Kindle Price: | $0.00 |
Sold by: | Amazon.com Services LLC |
Your Memberships & Subscriptions
Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.
Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.
Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.
OK
Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of America, During the Year 1799-1804 — Volume 2 Kindle Edition
- LanguageEnglish
- Publication dateMay 17, 2012
- File size1270 KB
Customers who bought this item also bought
Editorial Reviews
About the Author
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
- Best Sellers Rank: #32,408 Free in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #789 in Social Sciences (Kindle Store)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read author blogs and more
Customer reviews
Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.
To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.
Learn more how customers reviews work on Amazon-
Top reviews
Top reviews from the United States
There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.
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.
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.