Topic 14 - Alexander von Humboldt

Alexander von Humboldt transformed science in the early 19th Century.  Charles Darwin famously called him "the greatest scientific traveler who ever lived."  In addition to his contributions to science and geography, von Humboldt was an astute political observer in his travels through Spanish America. He wrote 30 volumes on his travels and field studies.  For more information on von Humboldt, link here to a feature in the Humanities magazine 


Alexander von Humboldt is a good primary source of information on Spanish America at the turn of the 19th century and his travels included parts of what is now the United States.  Below is an excerpt from his Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain concerning Alta California:

The population of New California would have augmented still more rapidly if the laws by which the Spanish presidios have been governed for ages were not directly opposite to the true interests of both mother-country and colonies. By these laws the soldiers stationed at Monterey are not permitted to live out of their barracks and to settle as colonists. The monks are generally averse to the settlement of colonists of the white cast, because being people who reason (gente de razon*) they do not submit so easily to a blind obedience as the Indians. "It is truly distressing," (says a well-informed and enlightened Spanish navigator†) "that the military, who pass a painful and laborious life, cannot in their old age settle in the country and employ themselves in agriculture. The prohibition of building houses in the neighbourhood of the presidio is contrary to all the dictates of sound policy. If the whites were permitted to employ themselves in the cultivation of the soil and the rearing of cattle, and if the military, by establishing their wives and children in cottages, could prepare an asylum against the indigence to which they are too frequently exposed in their old age, New California would soon become a flourishing colony, a resting place of the greatest utility for the Spanish navigators who trade between Peru, Mexico, and the Philippine Islands." On removing the obstacles which we have pointed out, the Malouine Islands, the missions of the Rio Negro, and the coasts of San Francisco and Monterey, would soon be peopled with a great number of whites. But what a striking contrast between the principles of colonization followed by the Spaniards, and those by which Great Britain has created in a few years villages on the eastern coast of New Holland!


Here is an interesting documentary on Alexander von Humboldt.  I want you to watch the first 14 minutes (until the end of the discussion of slavery).  If you have the time or the inclination, watch the remaining 30 minutes.