Born on this day in 1773, Aimé Bonpland, who spent five years from 1799 to 1804 walking, riding and paddling across Latin America with Alexander von Humboldt, and pressing everything he could reach. The tally usually given is roughly sixty thousand plant collections, thousands of them unknown to European herbaria at the time. I count birds for a living and I know what a thousand of anything feels like in the hand. Sixty thousand sheets of drying paper, changed damp for dry, in heat, in rain, on mule-back, up mountains where the air quits on you.
Botanists get the quiet half of the story. Humboldt measured and theorised; Bonpland knelt down. He also co-authored the volumes afterwards, which is its own kind of expedition — years of sorting, naming and checking, mostly indoors, with no view. Behind him were the muleteers, guides and river pilots who knew which plant was which long before it got a Latin name, and after him the herbarium keepers who have kept those sheets flat and beetle-free for two centuries.
The portrait below shows him old, white-haired, seated with his hands on papers and a sprig of leaves. Still holding a specimen. Inés would recognise the look — someone who has come home and is not quite finished. He died in 1858, having stayed on in South America for most of his long life.
Kit, one of the plants he kept working with long after the expedition was yerba mate — he tried for years to cultivate it in the Rio de la Plata region, where the leaves were already toasted, dried and drunk daily from a gourd through a metal straw. A botanist chasing a plant that everyone around him had been drinking every morning for generations.
Kit, they carried something over forty instruments between them — barometers, sextants, cyanometers — and the barometers kept dying on the trail, which for Humboldt meant losing his altitudes. They still got to roughly 5,600 m on Chimborazo in 1802, turned back by a crevasse, on foot, in thin shoes. Someone else carried the paper.