Brave Companions: Portraits In History - Softcover

David McCullough has twice received the Pulitzer Prize, for Truman and John Adams, and twice received the National Book Award, for The Path Between the Seas and Mornings on Horseback. His other acclaimed books include The Johnstown Flood, The Great Bridge, Brave Companions, 1776, The Greater Journey, The American Spirit, and The Wright Brothers. He is the recipient of numerous honors and awards, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian award. Visit DavidMcCullough.com.

Chapter 1

Journey to the Top of the World

On a morning in May 1804, there arrived at the White House by Baltimore coach, and in the company of the painter Charles Willson Peale, a visitor from abroad: an aristocratic young German, age thirty-four, a bachelor, occupation scientist and explorer. And like Halley's comet or the white whale or other such natural phenomena dear to the nineteenth century, he would be remembered by all who saw him for the rest of their days.

He had come to pay his respects to the president of the new republic, Thomas Jefferson, a fellow "friend of science," and to tell him something of his recent journeys through South and Central America. For the next several weeks he did little else but talk, while Jefferson, on their walks about the White House grounds; or James Madison, the secretary of state; or the clever Mrs. Madison; or Albert Gallatin, the secretary of the treasury; or those who came to dine with the president or to do business with him, listened in awe.

The young man, they found, was a naturalist, an astronomer, a geographer, a geologist, a botanist, an authority on Indian antiquities, a linguist, an artist -- an academy unto himself, as the poet Goethe would say. He was at home in any subject. He had read every book. He had seen things almost impossible to imagine. "We all consider him as a very extraordinary man," Gallatin told his wife, speaking apparently for Jefferson's entire official family, "and his travels, which he intends publishing on his return to Europe, will, I think, rank above any other productions of the kind." He also talked at double the speed of anybody Gallatin had ever met before and would shift suddenly from English, which he spoke superbly, into French or Spanish or German, seemingly unaware of what he was doing, but never hesitating for a word, apparently to the very great confusion of his newfound American friends, Jefferson and the Swiss-born Gallatin not included.

Gallatin, a man not easily impressed, found the extent of the visitor's reading and scientific knowledge astonishing. "I was delighted," he said, "and swallowed more information of various kinds in less than two hours than I had for two years past in all I had read and heard."

In a letter to Jefferson written from Philadelphia a few days earlier, the young man had said, "[I would] love to talk to you about a subject that you have treated so ingeniously in your work on Virginia, the teeth of mammoth, which we too discovered in the Andes." Jefferson had responded immediately and most cordially. "A lively desire will be felt generally to receive the information you will be able to give." In the new capital city, Jefferson wrote, there was "nothing curious to attract the observations of a traveler," which was largely so, save, of course, for Jefferson himself. Upon arrival the young man had found the presidential mansion anything but imposing -- crude wooden steps led to the front door, rooms were still unplastered -- and at one point he had inadvertently encountered the chief executive sprawled on the floor, wrestling with his grandchildren.

But there they were in Washington for several days, two of the most remarkable men of their time, fellow spirits if ever there were, talking, talking endlessly, intensely, their conversation having quickly ranged far from fossil teeth.

The young man's name was Humboldt, Alexander von Humboldt -- Friedrich Wilhelm Karl Heinrich Alexander von Humboldt -- or Baron von Humboldt, as he was commonly addressed. He had been born in Berlin on September 14, 1769, the second son of a middle-aged army officer, a minor figure in the court of Frederick the Great, and of a rather solemn, domineering young woman of Huguenot descent who had inherited a sizable fortune. He was a baron in about the way some Southerners are colonels.

William Burwell, Jefferson's private secretary, described him as looking considerably younger than his age, "of small figure, well made, agreeable looks, simple unaffected manners, remarkably sprightly." And Humboldt's passport, issued in Paris in 1798, has him five feet, eight inches tall, with "light-brown hair, gray eyes, large nose, rather large mouth, well-formed chin, open forehead marked by smallpox." However, in a portrait by Peale, done shortly after the trip to see Jefferson, the eyes are as blue as Dutch tiles.

Years later, when the phenomenon of Humboldt had become known the world over, the learned and curious would journey thousands of miles for the chance to see him, and his published works would be taken as the gospel of a new age. He would be regarded as the incomparable high priest of nineteenth-century science -- a towering godlike inspiration to such a disparate assortment of individuals as John Charles Frémont, John James Audubon, John Lloyd Stephens, Sir Charles Lyell, Simón Bolívar, W. H. Hudson, William Hickling Prescott, Edward Whymper, Charles Darwin, Louis Agassiz. Darwin, during the voyage of the Beagle, would carry with him three inspirational books -- the Bible, Milton, and Humboldt.

But at this point the name Humboldt meant very little. The honorary citizenships, the countless decorations, were all still to come. No Pacific Ocean current, no bay or glacier or river had been named for him as yet, no mountains in China. Humboldt, Kansas, and Humboldt, Iowa, were still prairie grass, part of that incomprehensibly vast piece of the continent purchased by Jefferson from Napoleon only the year before and that Jefferson had just sent Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to investigate. So it was the young man himself, not a reputation, and the story he had to tell that captivated everyone. After nearly five years he had returned from one of the great scientific odysseys of all time. It was a journey that would capture the imagination of the age, but that has been strangely forgotten in our own time. It is doubtful that one educated American in ten today could say who exactly Humboldt was or what he did, not even, possibly, in Humboldt, Iowa, or Humboldt, Kansas. Perhaps this is because his travels were through Spanish America. Perhaps his extraordinary accomplishments were simply overshadowed by the popular impact of the Lewis and Clark expedition. In any event, his was a journey of enormous scientific consequence (far more so than the Lewis and Clark expedition) and a fascinating adventure by any standards.

In the company of a young French medical doctor turned botanist, Aime Bonpland, Humboldt had departed from La Coruña, Spain, in June 1799, on a Spanish frigate, slipping past a British blockade in the dark of night, in the midst of a storm, and carrying with him a unique document from the Spanish government. He and Bonpland had been granted complete freedom to explore -- for scientific purposes -- any or all of Spain's largely unexplored American colonies; to make astronomical observations, maps; to collect; to go wherever they wished, speak to whomever they wished. The whole arrangement was quite unprecedented (prior to this Spain had rigorously denied any such travels by foreigners), and it had come about quite by chance.

Humboldt, after completing his education and serving as a government inspector of mines in Prussia, had decided to lead his own far-flung scientific expedition. Just where was an open question, but both of his parents had died, with the result that he had become a man of ample private means and was free to do whatever he wished. His impulse had been to go to Egypt, to catch up with Napoleon's troops there. But he and Bonpland (whom he had met by chance in Paris) had proceeded no farther than Spain when Humboldt, during an audience with Charles IV, expressed an interest in His Catholic Majesty's overseas empire. An expedition, to be paid for by Humboldt, was immediately and most unexpectedly sanctioned, and the two young men were on their way.

The ship followed Columbus's route, going first to the Canary Islands, and though it was Humboldt's intention to commence his scientific discovery of the New World at Cuba, the Spanish captain, after an outbreak of typhoid fever on board, decided to put the two explorers ashore at Cumaná, on the coast of present-day Venezuela, or New Granada, as it was then known.

They landed, bag and baggage, on July 16. Their gear included forty-odd scientific instruments, the most versatile and finest available at the time and just the sort of thing Thomas Jefferson would have found fascinating. Included were a tiny, two-inch sextant (a so-called snuffbox sextant), compasses, a microscope, barometers and thermometers that had been standardized with those of the Paris observatory before departure, three different kinds of electrometers, a device for measuring the specific gravity of seawater, telescopes, a theodolite, a Leyden jar, an instrument by which the blueness of the sky could be determined, a large and cumbersome magnetometer, and a rain gauge. Their excitement was enormous. No botanist, no naturalist or scientist of any kind, had ever been there before them. Everything was new, even the stars in the sky. "We are here in a divine country," Humboldt wrote to his brother. "What trees! Coconut trees, fifty to sixty feet high, Poinciana pulcherrima, with a foot-high bouquet of magnificent, bright-red flowers; pisang and a host of trees with enormous leaves and scented flowers, as big as the palm of a hand, of which we knew nothing...And what colors in birds, fish, even crayfish (sky blue and yellow)! We rush around like the demented; in the first three days we were quite unable to classify anything; we pick up one object to throw it away for the next. Bonpland keeps telling me that he will go mad if the wonders do not cease soon."

And then they were on the move. For three months they explored and mapped the coastal plain, collecting some sixteen hundred plants -- palms, orchids, grasses, bamboos -- among which they were able to identify six hundred new species. They witnessed a total eclipse, an earthquake, and, on a night in November, a spectacular meteor shower that went on for hours. They paddled up the Apure River to its confluence with the Orinoco and there commenced what was to be their major effort: they would trace the Orinoco to its source, something no one had done before, and establish that there is a connection, by the Rio Negro, between the Orinoco and the Amazon.

In all -- on the Apure, the Orinoco, the Atabapo, the Negro, and Casiquiare -- they spent seventy-five days in open boats or canoes, traveling an estimated 6,443 miles through one of the most difficult and little-known places on Earth. Sometimes, on the Casiquiare, for example, they could make almost no headway against the current, they and their Indian guides rowing strenuously for fourteen hours to go all of nine miles. The smothering humidity and torrential rains destroyed most of their provisions. For weeks they lived on bananas and ants, or an occasional fried monkey.

They went as far as Esmeralda, a tiny mosquito-infested village, which Humboldt put on his map and which, curiously, remains on most every map of South America to this day despite the fact that there is no longer a single trace of the place. By September 1, 1800, when they again reached Cumaná, they had beheld, examined, sketched, collected, and classified more plants than any botanist before them (some twelve thousand, by their count). They had gathered rock samples, fishes and reptiles placed in phials, the skins of animals -- enough in fact to keep Humboldt occupied for the rest of his life. Yet they had been barely able to collect a tenth of what they had seen, and the humidity and insects had destroyed more than a third of what they had in their plant boxes.

They themselves, miraculously, held up very well. For two such thoroughly inexperienced, ill-prepared young Europeans to have plunged ahead as they did, knowing nothing of life in the jungle, virtually unequipped by modern standards, had been both amazingly presumptuous and reckless. Bonpland did not even know how to swim. Yet they withstood the broiling climate and every other kind of tropical discomfort with little more to protect them than their own "cheerful character," as Humboldt noted. "With some gaiety of temper," he said, "with feelings of mutual good will, and with a vivid taste for the majestic grandeur of these vast valleys of rivers, travelers easily supported evils that become habitual." The mosquitoes he described as being an atmosphere unto themselves, covering the face, the hands, filling the nostrils. Invariably, he said, they "occasion coughing and sneezing whenever any attempt is made to speak in the open air" -- terrible punishment for someone who so loved to talk.

To avoid the suffocating heat, he and Bonpland often started the day at two in the morning. Their only salvation from the mosquitoes was to bury themselves in sand.

Toward the end of their journey back down the Orinoco, both men came down with typhoid fever. Bonpland very nearly died, but Humboldt, who had been troubled by ill health most of his life, made a rapid recovery and except for that one instance remained perfectly fit throughout, healthier than at any time in his life. He seemed made for the tropics. The days were never long enough. His spirits soared. This for him was life at its fullest and best. "I could not possibly have been placed in circumstances more highly favorable for study and exploration," he wrote to his brother. "I am free from the distractions constantly arising in civilized life from social claims. Nature offers unceasingly the most novel and fascinating objects for learning."

He believed, this brilliant, determined young man being eaten alive by mosquitoes, that there is a harmony of nature, that man is a part of that harmony, and that if he himself could observe things closely enough, collect enough -- if he knew enough -- then the forces that determine that harmony would become apparent.

Nothing seems to have escaped his notice. His physical energy was boundless -- incredible really. Literally everything seems to have interested him. He sketched, he made astronomical observations, magnetic observations. He gathered up rocks and minerals and Indian artifacts. Above all, he kept the most copious notes imaginable -- on tides, soils, petroleum, chocolate, rubber; on missionaries; on the physique of the Carib Indian, the anatomy of shellfish; on turtle eggs, howling monkeys, alligators (one found sunning itself on a sandbank on the Orinoco measured twenty-two feet); on vampire bats and poison darts and electric eels (wonder of wonders); on the nighttime cacophony of the jungle and the sudden silence imposed by the roar of the jaguar (an observation that would intrigue Audubon); on a tribe of Indians, the Otomaco, that overcame annual seasons of famine by eating a particular kind of dirt; on a dark, ugly nocturnal bird called the guacharo (the oilbird), a bird about the size of a chicken, which he encountered in screeching hordes inside a gloomy grotto; on the ravages of termites; on an exotic tree that gave milk (it was actually an Artocarpus, which had been brought to America by the Spanish only a score of years earlier); on the great grass fires that lit up the night on the llanos, the sweeping plains that reach southward from Caracas; on Indian legends, Indian diet, Indian apathy, Indian languages. (W. H. Hudson, the great English author whose classic Green Mansions is set in the same general locale, would tell a story that Humboldt acquired a parrot from which he was able to produce the vocabulary of an extinct tribe, and that Humboldt later took the bird back to Paris, where it became something of a sensation. Humboldt...