Abstract
Residing in Cartagena de Indias on April 12, 1801, close to two years into his famed trip through the Americas, Alexander von Humboldt penned a letter to Nicolas Baudin. In this document, Humboldt asked for the French explorer’s permission to join an expedition destined for the Southern Pacific. Hoping Baudin would touch upon the west coast of South America, Humboldt and his trusted companion, Aimé Bonpland, were about to change their plans and “started in a little pilot boat to look for you in the South Sea, to try whether by reviving our old plans, we could join our labors with yours, and sail with you on the South Seas.” Humboldt proceeded to solicit Baudin’s frank opinion about the possibility of participation, and, in case of a negative response, he “should then continue on my route from Lima to Acapulco, Mexico, the Philippines, Surato, Bassara, Palestine, Marseilles. How much I should prefer, however, to make a voyage with you!”2 The letter never reached the intended recipient, because Baudin had already departed France to explore Australia’s lesser-known coastlines.3
What a good fortune for New Granada to deserve the attention of such a learned traveler, a dignified successor to Magellan, Byron, and Cook!
Francisco José de Caldas to Alexander von Humboldt December 6, 1801
Nowadays the area surrounding Port Jackson in New Holland and the island of Tahiti are not written about more often than many parts of Mexico and Peru were at that time.
Alexander von Humboldt, Views of the
Cordilleras and Monuments of the Indigenous
Peoples of the Americas, 1807
In the heroic ages of the Portuguese and Castilian races, it was not thirst for gold alone, as it has been asserted for lack of ignorance of national character at the period, but rather a general spirit of daring, that led to the persecution of distant voyages. The names of Hayti, Cubagua and Darien acted on the imagination of man in the beginning of the sixteenth century in the same manner as those of Tinian and Otaheite have done in more recent times, since Anson and Cook.
Alexander von Humboldt, Cosmos 1829
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Notes
Letter reprinted in Ulrike Moheit, ed., Alexander von Humboldt, Briefe aus Amerika, 1799–1804 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1993), 163.
Alexander von Humboldt to Nicolas Baudin, April 12, 1801, in Friedrich Kapp, ed. and trans., Letters of Alexander von Humboldt Written between the Years of 1827 and 1858 to Varnhagen von Ense (New York: Rudd & Carleton, 1860), 235–238.
This expedition was beset by many problems, including shipwrecks as well as endless quarrels between Baudin and the naturalist. Baudin himself died of tuberculosis on Mauritius in 1803 on the voyage’s homebound leg. See, for instance, Jean Fornasiero, Peter Monteath, and John West-Sooby, Encountering Terra Australis: The Australian Voyages of Nicholas Baudin and Matthew Flinders (Kent Town: Wakefield Press, 2004).
The list of publications that have appeared in connection with Humboldt since 1999 is too vast to be reproduced here. Consult, for instance, Gerhard Helfrich, Humboldt’s Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Latin American Journey that Changed the Way We See the World (New York: Gotham Books, 2004).
Susanne Zantop, Colonial Fantasies: Conquest, Family, and Nation in Precolonial Germany, 1770–1870 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 166–190.
For an entertaining comparison of Forster and Humboldt, consult Erwin H. Ackerknecht, “Georg Forster, Alexander von Humboldt, and Ethnography,” Isis 46 (1955): 83–95.
Humboldt’s frustrations about joining this venture figure prominently in his Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctal Regions of the New Continent during the Years 1799–1804 (London: Longman et al., 1814), 31–32.
A frequently told example is Humboldt’s encounter with Napoleon Bonaparte. While attending the French emperor’s coronation gala, Humboldt received a most degrading comment from the newly crowned emperor: “I understand you collect plants, monsieur. So does my wife.” See, for instance, John Charles Chasteen, Americanos: Latin America’s Struggle for Independence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 28. Chasteen employs Humboldt’s voyage to illustrate the political and economic conditions in the Spanish dependencies prior to the revolutions.
Alexander von Humboldt, Aspects of Nature in Different Lands and Different Climates with Scientific Elucidations. (Philadelphia: Lea and Blanchard, 1849), 436–437.
Leopoldo Zea, “Humboldt y el otro descubrimiento,” in Leoplodo Zea and Mario Magallón (eds) El mundo que encontró Humboldt (Mexico City: Instituto Panamericano de Geografía e Historia, 1999), 1–15.
Antonio Lafuente and Nuria Valverde, “Botany and Spanish Imperial”; Jorge Cañizares Esguerra, “How Derivative was Humboldt? Microcosmic Nature Narrative in Early Modern Spanish America and the (Other) Origins of Humboldt’s Ecological Sensibilities,” in Londa Schieber and Claudia Swan, eds, Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce, and Politics in the Early Modern World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 148–168.
This influence is most prominent in the works of Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra: Nature, Empire, and Nation: Exploration of the History of Science in the Iberian World (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), chapter 6.
Miguel Angel Puig-Semper, “Humboldt, un Prusiano en la corte del Rey Carlos IV,” Revista de Indias LIX (1999): 329–355.
Sandra Rebok, Alexander von Humboldt und Spanien im 19, Jahrhundert: Analyse eines wechselseitigen Wahrnehmungsprozesses (Frankfurt a.M: Vervuert Verlag, 2006).
An important source on these developments is Ursula Lamb’s Cosmographers and Pilots of the Spanish Empire (Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 1995).
Humboldt, Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain, vol. I, John Black, trans. (New York: I Riley, 1811), iv.
Bronwen Douglas, “Foreign Bodies in Oceania” in Bronwen Douglas and Chris Ballard, eds, Foreign Bodies: Oceania and the Science of Race, 1750–1840 (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 2008), 5.
James Belich, “Race” in David Armitage and Alison Bashford, eds, Pacific Histories: Ocean, Land, and People (New York: Palgrave, 2013), 263.
See, for instance, Peter Hanns Reill, Vitalizing Nature in the Enlightenment (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 237–245.
Alexander von Humboldt, Cosmos: A Sketch of a Physical Description of the Universe, vol. 1, E. C. Otte, trans. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 351–359.
Humboldt’s vision is well-described in Anne Godlewska’s Geography Unbound: French Geographic Science from Cassini to Humboldt (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 119–129.
See, for instance, Harry Liebersohn, The Travelers’ World, 226–230. For a wider context of the interaction between Oceania and European conceptions of “race,” consult Bronwen Douglas and Chris Ballard, eds., Foreign Bodies: Oceania and the Science of Race, 1750–1940 (Canberra: Australian National University, 2008).
There are some notable exceptions to this rule. See, for instance, Charles Minguet, “Colón y Vespacio en la vision geohistorica de Alexander von Humboldt” in Leopoldo Zea and Mario Magallón, eds, De Colón a Humboldt (Mexico City: Instituto Panamericano de Geografía, 1999), 9–20. Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra in his monumental How to Write Histories also credits Humboldt’s willingness to engage Spanish historical material.
Alexander von Humboldt, Political Essay of the Kingdom of New Spain vol. I (London: Longman et al., 1822), 81–83.
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© 2014 Rainer F. Buschmann
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Buschmann, R.F. (2014). On Rediscovering the Americas. In: Iberian Visions of the Pacific Ocean, 1507–1899. Palgrave Studies in Pacific History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137304711_7
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