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Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of America, During the Year 1799-1804 — Volume 2 Kindle Edition

4.6 4.6 out of 5 stars 20 ratings

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Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Aimé Jacques Alexandre Bonpland was a French adventurer and botanist who lived from August 22, 1773, to May 11, 1858. From 1799 to 1804, he went to Latin America with Alexander von Humboldt. He co-wrote many of the scientific papers that came out of their trip. Bonpl. is the normal author abbreviation that is used to show that this person wrote a botanical name? He was born in La Rochelle, France, on August 22, or August 29, 1773, as Aimé Jacques Alexandre Goujaud. His father was a doctor, and he went to Paris with his brother Michael around 1790 to study medicine with him. From 1791 on, they took classes at the Botanical Museum of Natural History in Paris. Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, Antoine Laurent de Jussieu, and René Louiche Desfontaines were some of their teachers. Aimé learned under Jean-Nicolas Corvisart and may have taken classes at the Hôtel-Dieu with Pierre-Joseph Desault. During this time, Aimé also became friendly with Xavier Bichat, who was also a student. Friedrich Wilhelm Heinrich Alexander von Humboldt was a German philosopher, traveler, geographer, naturalist, and naturalist who lived from September 14, 1769, to May 6, 1859. He was a supporter of Romantic science and philosophy. He was the younger brother of Wilhelm von Humboldt, who was a German minister, philosopher, and scientist and lived from 1767 to 1835. The study of biogeography was started by Humboldt's quantitative work on botanical geography. He was also one of the first people to push for long-term systematic geophysical measurement, which led to the development of modern geomagnetic and meteorological monitoring. From 1799 to 1804, Humboldt traveled a lot in the Americas. He was the first modern Western scientist to explore and write about these places. Over the course of 21 years, his account of the trip was written up and released in several books. Humboldt was one of the first people to say that the lands that now border the Atlantic Ocean (mainly South America and Africa) used to be one big area.

Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0084B5ESU
  • Publication date ‏ : ‎ May 17, 2012
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • File size ‏ : ‎ 1270 KB
  • Simultaneous device usage ‏ : ‎ Unlimited
  • Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
  • Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
  • Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 372 pages
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.6 4.6 out of 5 stars 20 ratings

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Alexander von Humboldt
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Customer reviews

4.6 out of 5 stars
4.6 out of 5
20 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Reviewed in the United States on September 25, 2016
A continuation of Humboldt's account of his extraordinary travels in South America.
Reviewed in the United States on November 29, 2014
See my comment for volume 1
Reviewed in the United States on September 9, 2020
Prussian explorer Alexander von Humboldt’s expedition to the New World from 1799 to 1804 was a landmark event not only for the history of scientific exploration but also for the nascent genre of nature writing. Humboldt’s journey to Venezuela, Colombia, Peru, Cuba, and Mexico yielded at least 30 volumes of published findings. Most of these books were specialized tomes on botany, zoology, mineralogy, or cultural geography. His Personal Narrative, however, was intended to be the all-encompassing account of the expedition for general readers. In this three-volume work, Humboldt combines copious scientific data with personal reflections on his travels, including numerous diversions into a variety of fields that represent his staggeringly broad range of interests and expertise.

Though the first volume of the Personal Narrative was a fascinating read, the second volume is more enjoyable, for a few reasons. One is that the entire narrative takes place in Venezuela, since the previous volume already covered the journey to get there. Also, the events related in Volume 2 are unified by a single compelling mission. Humboldt and his traveling companion, the French botanist Aimé Bonpland, set out to investigate the rumor of a natural canal, the Casiquiare, that connects the watersheds of the Orinoco and Amazon river basins. The pair traveled 1,725 miles to establish the veracity of this unique geographical feature. In addition, Humboldt’s writing in this second volume is more accessible than that of Volume 1. His prose reads less like a string of empirical data and more like a series of scientific travel essays.

Of course, it wouldn’t be a Humboldt production without multiple asides into topics that interest him, often resulting in digressions within digressions. Humboldt, the ultimate generalist, left no field of study untouched in his explorations. He was an expert not only in the animal, vegetable, and mineral kingdoms, but also in geography, meteorology, astronomy, anthropology, linguistics, and the politics and history of South America. The vast range of subjects he pontificates upon include the influence of physical geography on the worldwide development of agriculture, a tree that produces a milk-like sap, the results of his extensive (and dangerous) experiments with electric eels, the unjust treatment of the Indigenous population by the Spanish missionaries, the chemical properties that determine the different colors of water in various rivers and lakes, the history of cannibalism, the truth behind the rumors of a tribe of women warriors (from which the Amazon river gets its name), and one of Humboldt’s favorite subjects, people who eat dirt (a practice more widespread than you’d think). In all cases Humboldt compares his observations in Venezuela with phenomena he has witnessed and studied throughout the world.

One taxing aspect of the Personal Narrative is that much of Humboldt’s text is devoted to geographical information that could better be conveyed through maps—the direction of mountain ranges, the tributaries of rivers, and so forth. The reader spends a great deal of time wading through a jumble of place names and compass points. Perhaps the original editions of the three volumes included a map or two, but you won’t find them in the public domain versions that you can now download for free. If Humboldt didn’t provide maps, he should have, and if he did, then much of his descriptive text is redundant. Even so, Volume 2 of the Personal Narrative is still a wonderful, intellectually stimulating thrill ride through the sun-drenched plains and dense jungles of South America, with one of history’s great polymaths as your enlightened tour guide.
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Reviewed in the United States on December 24, 2013
I have the Kindle version and found it so good I wanted an old fashioned copy I could dip into, and this is in the post as I speak, thanks to Amazon Books. The story is a staggeringly good read and gives an amazing idea of the breadth of von Humbolts mind. Read it whist following the journey on an atlas or on Google earth. All school children should be exposed to this book, it stimulates the curiosity.
Reviewed in the United States on November 5, 2015
Good account about his voyage. Harder to read than similar books like the ones from D'Orbigny or Darwin.
Reviewed in the United States on July 13, 2009
This is volume 2 of Alexander von Humboldt's travels in the New World. To be honest, it took me nearly a year to read it. The chapters are long (around 60 pages each) and weighty with Indian words and place names, the names of Spanish commanders and settlements, and ancient names of rivers.

It is worth it.

No one writes like Humboldt. His cheeriness and intellect are amazing. I took pages and pages of notes while reading the book, and I relied heavily on my atlas to follow his progress through the Orinoco region.

Humboldt's mission in this volume is to travel the Orinoco to its source, to survey and chart its course, and to look for a connecting waterway between the Orinoco, Rio Negro, and Amazon Rivers. He took with him his curiosity, zeal for the natural sciences, and unbridled energy, and he returned successful.

He gives us in this book a full treatise on insect stings, including:
- the Indians' physical reaction to the stings, compared with the missionaries' and his own;
- his methods of knowing what type of insect has just bitten him by the nature of the pain;
- the way the Indians tell time by the changing sounds of the droning insects;
- correlations of barometer and altitude with insect inactivity;
- various methods for attenuating the pain or avoiding the stings, and an analysis of their efficacy and practicability;
- the distributions of insect species on various rivers and their tributaries.

In fact, his natural cheerfulness hits a bump due to the insects - he returns to the miseries they create many times throughout the upriver journey.

Thomas Jefferson was an ardent admirer of Humboldt's, and invited him to the White House at the end of Humboldt's time in the Americas. In a way it makes sense, since Jefferson tried to do with Lewis and Clark's expedition what Humboldt succeeded in doing -- finding inland waterways to improve travel, trade and communication across a continent. But it beats me how Jefferson could reconcile his admiration with Humboldt's own vocal distaste for slavery. Jefferson disdained confrontations on the subject of slavery, but Humboldt consistently and vigorously makes the case that slavery is wrong - economically and morally (pp 37, 212, 339, and more). His view of the mission system in place along the rivers is likewise unfavorable. He plainly feels that the mission system is wrong, that not only does it *not* modernize the Indians, but that it does not serve them at all.

Nowadays, Humboldt would be accused of presumptuous meddling, racist condescension, and cultural superiority. Not so fast! He was an open-minded, clever man who saw what was and imagined how it could be made better, to raise the region out of poverty.

I am glad I bought the unabridged volumes. The thing they are lacking is ... maps. If you own a good atlas, it makes up the difference, but books like this, with so much detail, should include a map.
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Reviewed in the United States on March 17, 2013
A hard read. Lots of technical data that slow down the adventure of discovery. One needs to take one time to get through it.
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Reviewed in the United States on January 4, 2022
It took awhile to get used to the writing but it became pleasant to me. Lots of the detail about botany and geology I paged through quickly but so much of the ethology had me doing searches and taking notes. It is interesting to me that so many of the searches I did with Wikipedia had no reference to observations by Humboldt that made me want to do the search. Without reviewing the notes here are topics- tribal warfare, slavery, cannibals, diet,polygamy, polyandry, interbreeding,sexual division of labor, indolence- as they relate to the nations he encountered.
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