The Invention of Nature (23 page)

From Paris, Humboldt watched anxiously, sending letters to members of the US government in which he asked them to support their southern brethren, and then impatiently complaining when he didn’t receive answers quickly enough. His enquiries should be dealt with as a matter of great urgency, an American general in Paris wrote to Jefferson, because Humboldt’s influence ‘is greater than that of any other man in Europe’.

No one in Europe or North America knew more about South America than Humboldt – he had become the authority on the subject. His books were a treasure trove of information about a continent that until then had been ‘so shamefully unknown’, Jefferson said. There was one publication in particular that attracted attention: Humboldt’s Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain. Published in four volumes between 1808 and 1811, it had rolled off the printing presses at exactly the moment when the world turned its attention to the independence movements in South America.

Humboldt sent Jefferson the volumes in regular consignments as they were published, and the former President studied them carefully to learn as much as he could about the rebelling colonies. ‘We have little knowledge of them,’ Jefferson told Humboldt, ‘but through you.’ Jefferson and many of his political friends were torn between their wish to see free republics spreading, the risk of officially supporting a potentially unstable regime in South America and the spectre of a great economic competitor rising in the southern hemisphere. It was not so much what the United States wished for them but ‘what is practicable’, Jefferson believed. He hoped that the colonies would not unite as one nation but remain separate countries because as a ‘single mass they would be a very formidable neighbor’.

Jefferson was not alone in gleaning information from Humboldt’s books: Bolívar also studied the volumes because most parts of the continent that he wanted to liberate were unknown to him. In the Political Essay of New Spain Humboldt had doggedly woven together his observations on geography, plants, conflicts of race and Spanish exploits with the environmental consequences of colonial rule and labour conditions in manufacturing, mines and agriculture. He provided information about revenues and military defence, about roads and ports, and he included table upon table of data ranging from silver production in mines to agricultural yields, as well as total amounts of imports and exports to and from the different colonies.

The volumes made several points very clear: colonialism was disastrous for people and the environment; colonial society was based on inequality; the indigenous people were neither barbaric nor savages, and the colonists were as capable of scientific discoveries, art and craftsmanship as the Europeans; and the future of South America was based on subsistence farming and not on monoculture or mining. Though focused on the Viceroyalty of New Spain, Humboldt always compared his data with that from Europe, the United States and the other Spanish colonies in South America. Just as he had looked at plants in the context of a wider world and with a focus on revealing global patterns, he now connected colonialism, slavery and economics. The Political Essay of New Spain was neither a travel narrative nor an evocation of marvellous landscapes, but a handbook of facts, hard data and numbers. It was so detailed and overwhelmingly meticulous that the English translator wrote in the preface to the English edition that the book tended to ‘fatigue the attention of the reader’. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Humboldt chose another translator for his later publications.

The man who had been granted rare permission by Carlos IV to explore the Spanish Latin American territories went on to publish a harsh criticism of the colonial rule. His book was filled, Humboldt told Jefferson, with the expressions of his ‘independent sentiments’. The Spanish had incited hatred between the different racial groups, Humboldt accused. The missionaries, for example, treated the indigenous Indians brutally and were driven by ‘culpable fanaticism’. Imperial rule exploited the colonies for raw materials and destroyed the environment as it went along. European colonial policies were ruthless and suspicious, he said, and South America had been destroyed by its conquerors. Their thirst for wealth had brought the ‘abuse of power’ to Latin America.

Humboldt’s criticism was based on his own observations, supplemented with information he had received from the colonial scientists whom he had met during his expedition. All this was then underpinned with the statistical and demographic data from governmental archives, mainly in Mexico City and Havana. In the years after his return, Humboldt evaluated and published these results, first in the Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain and later in the Political Essay on the Island of Cuba. These scathing indictments of colonialism and slavery showed how everything was interrelated: climate, soils and agriculture with slavery, demographics and economics. Humboldt claimed that the colonies could only be liberated and self-sufficient when they were ‘freed from the fetters of the odious monopoly’. It was the ‘European barbarity’, Humboldt insisted, that had created this unjust world.

Humboldt’s knowledge of the continent was encyclopaedic, Bolívar wrote in September 1815 in his so-called ‘Letter from Jamaica’ in which he referred to his old friend as the greatest authority on South America. Written in Jamaica, where he had fled four months previously when the Spanish armada had arrived, the letter was the distillation of Bolívar’s political thought and his vision for the future. In it, he also echoed Humboldt’s criticism about the destructive impact of colonialism. His people were enslaved and confined to cultivating cash crops and mining in order to feed Spain’s insatiable appetite, Bolívar wrote, but even the lushest fields and greatest ores would ‘never satisfy the lust of that greedy nation’. The Spanish destroyed vast regions, Bolívar warned, and ‘entire provinces are transformed to deserts’.

Humboldt had written about soils that were so fertile that they only needed to be raked to produce rich harvests. In much the same vein Bolívar now asked how a land so ‘abundantly endowed’ by nature could be kept so desperately oppressed and passive. And just as Humboldt had claimed in the Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain that the vices of the feudal government had passed from the northern to the southern hemisphere, so Bolívar now compared the Spanish grip on their colonies to ‘a kind of feudal ownership’. But the revolutionaries would continue to fight, Bolívar asserted, because ‘the chains have been broken’.

Bolívar also realized that slavery stood at the centre of the conflict. If the enslaved population was not on his side, as he had painfully experienced during the brutal civil war with José Tomás Boves and his Legions of Hell, they were against him and against the creole plantation owners who relied on slave labour. Without the help of the slaves there would be no revolution. It was a subject that he discussed with Alexandre Pétion, the first President of the Republic of Haiti – the island where Bolívar had escaped to after an assassination attempt on him in Jamaica.

Haiti had been a French colony but after a successful slave rebellion in the early 1790s, the revolutionaries had declared independence in 1804. Pétion, who was mixed race – the son of a wealthy Frenchman and a mother of African ancestry – was one of the founding fathers of the republic. He was also the only ruler and politician who promised to help Bolívar. When Pétion pledged arms and ships in exchange for the promise to free the slaves, Bolívar agreed. ‘Slavery,’ he said, ‘was the daughter of darkness.’

After three months in Haiti, Bolívar sailed for Venezuela with a small fleet of Pétion’s ships, packed with gunpowder, weapons and men. When he arrived in summer 1816, Bolívar declared freedom for all the slaves. This was a first and important step, but he struggled to convince the creole elite. Three years later he said that slavery still shrouded the country in a ‘black veil’ and – once again invoking nature as a metaphor – warned that ‘storm clouds darkened the sky, threatening a rain of fire’. Bolívar liberated his own slaves and promised freedom in exchange for military service, but it was only a decade later when he wrote the Bolivian constitution, in 1826, that the full abolition of slavery became law. It was a bold move at a time when apparently enlightened American statesmen, such as Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, still had hundreds of slaves working their plantations. Humboldt, who had been a staunch abolitionist since seeing the slave market in Cumaná shortly after his arrival in South America, was impressed with Bolívar’s decision. A few years later Humboldt praised Bolívar in one of his books for setting an example to the world, particularly in contrast to the United States.

Over the next years Humboldt followed events in South America from Paris. There was much toing and froing – with Bolívar slowly uniting the regional warlords who were fighting the Spanish in their territories. The revolutionaries were in control of some regions, but these were often far apart and the men had certainly not acted as a united force. In the Llanos, for example, José Antonio Páez had, after Boves’s death at the end of 1814, gained the support of the plainsmen – the llaneros – for the republican cause. His 1,100 wild llaneros on horses and barefoot Indians armed only with bows and arrows defeated almost 4,000 experienced Spanish soldiers in the open steppes of the Llanos in early 1818. These tough and rough-mannered men were the most accomplished riders. As a creole and a city-dweller, Bolívar was not someone they would have chosen as their leader but he won their respect. Though extremely thin – at five feet six inches Bolívar weighed only 130 pounds – he displayed an endurance and strength in the saddle that gained him the nickname ‘Iron Ass’. Whether swimming with his hands tied behind his back for a dare or dismounting over his horse’s head (which he had practised after seeing the llaneros doing it), Bolívar impressed Páez’s men with his physical prowess.

Humboldt would probably not have recognized Bolívar any more. The dashing young man who had promenaded through Paris in the latest fashion now dressed simply in jute sandals and a plain coat. Though only in his mid-thirties, Bolívar’s face was already lined and his skin jaundiced, but his eyes radiated a piercing intensity and his voice had the power to rally his soldiers. During the previous years Bolívar had lost his plantations and been exiled from his country several times. He was relentless with his men but also with himself. He often slept, just wrapped in a cape, on the bare floor or spent all day driving his horse across rough terrain but retained enough energy to read French philosophers in the evening.

The Spanish still controlled the northern part of Venezuela including Caracas as well as much of the Viceroyalty of New Granada, but Bolívar had gained territories in the eastern provinces of Venezuela and along the Orinoco. The revolution was not progressing as swiftly as he had hoped, but he believed that it was time to encourage elections in the liberated regions and to have a constitution. A congress was called to assemble at Angostura (today’s Ciudad Bolívar in Venezuela) on the banks of the Orinoco, the town where Humboldt and Bonpland had been struck down with fever almost two decades previously after their gruelling weeks to find the Casiquiare River. With Caracas in the hands of the Spanish, Angostura was the temporary capital of the new republic. On 15 February 1819, twenty-six delegates took their seats in a simple brick building that was the government house to listen to Bolívar’s vision of the future. He presented them with the constitution that he had drafted on the river journey along the Orinoco and once again talked about the importance of unity between race and class as well as between the different colonies.

In his speech in Angostura Bolívar described South America’s ‘splendour and vitality’ to remind his fellow countrymen why they were fighting. No other place in the world had been ‘so bountifully provided by nature’, Bolívar said. He talked of his soul climbing to great heights so that he could perceive the future of his country from the perspective that it demanded – a future that united this vast continent that stretched from coast to coast. He himself, Bolívar said, was only a ‘plaything of the revolutionary hurricane’ but he was ready to follow the dream of a free South America.

At the end of May 1819, three months after his speech to the congress, Bolívar drove his entire army with single-minded determination from Angostura across the continent towards the Andes to free New Granada. His troops consisted of Páez’s horsemen, Indians, freed slaves, mestizos, creoles, women and children. There were also many British veterans who had joined Bolívar at the end of the Napoleonic Wars when hundreds of thousands of soldiers had returned home from the battlefields with no jobs or income. Bolívar’s unofficial ambassador in London had not only tried to get international support for the revolution but was also busy recruiting the unemployed veterans. Within five years more than 5,000 soldiers – the so-called British Legions – arrived in South America from Britain and Ireland together with some 50,000 rifles and muskets as well as hundreds of tons of munitions. Some were motivated by political beliefs, others by money, but whatever their reasons, Bolívar’s fortunes were turning.

Bolívar’s strange mix of troops achieved the impossible over the next weeks as they trudged west through torrential rains across the flooded plains of the Llanos towards the Andes. By the time they climbed the magnificent mountain range at the small town of Pisba, some 100 miles to the north-east of Bogotá, their shoes had long been shredded and many wore blankets instead of trousers. Barefoot, hungry and freezing, they battled on against ice and thin air, climbing to a height of 13,000 feet before descending down into the heart of enemy territory. A few days later, at the end of July, they surprised the royalist army with the bravery of the spear-wielding llaneros, the calm determination of the British soldiers and Bolívar’s almost god-like ability seemingly to appear everywhere.

If they survived the march across the Andes, they believed they would be able to crush the royalists. And so they did. On 7 August 1819, fired up by their victory a few days previously, Bolívar’s troops defeated the Spanish at the Battle of Boyacá. As Bolívar’s men charged down the slopes, the terrified royalists just ran. The road to Bogotá was open for Bolívar and he now rode to the capital like a ‘lightning bolt’, one of his officers said, his coat open to his bare chest and his long hair dancing in the wind. Bolívar took Bogotá and with that wrested New Granada from the Spanish. In December Quito, Venezuela and New Granada joined to form the new Republic of Gran Colombia with Bolívar as President.