Book description
A great, innovative and restless thinker, the young Humboldt
(1769-1859) went on his epochal journey to the New World during a time
of revolutionary ferment across Europe. This part of his matchless
narrative of adventure and scientific research focuses on his time in
Venezuela - in the Llanos and on the Orinoco River - riding and
paddling, restlessly and happily noting the extraordinary things on
every hand. Great Journeys allows readers to travel both around the
planet and back through the centuries but also back into ideas and
worlds frightening, ruthless and cruel in different ways from our own.
Few reading experiences can begin to match that of engaging with writers
who saw astounding things: Great civilisations, walls of ice, violent
and implacable jungles, deserts and mountains, multitudes of birds and
flowers new to science. Reading these books is to see the world afresh,
to rediscover a time when many cultures were quite strange to each
other, where legends and stories were treated as facts and in which so
much was still to be discovered. Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859)
was a Prussian naturalist and explorer. Between 1799 and 1804, von
Humboldt travelled South and Central America, exploring and describing
it from a scientific point of view for the first time.
