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By Root 317 0

an exciting and multifarious phenomenon called Madrid was waiting to be discovered outside, promising an embarrassment of monuments, churches, museums, fountains, plazas and shopping streets. And yet the prospect of those enticements, about which I had heard so much and which I knew I was privileged to be able to see, merely provoked in me a combination of listlessness and self-disgust at the contrast between my own indolence and what I imagined would have been the eagerness of more normal visitors. My overwhelming wish was to remain in bed and, if possible, catch an early flight home.

2.

In the summer of 1799, a twenty-nine-year-old German by the name of Alexander von Humboldt set sail from the Spanish port of La Coruna, bound for the South American continent on a voyage of exploration.

‘From my earliest days I had felt the urge to travel to distant lands seldom visited by Europeans,' he would later recall. ‘The study of maps and the perusal of travel books aroused in me a secret fascination that was at times almost irresistible.' The young German was ideally suited to follow up on his fascination. Along with great physical stamina, he had expertise in biology, geology, chemistry, physics and history. As a student at the University of Göttingen, he had befriended Georg Forster, the naturalist who had accompanied Captain Cook on his second voyage, and mastered the art of classifying plant and animal species. Since finishing his studies, Humboldt had been looking for opportunities to travel to someplace remote and unknown. Plans to go to Egypt and Mecca had fallen through at the last moment, but in the spring of 1799, Humboldt had had the good fortune to meet King Charles IV of Spain and had persuaded him to underwrite his exploration of South America.

Humboldt was to be away from Europe for five years. On his return, he settled in Paris and over the next twenty years published a thirty-volume account of his travels, entitled Journey to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent. The length of the work was an accurate measure of Humboldt's achievements. Surveying these, Ralph Waldo Emerson was to write, ‘Humboldt was one of those wonders of the world, like Aristotle, like Julius Caesar, like the Admirable Crichton, who appear from time to time as if to show us the possibilities of the human mind, the force and range of the faculties—a universal man.'

Much about South America was still unknown to Europe when Humboldt set sail from La Coruna: Vespucci and Bougainville had travelled around the shores of the continent, and La Condamine and Bouguer had surveyed the streams and mountains of the Amazon and of Peru, but there were still no accurate maps of the region, and little information had been gathered on its geology, botany and indigenous peoples. Humboldt transformed the state of knowledge. He travelled fifteen thousand kilometres around the northern coastlines and interior, on the way collecting some sixteen hundred plants and identifying six hundred new species. He redrew the map of South America based on readings supplied by accurate chronometers and sextants. He researched the Earth's magnetism and was the first to discover that magnetic intensity declined the further one got from the poles. He gave the first account of the rubber and cinchona trees. He mapped the streams connecting the Orinoco and Negro river systems. He measured the effects of air pressure and altitude on vegetation. He studied the kinship rituals of the people of the Amazon Basin and inferred connections between geography and cultural characteristics. He compared the

Eduard Ender, Alexander von Humboldt andAtmeBonplandtn Venezuela, e. 1S50

salinity of water from the Pacific and the Atlantic and conceived the idea of sea currents, recognising that the temperature of the sea owed more to drifts than to latitude.

Humboldt's early biographer, F. A. Schwarzenberg, subtitled his life of Humboldt What May Be Accomplished in a Lifetime. He summarised the areas of his subject's extraordinary curiosity as follows: ‘I) The knowledge of the Earth