The Invention of Nature: The Adventures of Alexander von Humboldt, the Lost Hero of Science by Andrea Wulf – review

In a period roughly encompassing the second half of the 18th century and the first half of the 19th, a handful of very young European men crisscrossed the world on ships and changed the way we think. The insights that these slightly annoying but wonderful individuals gained on their journeys have surely had a far more profound impact on how we see the world than, say, the French Revolution.

Exhibiting an almost mad degree of assurance, they beguiled committees, sea captains and patrons to take great risks and accommodate their often eccentric needs. Joseph Banks on the Endeavour, Georg Forster on the Resolution, Charles Darwin on the Beagle, Joseph Hooker on the Erebus and Thomas Huxley on the Rattlesnake seemed to have a hypersensitivity to the ideas around them and, influenced by their exotic surroundings, brought these to bear on the great scientific questions of the day. Darwin’s observations of earthquakes, finches and coral atolls were influenced by his reading of Charles Lyell and Thomas Malthus, while Humboldt took the works of Kant, Buffon and Goethe up the Andes and into the Orinoco.

Andrea Wulf’s enjoyable new book tackles Alexander von Humboldt, the Prussian polymath, author and explorer. He transformed our understanding of physical geography and meteorology, and spent his life trying to bind together the workings of the Earth and ultimately the cosmos (a term he coined in its modern sense in Kosmos, his five-volume treatise on the unity of science, published between 1845 and 1862) through universal rules.

Many of the other young naturalists tended, boa constrictor-like, to gorge themselves on specimens from a single trip and then spend years digesting them, never setting foot outside their homes again except to collect awards. One of the many pleasures of Humboldt is that he never mutated into a hide-bound panjandrum. He started his exploring career later than the others, setting foot in South America for the first time in the summer of 1799, shortly before his 30th birthday. On his return in 1804 he planned all manner of thwarted expeditions before finally hurtling across the length of Russia aged 59, “the crazy Prussian prince Humblot”, as one of his Cossack guards called him.

From an early age Humboldt clearly had a spark that made him remarkable. This was partly down to the help of his older brother, Wilhelm, also a polymath. While still a mere Prussian inspector of mines in his mid-20s he delighted and inspired Goethe and Friedrich Schiller on visits to Weimar, fiddling with electrical experiments and helping inspire Faust. He also met many of the other adventurers of the age, including , William Bligh, Banks and Louis-Antoine de Bougainville, all of whom were affected by his ideas and energy.

Humboldt’s exploits were limited first by money (until an inheritance solved the problem), and then by the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. His plans to go to the West Indies were stymied by all the sea battles going on, and he couldn’t view Mounts Etna and Vesuvius because Napoleon had invaded. He scouted around frenziedly for somewhere, anywhere, to go, and settled on South America almost by default. His charm and energy persuaded King Carlos IV of Spain to sign the papers that, unprecedentedly, allowed a non-Spaniard into Spanish America.

Wulf imbues Humboldt’s adventures there with something of the spirit of Tintin, relishing the jungles, mountians and dangerous animals at every turn. There is an excellent book of Humboldt’s adventure with some electric eels, which I won’t spoil here: it should be read either in Wulf’s book of Humboldt’s own matchless account of the trip, Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of America, During the Years 1799-1804. Through his extraordinarily vivid speeches and writing, he brought alive for European readers the colonialism, slavery, rapaciousness and ecological devastation he found in the Americas, making the conquest of much of the New World public, exotic but also shameful.

As usual with yarns of Europeans’ exploration, there is a succession of comic realisations: the vast, waterless lands of Venezuela that Humboldt so bravely crosses turn out to have cheerful, small, long-established towns on the far side; the explorer’s hunch that the Orinoco joins the Amazon is, it transpires, common knowledge to his guides. But the fever-crazed white man “discovering” and “naming” something else blooming obvious is half the fun of the genre.

The great surprise in the book is that Humboldt planned an expedition to the Himalayas, to develop his comparative ideas about altitude, geology and plant life by comparing what he found in tropical America with conditions in Asia. Remarkably, the East India Company was no more enlightened than the Spanish government about admitting Humboldt, and spent many years blocking all his attempts to enter the country. This is tantalising: if only he had been given the chance to write Humboldt’s Travels in British India, it could have been one of the greatest and most devastating books of the 19th century.

Wulf has an unfailing ability to spot an interesting quotation or a curious situation. She is very good on the cities where Humboldt lived and the rival atmospheres of Paris and Berlin. His rather melancholy and belated Russian expedition is well described, including the moment when Humboldt communicated with a Chinese border captain via intermediaries, from German to Russian, then from Russian to Mongolian, and then from Mongolian to Chinese.

But the book does have its frustrations. It is not very long, but more than a quarter of it consists of potted accounts of other people’s debts to Humboldt (Simon Bolivar, Darwin, John Muir and others), at the expense of material on the man himself. Most awkwardly, she decides not to deal at all with his substantial time in Mexico (where, for example, he created the misleading term “Aztec”). As many pages are given to Humboldt’s time in the Llanas and Orinoco as to a rather basic summary of Bolivar’s role in South America’s liberation (inspired, in some small ways, by Humboldt). The later chapters about those who followed in hiss footsteps are sometimes excellent (particularly the one on Muir with his wonderful neologisms “dollarable” and “Sequoical”). However, given how little Humboldt’s endless, sensational adventures are now read in English – one of her key points – it seems a shame not to really let rip and pile up the pages on tapirs, curare and jaguars.

These are minor cavils, though, and should not stand in the way of readers eagerly reading The Invention of Nature – a superior celebration of an adorable figure.

Simon Winder is the author of Germania: A Personal History of Germans Ancient and Modern.

Due to a technical glitch an unfinished version of this article was published on 14 November. This has now been amended.