Aimé Bonpland

Aimé Bonpland: The Other Man on Chimborazo

In June 1802 two Europeans clawed their way up the flank of Chimborazo, then believed to be the highest mountain on earth, and stopped at 19,286 feet — a world altitude record for a Westerner that would stand for decades. History remembers the German who took the barometric readings. The Frenchman beside him, gasping in the same thin air, was carrying the plants: some six thousand specimens over five years, most of them unknown in Europe. Aimé Bonpland was arguably the greatest field botanist of his century, and he spent the second half of his life in a place where almost nobody knew it.

The Surgeon from La Rochelle

He was born Aimé Jacques Alexandre Bonpland in La Rochelle in late August 1773 — the date is variously given as the 22nd, 23rd or 29th — the son of a physician. Around 1790 he followed his brother to Paris to study medicine, then gravitated to the Museum of Natural History, where he studied under Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and Antoine Laurent de Jussieu. It is difficult to overstate the luck of that classroom: Jussieu was constructing the natural system of plant families that still underlies botanical classification, and Lamarck was thinking his way toward transformism. Bonpland absorbed both while the ideas were still hot.

The Revolution made him a military surgeon, which taught him a different competence — how to keep working under conditions that would incapacitate most people. He met Alexander von Humboldt at the house of the physician Jean-Nicolas Corvisart, and the two men found in each other the thing each lacked. Humboldt had money, instruments and an appetite for measurement; Bonpland had hands.

Five Years in the Equinoctial Regions

They sailed in 1799 and did not return until 1804. The itinerary reads like an inventory of a continent: Venezuela, Cuba, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Mexico, the Amazon basin. They spent seventy-five days canoeing the Orinoco system in pursuit of its rumoured connection to the Amazon watershed. They crossed the Andes four times. Humboldt fixed positions by observing Jupiter's moons and charted the cold Pacific current that now carries his name.

Bonpland's work was less visible and physically harder. Collecting in the tropics is a race against rot: every specimen must be pressed, dried, labelled and kept dry in an environment engineered to destroy paper. He did this in canoes, on mule trains and at altitude, for five years, and brought the collection home intact — thirty large crates of material, and roughly six thousand plant species that European science had never described. The pair spent decades publishing it. *Plantes équinoxiales* appeared from 1808 to 1816; *Nova genera et species plantarum* from 1815 onward, its title page recording that Carl Sigismund Kunth put the work in order from Bonpland's own autograph notes. The whole enterprise, the thirty-volume *Voyage aux régions équinoxiales du Nouveau Continent*, ran from 1805 to 1834 and effectively founded plant geography as a discipline — the study of why particular vegetation occurs at particular altitudes and latitudes, an idea that would run straight into the hands of Charles Darwin.

Malmaison

Paris rewarded him. Napoleon granted an annual pension of 3,000 francs, and the Empress Josephine made him superintendent of the gardens at Malmaison, where American plants were being cultivated for the first time on French soil. In 1813 he published descriptions of the rare plants growing there. He had arrived: a pension, an imperial patron, and a share in the most celebrated scientific expedition of the age.

He gave it up. In 1816, at forty-three, Bonpland left Europe for Buenos Aires and never lived in France again.

The Second Life

Argentina made him professor of natural history, but the pull was botanical rather than academic. He was drawn to *Ilex paraguariensis* — yerba mate, the holly whose leaves were the great commodity of the Río de la Plata — and in 1821 he established a mate colony near the Paraná. It was, in agronomic terms, an entirely sound idea. It was also a direct commercial threat to Paraguay's dictator, José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia, who intended to monopolise mate production.

Francia sent soldiers. The colony was destroyed, and Bonpland was arrested on charges of espionage and held inside Paraguay from 1821 until 1829 — nine years, some accounts say ten, during which Humboldt, the French government and the scientific societies of Europe petitioned for his release and got nowhere. Francia simply ignored them. Bonpland, characteristically, spent the years practising medicine and farming rather than pining, and when the dictator finally let him go he did not sail for Europe. He went back to the same river.

San Borja

Released in 1829, he settled at San Borja in Corrientes, farming, trading yerba mate, treating patients and continuing to collect. He was a working naturalist on the edge of the Argentine interior for nearly three more decades, sending material back to Europe, corresponding with Humboldt, and largely forgotten by the institutions that had once feted him. He died there on 11 May 1858, aged eighty-four, and was buried at Paso de los Libres. The botanical abbreviation "Bonpl." still marks his authorities; plants, animals — the deep-sea squid *Grimalditeuthis bonplandi* among them — places and a lunar crater carry his name.

Why Aimé Is Called a Genius

The case for Bonpland is a case for a kind of intelligence modern culture is poor at recognising, because it lives in the hands. Collecting six thousand new species across five years of jungle, river and cordillera is not a matter of picking flowers. It requires an eye trained to spot what is unfamiliar in a landscape where everything is unfamiliar; the taxonomic knowledge — Jussieu's natural system, absorbed at source — to know instantly which finds matter; and a technique for preserving fragile material in heat, damp and constant motion that defeated most collectors of the era. Bonpland lost almost nothing. The evidentiary base on which Humboldt built plant geography, and on which Darwin drew a generation later, is very largely Bonpland's herbarium.

The counter-case is real, and it is why his is the smaller name. He was not a theorist. The synthesising ideas that made the expedition epochal were Humboldt's; the taxonomic write-up of *Nova genera et species plantarum* was executed by Kunth, arranging Bonpland's notes. He published comparatively little under his own name, abandoned a secure position at the heart of European science at forty-three, and spent his last four decades on projects — a mate plantation, a country medical practice — that produced no major publication. A less generous reading is of a magnificent technician who lacked the ambition to convert his material into a body of thought. Both readings are true at once: a genius of observation and craft whose life's work is filed under another man's name, and who seems to have minded far less than posterity does.

Legacy

The Humboldtian revolution in how Europeans understood the natural world — vegetation as a system varying predictably with altitude, climate and latitude — rests on specimens that one French army surgeon dried and labelled by hand in a canoe. That is the legacy, and it is enormous even if it is anonymous. The second legacy is stranger and more personal: Bonpland chose South America over Europe twice, once when he emigrated at forty-three and again when a dictator finally released him at fifty-six. Argentina has never forgotten it, and he lies buried by the river he refused to leave.

Achievements

• Recorded as physician, botanist and pteridologist