The Book of the Dead

Travels in West Africa, “I would rather have perished on a scaffold.” Despite this ardent assertion of her womanhood, she never came close to marrying, and her one serious crush (on Matthew Nathan, the acting governor of Sierra Leone) went unrequited. Perhaps her “maiden aunt” persona put him off. In Rudyard Kipling’s autobiography, Something of Myself (1937), he tells a revealing story. He first met Mary at one of his own aunt’s tea parties and was so entranced by her that he offered to walk her home. When the conversation strayed to cannibalism, he invited her up to his rooms “to talk it out there.” Mary at first accepted the invitation, “as a man would,” and then suddenly remembered herself: “Oh, I forgot I was a woman. ’Fraid I mustn’t.” Is there a faint hint of flirtation here? Kipling doesn’t say. It’s more likely that her time in Africa had blunted her English social radar. She once wrote to a friend that she did not go to Africa as a “tonic.” Rather, after the trauma of her parents’ deaths, she thought “having been for so many years so close to death and danger in the most dreadful form they can come to one, namely the fight for the life of one we love, that a mere English social life was, and ever will remain, an impossibility to me, so I went off to carry on the old fight, where it is at its thickest, in the Terrible Bight of Benin.” Like Peary and his Arctic, Mary had found her soul mate in a place rather than a person.

In 1899 she set out for Africa for the last time. Her objective was to collect samples of freshwater fish for the British Museum from the Orange River in South Africa, and then make her way “home” to West Africa. However, by the time she arrived, the Anglo-Boer War had broken out. Mary volunteered as a nurse and was sent to tend injured Boer prisoners of war in Simon’s Town camp near Cape Town. The conditions were dreadful and disease was rife. Mary drank wine in place of water to reduce the risk of infection but it was to no avail; within a few months she succumbed to typhoid. She died alone, asking her nurses to leave the room as she was dying. Only thirty-seven years old, she was buried at sea, as she had requested; but with full military honors, which she had not. It was not quite the end of the story. The coffin was insufficiently weighted and bobbed off over the waves. A lifeboat had to be launched in pursuit and the casket dispatched to the deep by attaching anchors to it. Mary Kingsley had never been easy to pin down.

If Genghis Khan sought power, Peary fame, and Mary Kingsley freedom, what drove the Prussian polymath Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) was knowledge. Explorer, geographer, cartographer, geologist, mineralogist, botanist, sociologist, and volcanologist, he is a giant of nineteenth-century science, linking the heroic voyages of Captain Cook and the conceptual revolution of Charles Darwin. He died just six months before the publication of On the Origin of Species in 1859, but without him, it might never have been written. When Darwin boarded the Beagle in 1826, he had Humboldt’s Personal Narrative tucked into his knapsack, a book he was still reading and rereading (and still taking notes from) right up until his death in 1882. “He was the greatest traveling scientist who ever lived,” Darwin wrote in his diary. “I have always admired him; now I worship him.” He wasn’t the only one. Goethe claimed that he had learned more in an hour’s conversation with Humboldt than in eight days of studying books. Thomas Jefferson counted him a close friend and sought his advice on what vines to plant at his country estate in Virginia. By his early thirties, Humboldt was said to be the second-most-famous man in the world after Napoleon. When the two met briefly in 1804, the yet-to-be-crowned emperor greeted him patronizingly: “You collect plants, Monsieur?” When Humboldt modestly agreed that he did, Napoleon turned smartly on his heel with a curt “So does my wife!” He later tried to deport him as a spy.

Humboldt did a great deal more than “collect plants.” His name is in every botany and biology textbook—as well as every atlas—in the world. He has a penguin named after him, and a squid, a dolphin, a skunk, a lily, an orchid, and many other plant and animal species. The Humboldt Broncos are an ice-hockey team from Humboldt, Saskatchewan, one of a swath of North American places named for him, including Humboldt Bay, the Humboldt Sink, the Humboldt River, Humboldt Lake, Humboldt Salt Marsh, and the Humboldt Mountains. More important still, the greatest marine ecosystem on earth, the vast upwelling from the Antarctic Ocean that runs along the coasts of Chile and Peru and keeps them cool and dry, is called the Humboldt Current. Few human beings have inscribed themselves on the planet on such a scale.

Scale is a word that suits him. He invented what we now call earth science. He turned geography into an academic discipline and rewrote the history of the planet. He was the first real ecologist. The idea that the earth is a single interconnected entity had its first and most eloquent champion in Humboldt. He collected data from every possible source: animals, plants, fossils, rocks, the movements of stars, and weather patterns. He sought to combine all this information into one dynamic system, which he called harmony in nature.

Humboldt’s early life has some similarities to Peary’s. His father, a major in the Prussian army and one of Frederick the Great’s closest advisers, died when he was ten. His mother loomed large in his life as Peary’s had done, but far from smothering him with love, Maria von Humboldt drafted in a corps of private tutors to educate Alexander and his older brother, Wilhelm, to an appropriate standard. Alexander did not meet it. He was an inattentive student, preferring to spend time poring over his collections of plants, insects, and rocks, earning himself the nickname “the little apothecary.” He also had a gift for languages and could draw beautifully, particularly landscapes, but Maria was unimpressed. She wanted him to be a politician. Carted off to a succession of universities, he failed to graduate from any of them. Toiling away at finance and economics to please his mother, he quietly developed his languages and studied geology, botany, and history on the side.

At Gottingen University he made friends with Georg Forster, son of Johann Reinhold Forster, the naturalist on James Cook’s second voyage to the South Pacific. Talking with Georg, Humboldt suddenly realized what he wanted to do: Scientific exploration was to be his destiny. Sensing that geology was the quickest way to get there, he entered the Freiberg School of Mines, a new and progressive establishment with a growing international reputation. Humboldt was the star student of his year, staggering everyone with his ability to memorize immense amounts of technical information and with his capacity for hard work. Once again, he didn’t graduate, but he didn’t need to: The Prussian government offered him a job as an assessor of mines. Posted to rural Bavaria, he spent five years reorganizing a series of semiredundant gold and copper mines, reequipping them, hiring new staff, and introducing the latest mining technology. He invented a safety lamp, and using his own money, founded a technical school for young miners. The government was so taken with him they sent him on several diplomatic missions to France. Louis Philippe, king of the French, always looked forward to his visits. Then in 1796 Alexander von Humboldt’s mother died.

Like Mary Kingsley at a similar age, Humboldt all at once found himself free of family obligations. What’s more, he had been left a sizable inheritance. He began to plan, but a chance meeting with a diplomat led to an introduction to Charles IV of Spain. The Spanish empire was sitting on a vast hoard of mineral wealth in South America and Humboldt made a favorable impression on the king, talking him through the latest developments in mining. The result was an invitation to visit the Spanish colonies in South America, at that time completely closed to the rest of the world. This was the break that Humboldt had waited for, and he immediately went out and spent a fortune on scientific and astronomical instruments. He set sail from Marseilles with the French botanist Aime Bonpland in 1799. Together they spent five years in Central and South America, covering six thousand miles on horseback, in canoes, and on foot. It was a journey that would change our understanding of the world.

The revolutionary general and liberator of South America, Simon Bolivar (1783–1830), called Humboldt the true discoverer of the continent. Before him no one had guessed that the Amazon rain forest was the planet’s richest and most diverse habitat. With Bonpland he collected more than 60,000 samples and discovered over 3,500 new species: No single trip has ever yielded as many. Humboldt’s vision went far beyond the work of his contemporaries, who were busily filling in branches on the sprouting tree of species devised by Linnaeus. He was intent on uncovering the hidden connections between apparently unconnected phenomena. He wasn’t just interested in what a plant looked like. He wanted to know why it lived where it lived, the type of rocks that produced the soil it grew in, the prevailing climatic conditions, the other species that grew near it—as well as the species that fed on it, near it, or under it and how the whole ecological cycle it was part of worked. That was why he had to travel. It was not enough to give his samples a label and a Latin name: He had to understand the context. One of the pleasures of reading Humboldt is that he never lost his childlike sense of awe: “The stars as they sparkle in the firmament fill us with delight and ecstasy,” he wrote, “and yet they all move in orbit marked out with mathematical precision.”

Humboldt was incapable of noticing anything without then asking “why?” When he observed the “brilliant fireworks” of the Leonid meteor shower in northern Venezuela, he went on to calculate when they would next return. Confronted with volcanoes, he perceived that they were lined up along subterranean fissures in the earth’s