Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
naturalist Johann Wolfgang von Goethe credited the Lisbon disaster with
his boyhood loss of faith. Doubts about the veracity of Goethe's account do
not detract from its influence.19
19
in the nineteenth century, the Lisbon earth-
quake became a cultural shorthand for initiation into a skeptical, rational,
and self-consciously modern search for natural causes. in an age fond of
likening human history to a progression from infancy to maturity, Lisbon
figured as the coming of age of the european mind.
20
if earthquakes became virtually a rite of passage for victorian naturalists,
it was thanks largely to the seismic reflections of Alexander von Humboldt.
Humboldt was born in 1769 in Berlin, the cosmopolitan capital of the rap-
idly expanding kingdom of Prussia. Humboldt matured in an age intent on
exploiting the natural and human “resources” of the New World. Though he
served european empires, he managed to retain a critical distance from their
goals. Humboldt became the nineteenth century's most celebrated model
of the scientific traveler. He embodied the romance, heroism, and freedom
from social convention that seemed to await explorers in the name of sci-
ence. He traveled in search of a “general physics of the earth.” This meant
tracing the most varied phenomena across the planet's surface—the charac-
teristics of the atmosphere, the elevations of mountains, the distribution of
plant species—in search of patterns and interconnections. Humboldt dem-
onstrated how physical and organic nature could be studied together, region
by region, landscape by landscape—comparing, say, deserts and grasslands,
alpine lakes and tropical lakes. Against the nineteenth-century trend toward
scientific specialization, this was an approach that united meteorological,
geological, botanical, zoological, and even anthropological perspectives.
Natural conditions posed the constraints within which cultures developed;
cultural tendencies in turn shaped the uses and perceptions of nature.
21
Humboldt felt his first earthquake in Cumana, venezuela, in Novem-
ber 1799, two years after an earthquake there had killed approximately six-
teen thousand people. His account appeared in his
Personal Narrative
of the
South American voyage, which was required reading for aspiring nineteenth-
century naturalists. (Charles Darwin, for instance, copied out long passages
from it to carry with him on the
Beagle.
) it begins with Humboldt and his
companion Aimé Bonpland crossing a desolate beach one evening, when
out of nowhere appeared “a tall man, the colour of a mulatto, and naked to
the waist,” brandishing a large stick. Humboldt ducked his blow, but Bon-
pland was struck on the head, hard enough to leave him with a fever and
dizzy spells. The man then pulled a knife, and the travelers “would surely
have been wounded if some Basque merchants taking the fresh air on the
