Quotations from Humboldt, "Personal Narrative" last modified:1/16/13

Sugar-cane and Negroes; slaves, farming, abolition

The farm we lodged at was a fine sugar-cane plantation.… The owner's house is situated on a hillock surrounded by huts for the negroes.… The owner boasts of their contentment in the same way that northern European landowners boast about the happy peasants on their land. The day we arrived three runaway negroes had been captured; newly bought slaves. I dreaded witnessing those punishments that ruin the charm of the countryside wherever there are slaves. Luckily, the blacks were treated humanely. [p. 22] [near Cura:] [W]e were surprised not only by the progress of culture but also by the increase in the numbers of the free, hard-working population, used to manual work and too poor to buy slaves. Everywhere whites and mulattos had bought small isolated farms. Our host… had more land than he could farm; he distributed plots… to poor families who wanted to grow cotton. He tried to surround his enormous plantation with free working men. [He] was busy trying to abolish slavery and hoped to make slaves less necessary for the important estates, and to offer the freed slaves land to become farmers themselves.… [Humboldt cites many details about agricultural wages and prices.] I like quoting these details about colonial agriculture because they prove to Europeans that there is no doubt that sugar, cotton and indigo can be produced by free men, and that the miserable slaves can become peasants, farmers and landowners. [pp. 27-8]

from Alexander von Humboldt, Jaguars & Electric Eels, translated by Jason Wilson. London: Penguin Books, 1995. pp. 22, 27-8.

Humboldt's travel through the Americas began in 1799 and ended in 1804. The "Personal Narrative" comprises the final three volumes of his "Voyage aux régions équinoxiales du Nouveau Continent", which comprises thirty-five volumes, and was written betweeen 1805 and 1834. Thus Humboldt is recollecting events and emotions that span not only the years of his travel, but those well before it; and he wrote his narration after the travel (sometimes many years after its end). The title "Jaguars & Electric Eels" was supplied for this translation and edition, and is not by Humboldt.