QI The Book of the Dead

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 swathe 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 re-wrote the history of the planet. He was the first real ecologist. The idea that the earth is a single interconnected entityhad 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 advisors, 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 Göttingen 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 realised 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 memorise immenseamounts 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 reorganising a series of semi-redundant gold and copper mines, re-equipping 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 sizeable 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 favourable 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 Aimé Bonpland in 1799. Together they spent five years in Central and South America, covering 6,000 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, Simón Bolívar (1783–1830), called