ABSTRACT
It was an intricate social fabric and a critical historical juncture into which Alexander von Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland set foot when they arrived in South America in 1799. For the five eventful years that followed, they participated in that moment as they made their way around what they liked to call the New Continent. Their historic journey, and the monument of print it produced, laid down the lines for the ideological reinvention of South America that took place on both sides of the Atlantic during the momentous first decades of the nineteenth century. For thirty years, while popular uprisings, foreign invasions, and wars of independence convulsed Spanish America, Alexander von Humboldt’s vast writings on his equinoctial travels flowed in a steady stream from Paris, reaching thirty volumes in as many years. At a time when loosening travel restrictions began sending European travelers to South America by the dozen, Humboldt remained the single most influential interlocutor in the process of reimagining and redefinition that coincided with Spanish America’s independence from Spain. Humboldt was, and still is, considered “the most creative explorer of his time”; his American travels were regarded as “a model journey of exploration and a supreme geographical achievement.”1 He was as celebrated in Euro-america as in Europe, and his writings were the source of
new founding visions of America on both sides of the Atlantic. Charles Darwin wrote from on board the Beagle that his “whole course of life is due to having read and re-read” Humboldt’s Personal Narrative as a youth.2
