Humboldt's Cosmos by Gerard Helferich

Author:Gerard Helferich
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General Fiction
Publisher: Tantor eBooks
Published: 2011-11-07T05:00:00+00:00

Eight: Cuba

WHEN it was founded in 1764, the principal city of the Orinoco Delta was christened Santo Tomé de la Nueva Guayana. But the official designation proved cumbersome, and the town soon became known simply as Angostura, the Spanish word for “strait.” Strategically situated between the rain forest and the coast, the port developed an active trade with Spain and the West Indies, and by the time of Humboldt’s arrival, thirty-seven years after its founding, the city had grown to nearly seven thousand souls. Angostura’s streets were laid out parallel to the river and lined with high, pleasant houses built of stone. Above the town rose a barren slate outcropping, and behind, to the southeast, lay fetid marshes. Though Humboldt found little in the monotonous landscape to recommend it, Angostura did afford an undeniably majestic view of the Orinoco, which here formed a vast canal running southwest to northeast. During the rainy season, when the quays flooded, crocodiles were a hazard even in the center of town. While Humboldt was there, an Indian man was killed by one of the creatures while mooring his canoe in less than three feet of water.

Though their clothes were in tatters from the long river journey, Humboldt and Bonpland presented themselves to Governor Felipe de Ynciarte, who received them cordially and offered them accommodations. After the wild, desolate country they’d grown accustomed to, Angostura seemed a metropolis and the townfolk urbane citizens of the world. “We admired the conveniences which industry and commerce furnish to civilized man,” Humboldt wrote. “Humble dwellings appeared to us magnificent; and every person with whom we conversed, seemed to be endowed with superior intelligence. Long privations give a value to the smallest enjoyments; and I cannot express the pleasure we felt, when we saw for the first time wheaten bread on the governor’s table.”

In the days after their arrival, Bonpland went to work organizing the surviving two thirds of their herbarium, while Humboldt took measurements to fix Angostura’s latitude and longitude. But the travelers continued to experience the fatigue and weakness they’d felt on the river, and it wasn’t long before both men, plus a servant who’d been with them since Cumaná, contracted a severe fever. Humboldt wasn’t surprised by the delayed onset. “It is common enough for travelers to feel no effects from miasma till, on arriving in a purer atmosphere, they begin to enjoy repose,” he explained. “A certain excitement of the mental powers may suspend for some time the action of pathogenic causes.” He suspected typhoid, which was long confused with typhus (the disease that had swept through the Pizarro) but is now known to be a distinct illness.

It would be another eighty years before the cause of typhoid was discovered, a bacterium of the Salmonella genus that enters the body through contaminated food or water. After an incubation period ranging from ten days to four weeks, the victim feels the early symptoms of lethargy, headache, body aches, fever, and restlessness, which may be followed by

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