Original subtitles

More than 200 years ago, a scientist named Alexander von Humboldt spent five years exploring

South America.

He described Earth as a living organism where everything was connected.

Historian and bestselling author Andrea Wolf is traveling in his footsteps.

He's the first to warn about harmful human-induced climate change.

Nearly forgotten today, this young German explorer would become one of the most influential

scientists in history.

I think Humboldt is to 19th century science what Einstein is to the 20th century.

It is a complete rethinking of the world around us.

On November 4, 1799, Alexander von Humboldt was living his dream.

And then, the ground literally shifted under his feet.

Although he emerged unscathed, the earthquake prompted Humboldt, already a driven scientist,

to question everything.

What he discovered transformed our knowledge.

It dazzled kings and presidents and turned Humboldt into a superstar of modern science.

By the time of his death, Humboldt had fans across the world.

They erected statues and named dozens of institutions after him.

In the U.S., many towns and counties bear his name.

And even the state of Nevada was almost called Humboldt.

To honor his scientific achievements, his name was bestowed to hundreds of plants and animals.

He even has an honorary outpost on the moon.

So who was Alexander von Humboldt?

The man they say invented nature.

And how did he rock our world?

Born in 1769 into a family of aristocrats, Alexander grew up in a luxurious manner near

Berlin.

He had the best private education money could buy.

What he lacked was love.

Humboldt had a very unhappy childhood.

His mother was very cold and distant.

And from very early on, he dreamt of big voyages and distant countries.

After his father died when he was ten, Humboldt escaped outdoors, sparking a lifelong fascination

with plants and insects.

And the visiting king of Prussia asked if he wanted to conquer the world, like his namesake,

Alexander the Great, young Humboldt answered yes, but with my head.

At the age of 18, Alexander left home, or Chateau Bordeaux, as he called it.

He wanted to study science and nature.

His mother thought that was beneath him.

This was an enterprise that wasn't actually a professional activity so much as an avocation.

Most people of wealth and status who had the time and means to conduct observations in

nature.

In addition, 18th century science was still guided by religious principles.

According to the church, the world was less than 6,000 years old.

Meeting philosophers considered nature a divine clockwork with God at its center.

Alexander suspected there was more to it.

He wanted to look beyond traditional beliefs and discover how the world really worked.

In 1791, he arrived in the town of Freiburg to study at the local mining academy.

Nearly 230 years later, historian Andrea Wolf is visiting the silver mine where Alexander

received his training.

The technology has changed over the centuries, but the underground tunnels are much the same.

Right from the start, Humboldt was an overachiever.

Every morning Humboldt gets up at 5 o'clock, goes down into the mines, spends hours down

here, and then at noon he goes up to study at the mining academy.

So he completes a three-year course in eight months.

Humboldt became a mining inspector.

Unlike others, he took a keen interest in the welfare of the miners.

We saw that there were many things in this, in those days being a miner was a very risky

existence.

Humboldt always showed a very egalitarian approach to things.

He was not, as you would expect in this sort of very hierarchical society, somebody

who clung to his own social stratum.

In his spare time, Humboldt published articles about geology and botany.

There wasn't a science that didn't interest him.

I want to undo the gaudian knot of the processes of life.

As Humboldt's output grew, so did his reputation.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Germany's leading poet, said he learned more in an hour with

Humboldt than by reading books for eight days.

Others were less impressed.

Not everybody adored Humboldt.

He could gossip about people, he could be quite cynical about people.

There were some people who refused to leave a party before Humboldt had departed because

they were so worried that they might be the object of his snite comment.

So he's a complicated flawed personality.

Then, when he was 27, Humboldt's mother died of cancer.

He inherited a fortune.

Alexander was not particularly sad.

Quite the opposite.

He was relieved.

He felt liberated because finally he could follow his dreams.

He immediately stopped working as a mining inspector and he began to prepare what he

called his great voyage.

In the spring of 1799, Humboldt hiked across the Spanish peninsula to catch a ship towards

America.

He had big plans.

I will collect plants and animals, study heat and electricity, survey longitude and latitude

and measure mountains.

But my actual purpose is to examine how all natural forces are interwoven.

18th century science only had a limited amount of data.

Humboldt was convinced that with enough new scientific information, he would be able to

explain the natural world's great mysteries.

Ami Bonplone, a French botanist, would be his travel companion for the next five years.

The men set sail on a Spanish ship towards South America.

Forty-one days later, it dropped anchor off Kumana, in present day Venezuela.

The original plan had to go to Cuba, but there was an outbreak of diseases on the ship

and the captain decided that they had to stop in the first available port in South America

and that was Kumana.

So it's not actually the port Humboldt had planned to arrive but he didn't really care.

The two men were elated.

Their big South American adventure had begun.

Humboldt, as usual, got to work immediately.

The thermometer reached 37.7 degrees Celsius.

The first plant we gathered from American soil was Abhisena Tomentosa, the thrives on

the seashore.

South America was unlike anything they had seen before.

The guy was blue, the air was full of butterflies, the tropical plants were kind of bright,

brilliant, wonderful colours and Humboldt wanted to learn about everything.

Humboldt had brought 42 delicate scientific instruments to South America.

Somehow all had survived the voyage intact.

With their instruments in good working order, the two scientists were ready to systematically

explore the Venezuelan jungle.

Well, to this day for any scientist going for the first time into South American rainforest

is a religious experience.

I remember the first time I went into Peruvian rainforest and I had never seen anything

like this.

You suddenly immersed in this environment that has a diversity that is almost unimaginable.

Like Humboldt, Bonplon was very keen to explore the world.

He was a botanist, he was endlessly curious and they made a perfect team.

Together they achieved almost everything they wanted.

Humboldt measured temperatures and altitudes and made thousands of geological observations

while Bonplonk collected a vast array of plant specimens.

The more they discovered, the more questions arose.

Most people still believed that plants and animals were created by God entirely for the

use of humankind.

How could this explain the South American wilderness where humans seemed insignificant

compared to the giants of nature?

Trees of enormous height, covered by creepers, reach out of the canyons.

There are many voices proclaiming to us that all nature breathes.

But for all of South America's colorful brilliance, there was a dark side.

There was not only beautiful things here in Kommana, there was also something he saw

here that would change his life forever.

The Great Square was the place where slaves brought from the coast of Africa were sold.

Young men from 15 to 20 years of age.

He watches as people are being examined as though they are animals, they are being bartered

and sold and he comes away raging at the injustice.

This debasing custom dates back to Africa.

It's distressing to think that even at this day, there exist European colonists who mark

their slaves with a hot iron.

He was absolutely disgusted because he really didn't believe that there were races that

were more superior than other races.

So for him, everybody was equal.

Humboldt believes deeply in the equality of all races and that slavery is intrinsically

morally and politically wrong.

And he will be a voice throughout his life for the abolition of slavery in all of its

forms in every country he visits.

Before leaving the Kommana coast, Humboldt and Bonplant had one more mission to complete.

They monitored a solar eclipse that astronomers had forecast for October 28, 1799.

The event gave them the data they needed to pinpoint Kommana's exact position on the

map.

Solar eclipses in those days were momentous events and by observing the solar eclipse

in South America, he was actually able to substantially correct information about the

relative geographic position of the site where he was working and it basically moved the

entire continent.

Less than a week after the eclipse, Kommana was rocked by an earthquake.

How most ran for safety, Emmie and Alexander rushed to gather data.

It was a life-changing experience.

When shocks from an earthquake are felt and the earth we think of as so stable shakes

on its foundations, one second is long enough to destroy long-held illusions.

This earthquake changed Humboldt's thinking completely.

It kind of took away almost an illusion of a lifetime that earth, the ground, was the

stable element and water was the element of motion and suddenly this was all turned upside

down and he said, if we can't believe in the stability of earth, of the ground, what other

things can we really truly rely on?

At the time, the dominant scientific view was that earth had been shaped by water.

In the years after his Kommana earthquake experience, Humboldt came to conclude that

volcanic forces had primarily shaped our planet.

It was a crucial insight that paved the way for a revolutionary new understanding of nature

and he was just getting started.

At the end of 1799, Humboldt and Bonplone left Kommana.

They headed for the plains to the southwest called the Janus.

Its ponds are the habitat of electric eels.

Humboldt was desperate to study these deadly fish that discharged shocks of up to 600

volts.

The local people used their traditional way of catching electric eels.

They drove wild horses into one of the ponds.

The hooves of the horses chapped up the mud.

The electric eels kind of came up to the surface and discharged their electric shock against

the horses.

This allowed the team to capture partly discharged eels, so Humboldt could begin experimenting

with their electricity.

Humboldt was not a cerebral scholar.

He tested the sciences again and again on his body.

He rubbed chemicals into wounds on his body.

He risked his life again and again with his experiments.

Humboldt used his body to check the strength of their electricity.

Electric eels to this day have not lost their fascination.

As a graduate student, we had an electric, small electric eel in the laboratory.

One time I knew that the big one sets up to 600 volts, so I was going to stay away from

those.

It was a cute little thing, so I touched it and I got the shock of my life.

My arm was numb for the rest of the day and I didn't do that again.

So naive empiricism that's for characterized as scientists.

After four hours of experiments, our muscles ached until the following day.

As Humboldt and Bon Plon continued their journey, they encountered a region struggling

with change.

Farmers had removed trees around a lake to create fields and were using its water for

irrigation.

The lake's sources began to dry up and water levels dropped.

The crops began to fail.

Seeing this destruction, Humboldt was the first to explain the fundamental functions

of the forest for the ecosystem.

He talked about the tree's ability to store water, their ability to enrich the atmosphere

with moisture and their protection against soil erosion.

And it was at Lake Valencia that he first talked about harmful human-induced climate

change.

The inhabitants often set fire to forests to increase the pastureage.

But because it is now less forested, the eridity has increased.

There were moments when he became so pessimistic about our future that he talked about a future

where we might travel to distant planets.

And he said, if that happens, we would take our lethal mixture of greed, violence and

ignorance with us and we would leave these planets as barren as we've already done with

Earth.

In April 1800, Humboldt and Bon Plon reached their next destination.

The Mighty are a no-go river.

When Humboldt arrived in South America, he heard rumors that there was a connection between

the Orinocca River and the Amazon that was against all accepted scientific knowledge

of the time.

Scientists believed that two big river systems like the Orinocca and the Amazon should be

divided by a watershed.

So Humboldt set out for the Orinocca to find the truth.

The men and their small crew traveled beyond the Orinocca and into the surrounding river

network.

Humboldt found a new world.

His adventures started here, far away from the colonial towns at the coast.

He discovered a new world, a world he had dreamt of already as a little boy, when he

was reading the great traveling accounts of Captain Cook and Louis de Bourghonville.

What he didn't know, what he couldn't know was really how dangerous and how exhausting

the journey would be.

Throughout the journey, Humboldt was keen to tap into the indigenous people's unique

knowledge of nature.

Unlike other Europeans, he didn't consider them savages.

Humboldt was fascinated by Qrari, a notorious and highly effective poison used in hunting

and warfare.

Once it enters the bloodstream, it leads to instant paralysis and death.

Alfonso Gonzales, an elder of the Carapana people, is one of the few who knows how to

produce the deadly compound.

This plant is part of the poison Qrari.

In order to use it, you add a bit of water.

When it dissolves, you can apply it.

You can use different arrows depending on the animal you hunt.

Humboldt also learned that Qrari could help an upset stomach, so of course he gave it

a try.

We often swallow little bits of Qrari.

It tastes agreeably bitter.

There is no danger, so long as your gums and lips are not bleeding.

The jungle also taught Humboldt that the hunter sometimes becomes the hunted.

Once a stroll almost cost me my life, I spotted fresh jaguar tracks.

The animal had gone off into the jungle, 80 steps away from me.

I remembered what the Indians advised us to do and carried on walking.

I told my adventure story to the Indians who didn't give it much attention.

Constantly there were these dangers, but the thing that he mentions most really in his

diary are the mosquitoes.

Mosquitoes will tear you away as they cover your head and hands, pricking you with their

needle like suckers through your clothes and climbing into your nose and mouth.

I observed that a bath, those soothing against old bites, also made a susceptible to new

gums.

Humboldt and Bonplone's expedition faced extreme heat and disease, but the men also encountered

the richest ecosystem in the world.

So at night Humboldt very often lay awake and listened to the noises of the jungle.

He listened to the roaring of the jaguars who woke up the capybaras and the tapas who

kind of ran through the undergrowth and woke up the monkeys.

So he saw nature in a relentless battle as a bloody battle of survival.

And later Humboldt's description of nature's struggle for survival would inspire none other

than Charles Darwin.

Humboldt became almost a kind of like hero for Darwin, but it was also the content of

Humboldt's ideas which then became very important for Charles Darwin's concept of natural selection.

At one stage Humboldt's journey almost ended when a sudden gust hit the expedition boat.

Humboldt couldn't swim.

I just managed to rescue my diary.

Bonplone then took control of the situation with that coolness that he always showed in

danger.

He did not think that the boat would sink.

We bailed out the water.

In less than half an hour we were able to continue our journey.

Today that very diary Humboldt rescued on the Oronoko resides at an archive in Berlin.

So this page here is very special because we can still see the watermarks of that accident

on that page.

And how do we know this?

Because a few pages down he describes that the watermarks come from this boat accident

and he writes this in 1838 so almost 40 years later.

Humboldt also called the experience one of the worst of his life.

But the team pressed on.

Several weeks into their river journey the expedition was running very low on supplies

but they were close to a pivotal location that few Europeans had ever reached.

We're here at the Maipura Rapids which was at Humboldt's time really the gateway to a

new unknown world.

It was a dangerous world.

The rapids go over several miles across kind of rocky outcrops.

But despite the danger Humboldt described this as a magical world.

He talked about the islands which were closed in tropical plants.

He talked about the foam and the mist that created rainbows that danced over the water

surface.

So it's really here I think where he began to describe nature as a poet rather than as

a scientist.

Humboldt refused to turn back.

He decided to bypass the mile long rapids by letting the crew carry the boat through

the jungle.

The men continued their river journey which covered 1400 miles and lasted a total of 75

grueling days.

They suffered from fever and starvation.

In the end they discovered the natural canal the Kazikyara that linked the Orinoco with

an Amazon tributary.

Humboldt drew this detailed map of the largely unknown region.

But it would be his vast collection of plants and tens of thousands of measurements that

would make his five year journey into South America unlike any other.

He came back with 6,000 dried plant specimens.

He came back with 4,000 pages from his diary.

His trunks were filled with insects and rocks and hundreds and hundreds of drawings

and maps.

In 1801 Humboldt and Balpla made their way to Quito, today's capital of Ecuador, to

begin exploring volcanoes.

In the air, Andrea is able to see the region from a perspective Humboldt could only have

dreamed about.

Their first goal was the massive Pichincha volcano, looming over Quito.

Humboldt suspected that it might be connected to other volcanoes, beneath its mighty crater.

Humboldt went up Pichincha three times.

The first time he fainted, the second time his servant crashed through a snow bridge

about rescued the barometer.

The next day the people in Quito felt some traumas and there was a rumor circulating

that Humboldt had thrown gunpowder into the volcano to reignite it.

And then the next day Humboldt went up the third time but they came down pretty quickly

again because they felt the traumas up the volcano too.

Humboldt spent several months in Quito.

Even today, he is hugely popular in the region.

Revered for his scientific explorations and friendship with South American independence

fighter, Simon Bolivar.

Back in 1802, words soon got round Quito society that a dashing young aristocrat was

in town.

He visits one of the grand houses where Humboldt would have been the guest of honor.

His host here in Quito was the governor of Quito.

He had a beautiful daughter, Rosa Montefur.

Rosa and the other beautiful women in Quito all adored Humboldt but he preferred the company

of her brother Carlos Montefur, a very handsome young man who remained his companion for the

rest of the expedition.

These historians today agree that Humboldt was gay.

He was never very interested in women.

He had these very intense relationships with younger men.

But how much he lived these physically we will probably never know.

Humboldt himself said that great physical exertions kind of kept at bay sensual passions.

And maybe that was one of the reasons why he pushed his body to the limit as he traveled

through South America.

Montefur joined Humboldt and Bonplon in their quest to explore the secrets behind volcanoes.

Humboldt concluded they were linked by what he called a volcanic furnace.

It was a revolutionary idea for the time.

He was actually the first one to think about these notions that we have nowadays of the

ring of firework around the entire Pacific Rim.

We have all these very active earthquake zones as well as volcanoes.

The crowning glory of Humboldt's exhausting mountain tour was Chimborazzo, an inactive

volcano.

At almost 21,000 feet it was then believed to be the world's highest mountain.

In June 1802 the men managed to reach Chimborazzo's highest slopes.

The thin air made it hard to breathe and their gums were bleeding.

The leather soles were shredded.

A vast glacial crevasse at 19,400 feet blocked their path to the peak.

It is here on Chimborazzo when he's almost at the peak that his vision of nature clarifies

that everything that he had seen over the years but also before in Europe kind of came

together, fell together.

When he realized that nature was a global force and he saw that nature hangs together

too.

So he realized that nature was this really big web of life.

So it's almost like an epiphany he has on this mountain.

This is not just a cerebral experience.

This is something he felt in his heart.

He endured hardship and danger, collecting, measuring, observing.

Before concluding on top of one of South America's tallest mountains, in nature everything

is connected.

Humboldt's revolutionary painting of nature showed a botanical journey from the tropics

to the snow line.

These are Humboldt's lecture notes and when I saw them that was the moment when I think

I truly understood how his mind worked.

This is like a multi-layered collage of thoughts.

Everything is cross-referenced, stuck together.

Like in nature, everything is connected in his mind.

After Chimborazzo, the three men spent a year studying in Mexico then set off for the United

States in 1804.

They almost didn't make it when their ships sailed into a hurricane.

For a moment, Humboldt believed that he, his precious collection and his new ideas were

lost.

After six rough days, the storm led up.

They landed safely and Humboldt began making his way to Washington, D.C.

Having witnessed the great spectacle of the majestic Andes, I intended to enjoy the spectacle

of a free people.

He had been invited to the White House by none other than Thomas Jefferson.

He was welcomed with open arms.

Jefferson was a keen scientist and eager to learn about South and Central America.

It was a region that he and his government knew very little about.

The timing of Humboldt's visit was absolutely perfect because Jefferson had just bought

the Louisiana Territory in the previous year for the United States.

So with that purchase, Mexico had become the new neighbor and Humboldt had just spent a

year in Mexico.

So he had all kinds of data that was interesting for Jefferson.

President Jefferson was facing heavy criticism for purchasing the Louisiana Territory, a

vast wilderness without properly defined borders.

Humboldt's visit was a godsend because he had a newly created map of Mexico.

That map that Humboldt spent a year making in Mexico is exactly the information Jefferson

needs, both to understand what he has purchased, but also how to negotiate with the emissaries

of the Kingdom of Spain on where the border between these two countries will fall.

An 1804 copy of the map at the Library of Congress reveals how Humboldt captured Mexico

in unprecedented detail.

He's using every tool at his disposal in order to create the most correct pinpoint assessment

of where every city and every municipality is on that map.

Humboldt is a newly created, newly revised, newly amplified understanding of the North

American continent.

Humboldt allowed Jefferson to make a copy of the map under one condition.

Humboldt would receive detailed scientific information on the still unexplored North

American continent.

Jefferson agreed.

For decades, American scientists would provide Humboldt with data from the U.S.

On that same trip, Humboldt also visited Mount Vernon, the late George Washington's home

outside of Washington, D.C.

In 1804, it was still an active plantation with many enslaved workers.

Some of them lived in cabins like this.

Humboldt was deeply troubled by what he saw that day.

Ever since Humboldt saw the slave market in Venezuela, he thought that slavery was absolutely

terrible.

I imagine being here in Mount Vernon, one of the things that must have interested him

is slavery because this is a plantation built on slavery.

Exactly.

And one of the reasons I think he wanted to come to Mount Vernon was to understand how

that operated in a country that is dedicated to the premise that all men are created equal

and what Humboldt does is he's very upfront in his letters where he says, I cannot understand

how a democracy founded like yours can sanction slavery.

The Mount Vernon visit reinforced Humboldt's opposition to slavery.

He later became a vocal champion of the American abolitionist movement.

Humboldt spent just six weeks in the United States, yet the impact of his visit would

be felt for many decades.

The splash that Humboldt made here was one that affected every aspect of 19th century

life in the United States.

It was expressed to us both a desire to support American democracy, to advocate for the abolition

of slavery.

But what he also stated to Jefferson was, everything west of these mountains, meaning

everything west of the Blue Ridge would be new to science.

And he was excited for the potential of discovery and the addition of knowledge that we would

bring to the table.

Humboldt returned to Europe and moved to Paris.

He brought with him 35 crates with specimens, including 3,600 previously unknown plants.

While Montpellt compiled botanical books of their explorations, Humboldt began publishing

his data for scientists.

It would take 30 years to evaluate.

Humboldt basically single-handedly founded a whole variety of sciences.

He is one of the founders of geography.

He is one of the founders of modern earth sciences, all of these things.

Well into his old age, Humboldt remained at the center of sciences in Europe, reportedly

monopolizing every conversation.

In 1842, the young Charles Darwin recently returned from his own pivotal South American

journey was excited to meet his lifelong hero.

To Darwin's disappointment, he was unable to get a word in edgues.

Eventually, Humboldt returned to Berlin, where his journey had begun.

In 1845, Humboldt published the first volume of his great book, Cosmos, which became a

huge international bestseller.

In Cosmos, he took his readers on an extraordinary journey from earth to outer space, from the

tiniest fleck of moss to the highest volcanoes.

He wrote about botany, but also about poetry and landscape painting, about the migration

of the human race and the northern lights.

He wrote a book that brought everything together, and it was a portrait of nature that was pulsating

with life, and it was the book that made him famous everywhere.

Especially in the United States.

In 1846, Humboldt's ideas became one of the inspirations for a new scientific institution,

the Smithsonian.

Smithsonian Institution is in so many ways the physical manifestation of Alexander von

Humboldt's brain.

Every idea he cared about, every discovery he got excited about, all of the people he

championed over the course of his long life, their ideas, their discoveries, the objects

that he cared about are here at the Smithsonian.

Few research by Eleanor Harvey and her colleague suggests that Humboldt may also have played

a major role in establishing the Smithsonian in the first place.

This is James Smithson, the English scientist who left his fortune to found an institution

in Washington, D.C. that bears his name.

Why would he do this?

He never came here.

It turns out our research has shown he and Alexander von Humboldt knew each other, and Humboldt's

excitement for America and the prospects for its science might have played a role in

Smithson's decision to bring his fortune here to found an institution and put his name on

American scientific endeavor, in part thanks to Humboldt's advocacy.

Humboldt ultimately wrote 50 books and 700 papers.

He was one of the most famous people on the planet when he died, at the age of 89.

Alexander von Humboldt really was one of the great explorers of all time.

Through his work, we really got our first good understanding of South America.

In fact, to this day, he sort of thought of almost as a faint in South America.

Every idea that Humboldt espoused traveling through evolution, the impact that he had

on Charles Darwin's ideas, the impact on geology, plate tectonics, the connection of earthquakes

to volcanics, the issue of global weather, all of those ideas started with Humboldt.

Almost forgotten during two world wars, today Humboldt is experiencing a comeback.

Eleanor is curating a new exhibition and book about his impact on the United States, and

to date, Andrea's biography has been translated into 26 languages.

He revolutionized our understanding of nature, and he came up with this idea of nature as

a web of life.

He described Earth as a living organism where everything was connected, and he's the first

to warn about harmful human-induced climate change in 1800.

So he's pretty prophetic.

Nature is a wonderful web of organic life, animated by one breath, from pole to pole.

Over than 150 years after his death, Humboldt's visionary message about our world is as powerful

as ever.