‘Humboldt's impressions left him with a melancholy longing for the tropics – and a “vague desire to revisit that spot” years after he had returned’. For Lindquist, Bonpland is a significant subtext about the pull of the tropics.

67. Humboldt, Cartas americanas, 76; Philippe Foucault, Le pêcheur d’Orchidées. Aimé Bonpland, 1773–1858 (Paris: Seghers, 1990), 306. The quotation, however, could be invented.

68. Humboldt, Personal Narrative, xlvii.