The Passage to Cosmos The Passage to Cosmos Alexander von Humboldt and the Shaping of America laura dassow walls The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London Laura Dassow Walls is the John H. Bennett, Jr., Chair of Southern Letters at the University of South Carolina. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2009 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2009 Printed in the United States of America 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 1 2 3 4 5 isbn-13: 978-0-226-87182-0 (cloth) isbn-10: 0-226-87182-7 (cloth) Frontispiece: Natural Bridges of Icononzo, plate 4, Alexander von Humboldt, Vues des Cordillères (Paris, 1810). Rare Books and Special Collections, University of South Carolina Libraries. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Walls, Laura Dassow. The passage to Cosmos : Alexander von Humboldt and the shaping of America / Laura Dassow Walls. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn-13: 978-0-226-87182-0 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn-10: 0-226-87182-7 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Humboldt, Alexander von, 1769–1859—Influence—United States. 2. Humboldt, Alexander von, 1769–1859. Kosmos. 3. Humboldt, Alexander von, 1769–1859— Political and social views. 4. United States—Intellectual life—19th century. 5. Science—History—19th century. I. Title. q143.h9d388 2009 508.092—dc22 [B] 2009003099 a The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1992. Contents Preface: Romancing the Ruby-Crowned Kinglet vii Acknowledgments xiii Prologue: Humboldt’s Bridge 1 1 Confluences 12 Humboldt’s America 12 Humboldt’s Europe 22 A New Earth and a New Heaven 36 2 Passage to America, 1799–1804 49 Portals and Passages 49 The Casiquiare Crossing 55 High Peaks and Hanging Valleys 84 3 Manifest Destinies 99 Humboldt’s Visit to the United States, 1804 99 The Humboldt Network 107 The Many Faces of Humboldtian Science 120 By Land and by Sea 129 Interchapter: Finally Shall Come the Poet 148 4 “All are alike designed for freedom”: Humboldt on Race and Slavery 173 (De)Constructing Race 174 (Re)Constructing Race 186 Humboldt and American Slavery 197 5 The Community of Cosmos 210 Franz Boas, Cosmographer 210 Introducing Humboldt’s Cosmos 214 Behold the Earth 234 6 The Face of Planet America 251 The Apocalypse of Mind: Emerson and Poe 251 vi contents The Face of Nature: Thoreau, Church, and Whitman 260 Dwelling: Susan Cooper, Muir, Marsh 283 Epilogue: Recalling Cosmos 302 Notes 325 Bibliography 371 Index 391 Preface: Romancing the Ruby-Crowned Kinglet Every poet has trembled on the verge of science. henry david thoreau This book was born from a very small death at a laboratory bench, more years ago than I care to remember. I grew up near Seattle on an island now home to CEOs, doctors, and Microsoft millionaires, but then a suburb of mod- est houses tucked into a mature second-growth forest of Douglas fir, maple, hemlock, and western cedar. I wanted to be a scientist, which to me, immersed in Jane Goodall and Niko Tinbergen, meant a natural historian. I spent end- less hours learning the birds and plants of Puget Sound and weaving them into a 1960s-era ecological matrix of climax forests, disturbance, and succes- sion, edge effects, sandy uplands, and moist ravines. All this led me to the University of Washington, where as an eager freshman I knocked on various doors until one of them opened: an ornithologist agreed to put me to work as his assistant. My first taste of heaven was setting to rights the natural his- tory museum’s musty drawers of stuffed bird skins and boxes of bird bones. Months later, that task completed, he taught me how to prepare bird skins, and I learned the delicate art of unzipping the fragile songbird body from tail to beak, folding feathers out of the way and replacing flesh with rolls of cot- ton. He was particularly keen to prepare as many specimens as possible of a certain sparrow for a statistical study of plumage patterns. But one day something different came in. It was a ruby-crowned kinglet. I’d seen them in the wild, quick drab puffs of greenish-gray, but I’d never held one in my hand before. He was freshly dead, tiny, a mere tuft of down. And beautiful, so beautiful I was shocked to tears—softly shaded olive browns, el- egant to the last detail, topped with that brilliant jewel-bright ruby crown. Every feather was an astonishment. I held that kinglet in my hand, bewil- dered, and something inside me broke. I understood my professor’s need for data points, but what I beheld asked another and very different question. I viii preface didn’t know then just what it was, or how to begin to search for an answer, but I did know that my path had changed. I worked a bit longer at the mu- seum, until the day they told me my volunteer labor had proven the need for a paid assistant, a position for which I no longer qualified. After an agonized review of the university catalogue I changed my major to English. I had never taken an English course, but I loved to read and write, and of all the majors it seemed most likely to accommodate that grab bag of classes my curiosity demanded: botany, geology, animal behavior, scientific illustration, anthro- pology, history. So I analyzed novels and wrote poetry, and when it came time to specialize, I turned to the writings of Henry David Thoreau. I sensed that he, too, had beheld that kinglet, and asked not what statistical set this data point might fill, but that other question, Why should such things be? And what must one do about it? I felt Thoreau spoke directly to me when he wrote, “Every poet has trembled on the verge of science.” By what turns of history have we reached the point where a student must choose either to be, or not to be, a scientist? Why was my kinglet experi- enced as a fork in the road rather than a broadening of scientific truth? As an undergraduate, I was invited either to inhabit the conventions of science, or to turn my back on them: given the great tent of the sciences, one was either inside, or out. And similarly, transferring to English meant analyzing the novels of Dickens, never the metaphors of Darwin. Poets and artists lived in one world, scientists in another. How could I find a way to inhabit both? Thoreau offered one answer: toe that line between the written word and the natural world, just where each faces the other. Thoreau had also been tugged in two directions by what C. P. Snow called the “two cultures” of literature and science, but he had found a way to practice science as a poet, and to be a poet by means of the singular objects and discipline of science. It helped that “Science” in his day was not yet a big enclosed tent gathering insiders together, but more like a series of stalls in the great open-air agora of ideas, and that “Literature” then included writing of all sorts, science no less than poetry and fiction. Where had Thoreau found the model for his own poetic science? How had he learned to hold together fields of intellectual inquiry that we intui- tively believe to be separate? In graduate school I discovered that Thoreau’s turn to science, like Charles Darwin’s, was fired and shaped by the works of Alexander von Humboldt. I myself felt, on discovering Humboldt, a bit the same way Darwin did when he first stepped ashore in South America: “The mind is a chaos of delight, out of which a world of future and more quiet pleasure will arise. I am at present fit only to read Humboldt; he like another sun illumines everything I behold.” In turn, the sun of Humboldt’s life was romancing the ruby-crowned kinglet ix his guiding idea that the physical universe and the human mind were inte- grated halves of a single whole, and he named that whole Cosmos.1 Today Humboldt is forgotten in the United States, but in Thoreau’s day he was the predominant intellectual of his age, the most famous scientist in the world, and, as was widely repeated, the most famous human being after Napoleon—a pairing that Humboldt, a loyal partisan of the French Revolu- tion, despised. He grew up nourished by Berlin’s liberal Jewish intellectual circles and his friendships with Goethe and Schiller; he became the bold ad- venturer who had explored deep into the secret empire of Spanish America from 1799 to 1804, tracing the mysterious waterways of the Amazon and Ori- noco river systems and climbing Chimborazo to the top of the world (so they thought), almost 20,000 feet, a record that stood for thirty years. He seemed to comprehend all knowledge: he founded modern plant geography (the pre- cursor to ecology), and shaped an entire university of sciences, from biologi- cal, earth, ocean, and atmospheric sciences to physics and electrophysiology to cartography, ethnology, and linguistics, even finance and economics. He founded international cooperative science; he was the first to warn the world about the link between deforestation, catastrophic environmental change, and depopulation; his work on climate change marks the beginning of aware- ness of global warming. Historians today call this the age of “Humboldtian Science,” for few scientists in Europe, Russia, Australia, or the Americas were not captured by the global sweep of his methods or his international network of correspondents. His most famous scientific disciples in the English-speaking world were epoch-making: Charles Lyell, who revolutionized geology, and Charles Darwin, who built on Humboldt and Lyell to found evolutionary biology. Humboldt was the catalyst for modern science. As the German physi- ologist Emil Du Bois-Reymond is said to have said, “Every scientist is a de- scendent of Humboldt. We are all his family.” In Latin America, Humboldt continues to this day to be celebrated and studied, for there he is still seen as a founding pan-national hero, something like Washington, Jefferson, and Lewis and Clark rolled together, “Libera- tor of peoples / And herald of Bolívar.”2 In Europe, Humboldt studies are a thriving industry, and each year sees the publication of new works on him and new editions of his writings. But oddly, the United States have forgotten him. How ironic: nineteenth-century Americans prided themselves on living in the very republic that was the unique realization of Humboldt’s ideals, and Humboldt reciprocated by declaring himself “half an American” and involving himself deeply in the fortunes of the United States, corresponding with Thomas Jefferson, Albert Gallatin, and dozens more, and mentoring or inspiring writers such as Washington Irving, the historian William Hickling