Translator’s Introduction

Alexander Von Humboldt’s five-year expedition (1799–1804) to the Canary Islands, Venezuela, Cuba, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Mexico, and the United States was a first of its kind in many ways. After three centuries of colonial expansion had laid claims to the entire American continent, new generations of scientists and naturalists began to explore the geography, geology, botany, and biology of the new lands, and to describe the cultures and cultural artifacts they encountered there. These scientific expeditions continued the interests of the colonial powers in developing and exploiting the continent’s lands and peoples, and they were also guided by a spirit of European enlightenment. James Cook’s three voyages to the Pacific between 1768 and 1779 provided a wealth of information from New Zealand to Hawaii, yielding vast ethnographic and botanical collections and sparking interest in further journeys across the globe. The young German naturalist Georg Forster, who, along with his father, Johann Reinhold Forster, accompanied Cook on his second journey, became particularly influential for Humboldt. The two men became friends and traveled across the Netherlands, England, and France, and published their impressions together. Humboldt undoubtedly also became influenced by Forster’s liberal-revolutionary ideals (he founded a Jacobin club in 1792 and was involved in founding the Mainz Republic), and he greatly admired Forster’s travel report, A Voyage Round the World (1777), which inaugurated modern travel literature in its combination of scientific and ethnographic observations, personal reflections, and philosophical remarks.

The areas that Humboldt visited in South America had been explored some fifty years previously by the French mathematicians and astronomers Charles-Marie de La Condamine, Louis Godin, and Pierrre Bouguer. Sent by the Paris Academy of Sciences, they spent nearly ten years in Ecuador, from 1735 to 1745, measuring the meridian in order to prove that the earth was flattened at the poles, producing maps, exploring the Amazon headwaters, and describing cinchona and rubber trees in the process. At the request of the Spanish king, they were accompanied by two Spanish naval officers, Jorge Juan y Santacilia and Antonio Ulloa, who measured the heights of many Andean mountains using a barometer and who also discovered platinum.