A Longing for Wide and Unknown Things by Meinhardt Maren;

Author:Meinhardt, Maren;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: C. Hurst and Company (Publishers) Limited
Published: 2018-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

17

THE AMERICAN ALPS

The New World elicited two distinct types of response from Humboldt. What he encountered would often strike him as uncannily similar to what he knew from Europe: the Río Manzanares, for example, was ‘very like the river Saale near Jena’.1 Conversely, and often at the same time, he found it utterly different, possessed of a quality that made it fundamentally unlike all that he was familiar with. Europe was his point of reference, but he was also seeking something beyond it, something that transcended the confines of what he knew—and it was the tension between these two positions that seemed particularly to hold his attention.

At five o’clock in the morning on 4 September, Humboldt and Bonpland set off to explore the interior of the country. Before moving further south, into the Orinoco Basin, they would travel inland, taking in a triangular slice of the country, mostly via the mission stations established by the Catholic order of the Capuchins. There was the prospect of a fabled cave of night birds, probably new to science, as well as the chance of encountering indigenous tribes that hadn’t been described before. The paths, they had been told, would be difficult, and they would be able to take only the barest necessities. So they travelled with a painfully reduced load of scientific instruments: a sextant, an inclination compass,2 an instrument for determining declination (the difference between geographical north and magnetic north), a thermometer and a hygrometer,3 as well as quantities of paper for storing and drying plant specimens. Finally, they also carried a barometer, which, being the most sensitive of the instruments, was given into the special charge of a porter employed exclusively for the purpose, who walked alongside the mule that carried it. ‘[T]hese were the instruments to which we generally confined ourselves on our smaller expeditions’.4

On crossing the mountain range that separated the coast from the interior, the changing rock formations put Humboldt in mind of Switzerland and the Tyrol. Indeed, he declared, they were ‘in the American Alps’!5 On the summit of its highest peak, called ‘the Imposible’, they turned to look back. They could see all the way to the coast and beyond, where the Araya peninsula lay in the distance. Among the almost vertical rocks the estuary had dug itself a path like a twisted riverbed. The view that was spread out before Humboldt’s eyes was entirely new to him, of course, and yet, it seemed effortlessly to find a place in the network of meaning he was at home in: ‘This strange sight is reminiscent of the fantastical landscape that Leonardo da Vinci used as the background of his famous portrait of La Gioconda’.6

They descended into a densely wooded region, and, as they walked on beneath a green canopy, everything seemed magnified—bigger, louder and more vivid than in Europe. Not only was this new continent vast, but it had also been filled with a generous hand: ‘everything is of gigantic size, mountains, rivers, and masses of vegetation.

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