The Tenacious Travels of The Torrid Zone and The Global Dimensions of Geographical Knowledge in The Eighteenth Century

Journal of early
modern history 18 (2014) 141-172

brill.com/jemh
The Tenacious Travels of the Torrid Zone and the

Global Dimensions of Geographical Knowledge
in the Eighteenth Century
Neil Safier
The John Carter Brown Library
Abstract
This article sets out to explore the longevity and tenacity of the torrid zone as an
explanatory mechanism for describing the cultural characteristics of those popula-
tions living between the tropics during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. By
examining a series of colonizing missions and scientific expeditions to the New World,
it argues that long before the iconic voyage of Alexander von Humboldt, which is
thought to inaugurate a modern conception of the tropics, European travelers and
natural philosophers were molding earlier geographical theories in ways that extended
the life of certain pejorative stereotypes about non-European peoples. As such, it rep-
resents an important example of how geographical knowledge traveled across impe-
rial lines and, more importantly, challenges scholars to use more expansive temporal
ranges that normally separate the pre-European history of the Americas from its post-
conquest phase.
Keywords
Enlightenment geography – torrid zone – Garcilaso de la Vega – Antonio de Ulloa –

Alejandro Malaspina – Alexander von Humboldt – deep history – Amazonia
Introduction
A year-long visit to the Kingdom of New Spain in 1803 may have been some-
thing of an afterthought for Alexander von Humboldt following three years
spent in equinoctical South America. But once arrived, Humboldt took to the
task of providing a geographical and statistical portrait of this northernmost
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province of Spanish America with his usual gusto. He examined the land’s geo-
logical constitution and assessed the impact of its soil impurities on the cli-
mate and agriculture, measured the character and number of each “caste”
within the population, constructed maps and gauged the surface area of each
intendancy, and determined the state of every province’s commercial progress,
not neglecting a study of each region’s revenue as compared to the cost of pro-
viding military defense to the colony as a whole. After surveying this “immense
territorial expanse,” Humboldt also devoted one of six books of his Essai poli-
tique sur le Royaume de la Nouvelle Espagne (1811) to Mexico’s agriculture, care-
ful to include its mineralogical wealth alongside such vegetable resources as
oak trees, bananas, corn, and yucca, in a staggering array of comestible and
non-comestible varieties.
But Mexico had a special characteristic, which Humboldt was quick to point
out. “Because Mexico extends from the sixteenth to the thirty-seventh degree
of latitude,” he wrote, “it offers through its particular geographical position all
of the climatic changes that one would find if transported from the shores of
Senegal to Spain, or from the Malabar coast to the steppes of Bukhara.” Mexico’s
extraordinary climatic variability seemed to argue against any reductive theory
by which one could determine the character of a given region from its specific
climatic conditions. Straddling the northern and central portions of the globe
and defying any monoclimatic interpretation with its snow-capped volcanoes
and desert-like valleys, New Spain like Peru challenged any theory—especially
those inherited from antiquity—that posited a consistent distribution of tem-
peratures across the globe. In air as in water, Humboldt wrote, “the same lati-
tude brings together, so to speak, all the world’s climates.”1
Given Humboldt’s observations about the same latitude bringing together
different climatic conditions into one linear collection, it is remarkable that
when he wrote of those portions of Mexico that were south of the Tropic of
Cancer, he employed a term that had roots in a tradition emphasizing precisely
the opposite, a term that drew its initial meaning from geographical theories
hatched during classical antiquity and whose currency still gave it a particular
valence for Humboldt’s contemporaries. When authors in Humboldt’s day
characterized the climate and geographic situation of what we today would
call “the tropics,” they regularly used a term bequeathed to them from the
vocabulary of ancient geographers: the torrid zone, where burning tempera-
tures made conditions unfit for human habitation and climatic circumstances
1 Alexander von Humboldt, Essai politique sur le royaume de la Nouvelle-Espagne, deuxième

édition (Paris, 1825), 2:368-9 (livre IV, chap. IX). Unless otherwise noted, all translations are
my own.
Journal of early modern history 18 (2014) 141-172

the tenacious travels of the torrid zone 143
instilled terror in its first explorers. Borrowing from this tradition, Humboldt
regularly referred to the region between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of
Capricorn as the torrid zone as well. One of the first texts that Humboldt pub-
lished after his arrival in Paris, in fact, was entitled Essai sur les réfractions
astronomiques dans la zone torride (Paris, 1808), a text that, despite Humboldt’s
many observations to the contrary, took as part of its title a term that implied
a constant, searing heat.2 In his Essai politique sur le royaume de la Nouvelle-
Espagne, he wrote of the “cultivator, inhabitant of the torrid zone,” drawing
together the practice of agriculture with a recognition of the climatic zone
where such an individual lived. When Humboldt mentioned the region in
which the greatest portion of the inhabitants of Mexico passed their lives, he
wrote that “nearly seven-eighths of [Mexico’s] inhabitants live beneath the tor-
rid zone.” When he described the alimentary habits of Spanish American
Creoles who ate bread made of corn and manioc, he catalogued Caracas,
Cumaná, and Cartagena de Indias as “American cities that are situated beneath
the torrid zone.” Finally, in referencing foreign travelers who sojourned in the
New World, he categorized them as “Europeans who are recently arrived in the
torrid zone,” a group whose sensibilities might be shocked to see the rudimen-
tary agricultural practices around “a hut that holds a large indigenous family.”3
These varied contexts in which Humboldt used “the torrid zone” consis-
tently connected behavioral characteristics of the region’s inhabitants with the
climatic conditions in which they lived. Humboldt acknowledged that it was
improper to refer to the tropical regions of the globe with this term but took
rhetorical refuge in the fact that it had been sanctified through customary
employment. In one instance, he added parenthetically that his use of these
ancient terms derived from classical climatic theory was entirely appropriate:
“I take advantage of these improper names [because they have been] conse-
crated by wide use.”4
Should we take Humboldt as the ultimate arbiter of his own linguistic liber-
ties, or might there have been a deeper semantic issue at stake? In this essay, I
argue that for too long, in taking Humboldt’s voyage as the alpha and omega of
European scientific understanding of the equatorial regions of the planet in
the fading years of early modernity, the environmental history of the tropics
has neglected a more ambiguous conceptual legacy bequeathed to it by authors
and explorers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. For decades, schol-
ars have looked to later centuries as the moment that fostered a concerted
2 Humboldt, Personal narrative of travels to the equinoctial regions . . . (Philadelphia, 1815), xviii.

3 Humboldt, Essai politique, 2:395 (livre IV, chap. IX).
4 Humboldt, Essai politique, 2:380.
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European interest in the natural history of the tropics without considering an

earlier tradition of equatorial inquiry. In fact, ideas about the earth’s climate,
its variegated regions, and the effects that these settings had on their inhabit-
ants (and vice versa) did not emerge ex nihilo at some point in the nineteenth
century. Quite the contrary, philosophers, authors, and naturalists from l’Abbé
Du Bos and Buffon to Montesquieu and Hume were already discussing these
issues in the eighteenth century, themselves drawing on earlier traditions for
understanding the globe. Already there were semantic choices being made as
to how such regions should be portrayed.5
This essay takes as its starting point the idea that understanding early mod-
ern conceptions of landscape and territory—including such terms as the “tor-
rid zone”—is essential for understanding the human place within these
environments, and the subsequent development of ecological notions of space
and place. In particular, it emphasizes the eighteenth-century contributions of
voyageurs-philosophes, men who “traveled to instruct their compatriots,
observing and describing as only they know how to do.”6 Their métier was, as
Rousseau implies here, to observe, describe, and instruct; they were imbued
(for the most part) with the empirical impulse of their day. These were not
philosophes du cabinet, espousing environmental theories by reading and phi-
losophizing, but rather individuals who created the raw materials upon which
these writers based their philosophical treatises. With goals that resonated
rhetorically more with scientific than mercenary tones, they justified their
missions as much through taking measurements of stars as they did by glorify-
ing their monarch’s reign. Nonetheless, in addition to the specific instructions
they followed during their missions, they were attentive to the lay of the land:
the composition of soils, the shape of mountains, the behavior of local popula-
5 Important exceptions to the scholarly literature reinforcing the conceptual divide between
early modern and nineteenth century environmental sensibilities include: Richard Grove,
Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmen-
talism, 1600-1860 (Cambridge, 1995); David Arnold, ed., Warm Climates and Western Medicine:
The Emergence of Tropical Medicine, 1500-1900 (Amsterdam, 1996). See also Gary Y. Okihiro,
Pineapple Culture: A History of the Tropical and Temperate Zones (Berkeley, 2009), which
admirably incorporates classical, medieval, and eighteenth-century ideas about tropicality
into the author’s discussion of the pineapple in its global (but mostly Hawaiian) contexts.
This essay is inspired by works that deal with the perception of geographical singularities,
including Alain Corbin, Le territoire du vide: l’Occident et le désir du rivage, 1750-1840 (Paris,
1988), another work that deemphasizes the artificial conceptual boundary between the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
6 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes
(Amsterdam, 1755), 236-7.

tions, and the qualities of native plants. Their accumulated knowledge across
various fields constituted what we might call a rudimentary ecological aware-
ness, comprised of a set of relationships that Jean-Marc Drouin has referred to
as “the relationships between living beings and their environments” and which
frequently consisted of an accumulated “memory of their gestures, which we
can read as an ecological understanding [savoir écologique].”7
Most histories of the earth’s equatorial regions only surface in the wake of
Humboldt’s voyage to the New World (1799-1804), a voyage that in the two cen-
turies since he returned to Europe seems to have affirmed his role as a “second
Columbus” who discovered the Americas for science and taught Europeans
to view tropical nature through a universal frame. There is, of course, much
in Humboldt’s language that is familiar to us, and that reflects the language of
today’s environmental activists and philosophers. Humboldt’s statement that
“all natural forces are linked together, and made mutually dependent on each
other” seems to lead almost inexorably toward John Muir’s famous credo that
“when we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else
in the universe.”8 But Humboldt’s employment of the torrid zone seems to argue
against the interconnected meaning of this latter tradition, in that it separates
out the equatorial region—and those who inhabit it—from the parts of the
globe where different but interconnected climatic conditions were in effect.
Throughout their explorations, travelers to equatorial regions responded to
accounts penned by contemporary philosophers and their classical anteced-
ents, often adopting the zonal model to describe what they were expecting to
encounter in advance of their arrival and using it to reaffirm their observa-
tions. Residents of tropical regions also made their voices heard, taking issue
with speculative theories generated by armchair philosophers and offering
independent empirical observations, but all employed “the torrid zone” con-
cept to denote the region between the two tropics.9
The notion of a scorched, inhospitable landscape had of course been tem-
pered substantially by the eighteenth century, with the discovery of many
7 Jean-Marc Drouin, L’écologie et son histoire (Paris, 1993).

8 Humboldt, Cosmos: essai d’une description physique du monde, tr. Charles Galuski (Paris, 1855-
59), “Introduction,” 1:1, as quoted in Aaron Sachs, The Humboldt Current: Nineteenth-Century
Exploration and the Roots of American Environmentalism (New York, 2006), 110.
9 On Spanish and Spanish American reactions to Northern European philosophical assertions
about the supposed degeneracy of the New World, see Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, How to
Write the History of the New World (Stanford, 2001). On eighteenth-century experimental
practices with regard to climate in the British and British American context, see Jan Golinski,
British Weather and the Climate of Enlightenment (Chicago, 2007).
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cultures that had not only managed to survive in such circumstances, but had
in fact prospered because of the unique conditions that caused the seasons to
remain largely unchanged throughout the year. Circumnavigations had shown
that fire did not consume ships that crossed into tropical seas, and that societ-
ies did survive the blazing heat of the midday sun at the Equator. These voy-
ages gave geographer Jean-Charles Maclot the confidence in 1765 to observe
that “if the experiences of travelers had not come to our assistance, we would
undoubtedly still be of the opinion—like them—that the Torrid Zone and
many other parts of the globe are uninhabited.”10
But why was the torrid zone mentioned in the same breath as the
Enlightenment at all? Did the eighteenth century not cast a skeptical glance
toward such speculative ideas passed down from antiquity? Had not the
Aristotelian and Ptolemaic images of the globe been wiped clean by successive
voyages to a continent whose existence these early philosophers had not even
foreseen? The story of geographical perceptions is of course more complex
than these questions imply. Well after Christopher Columbus had overturned
what earlier authors had asserted without empirical basis, travelers such as
Amerigo Vespucci, Pero de Magalhães Gândavo, José de Acosta, and André
Thevet still referred to the torrid zone, even while they began to slowly modify
the character and conceptual dimensions of the imaginary band around the
equator. “The middle region, the one called Torrid,” the Jesuit Acosta wrote in
1590, “is in very fact inhabited by men, and we Spaniards have inhabited it
for a long time, and living in it is very comfortable and moderate.”11 While
Acosta’s primary goal was to convert the indigenous populations of the region
to Christianity, his wide-ranging Historia natural y moral de las Indias (Seville,
1590) set out to demonstrate the truth and fallacies attributed to earlier theo-
ries, being led “not so much by the doctrine of the ancient philosophers as by
true reason and a degree of experience.”12 But such first-person acknowledg-
ment of an inhabited torrid zone did little to quell the use of the term. Nor did
it necessarily remove the age-old stereotypes about the inhabitants, whose
earliest characterizations had marked them as indolent, docile populations
whom the path to civilization had left entirely behind.
The eighteenth century also, crucially, consolidated a series of racial and
climatic stereotypes about equatorial regions, deploying them in important,
10 Jean-Charles Maclot, Précis sur le globe terrestre, ou explication de la mappemonde; Ornée

de détails Historique & de Particularités recueillies de différentes Relations de Voyage, touch-
ant divers Peuples de la Terre (Paris, 1765).
11 Acosta, Natural and Moral History of the Indies (Durham, NC, 2002), 77 (Book 2, chapter 3).
12 Acosta, Natural and Moral History, 75 (Book 2, chapter 1).

but often contradictory, ways through the century’s most influential philo-
sophical works. This development was linked to a gradual conceptual shift in
the manner in which the torrid zone was perceived discursively in texts, mov-
ing from a term denoting uninhabitability, dryness, and searing heat, to a more
variable notion frequently defined by vast quantities of water and humidity,
extraordinary climatic and geological diversity, and overall abundance.
Concurrently, writers became less concerned about whether or not humans
could in fact survive beneath the torrid zone—something that had been
largely debunked by a host of eyewitness accounts—and far more interested
in what kind of life might be lived there. Proof of the torrid zone’s habitability
thus turned increasingly to a discussion of the region’s inhabitants, which was
connected to questions of civility, comfort, moderation, and whether and how
“civilization” might develop in these parts if left to its own devices. What is
more, many authors in this period were concerned with issues that would later
become central to environmental studies and geography: agriculture or applied
botany; the natural history of species and specimens; human behavior in dif-
ferent environments; and the role of climate in all of the above. As these topics
were discussed in myriad contexts, vestiges of the torrid zone’s checkered past
resonated semantically in unexpected places, setting the stage for colonial
administrators, medical doctors, merchants, and naturalists to employ this
framework when discussing tropical civilizations.
Eventually, in the nineteenth century, the multivalent and at times contra-
dictory “torrid zone” would be folded into “the tropics”. Environmental histori-
ans have tended to employ the latter term uncritically, without recognizing its
debt to earlier linguistic formulations.13 This is ironic, given these scholars’
insistence on the enduring legacy of linguistic features—metaphors, textual
description, naming—for understanding environmental change. Environmen-
tal histories of extra-European territories, such as Paul Carter’s The Road to
Botany Bay (1987) and David Arnold’s more recent The Tropics and the Travel-
ing Gaze (2005), frequently take root in a spatial mode with travelers at the
forefront, partaking in a move to correlate early colonial expansion into a
13 David Arnold has written that “torrid zone” can be seen as an “equivalent term” to “the
tropics.” See his introduction to Warm Climates, 6. Today, the idea of a torrid zone may
have recuperated some of its earlier metaphorical meaning, since it is rarely used to
denote anything but an antiquated, often sexualized space that is hot, unknown, and for-
bidden. One such example is Megan Vaughan’s use of the term as a chapter title in her
Creating the Creole Island (Durham, NC, 2005); chapter six is entitled “Love in the Torrid
Zone,” although nowhere is there any reference to the climatic discussions in which this
term originated, nor any subsequent use of the term.
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broader environmental history that was effected through (largely) European

propulsion. According to Carter, Captain Cook “proceeded within a cultural
network of names, allusions, puns, and coincidences, which . . . gave him . . .
conceptual space in which to move.”14 These pathbreaking explorations at the
intersections of history and geography focus on the ways that territory became
increasingly subjected to the scrutiny of imperial agents.15
Those who write about “the tropics” and “tropicality” tend to begin their
histories around 1800, either with Humboldt’s “rediscovery” of the tropics dur-
ing his South American journey or with the explosion of interest in the colo-
nized East that emerged through the writings of scientist-travelers like Joseph
Hooker.16 Far from criticizing these studies that rightly trace the emergence of
tropical tropes to these early decades of the nineteenth century, I am inter-
ested in interrogating the extent to which earlier ideas may have played a
role in this transformative moment. That is, was the “tropical revolution” that
14 Paul Carter, The Road to Botany Bay: An Essay in Spatial History (London, 1987), 7. See also
Richard Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the
Origins of Environmentalism, 1600-1860 (Cambridge, 1995).
15 But there are limits to these studies’ interpretive scope as well. By and large, most environ-
mental histories focus on the implications of the travelers’ gaze within the confines of a
single nation-state, rather than placing the conceptual changes they effect in a transna-
tional and transgeographical frame. Both Carter and Arnold argue that travelers were cru-
cial for developing an idea of the traversed space within a particular ideological (and
national) context, respectively, Australia and India. For Carter, it was through traveling
that “Cook inaugurated Australia’s spatial history” while Arnold argued that the “traveling
gaze” of Europeans (especially British) in India was part of a larger cultural process by
which specific landscapes of South Asia were colonized through science. Both studies
circumscribe their efficacy within national boundaries, which tends to naturalize fron-
tiers that were anything but solid during the periods under consideration. Arnold even
points out that India was frequently mentioned “as part of a wider tropical world,” but
fails to ask whether or not there were other conceptual frames within which eighteenth
and nineteenth-century travelers were thinking when they approached specific land-
scapes between the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn. Carter, Road to Botany Bay, 7; David
Arnold, Tropics and the Traveling Gaze: India, Landscape, and Science, 1800-1856 (Seattle,
2006), 5. Other examples of environmental history include William Cronon, Changes in
the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York, 2003); Nancy Lees
Stepan, Picturing Tropical Nature (Ithaca, ny, 2001); and David Blackbourne, The Conquest
of Nature: Water, Landscape, and the Making of Modern Germany (New York, 2006). For
salutary examples of environmental scholarship that steps outside of the national frame,
Eagle Glassheim, “Most, the Town that Moved: Coal, Communists and the ʻGypsy
Questionʼ in Post-War Czechoslovakia,” Environment and History 13 (2007): 447-76; Marc
Cioc, The Rhine: An Eco-Biography (Seattle, 2005).
16 Stepan, Picturing Tropical Nature; Arnold, Tropics and the Traveling Gaze.

occurred following Humboldt’s journey so radically different than ideas

that had been laid out before? Given the extraordinary geographical scope in
Humboldt’s writings, it is also relevant to ask whether this sometimes teleo-
logical environmental history might be better served if analyzed in a larger,
transnational context. Although this essay would ideally discuss representa-
tions of the torrid zone with regard to local and travelers’ accounts in Asia,
Africa, and elsewhere, the South American tropics nevertheless provides a par-
ticularly rich field site. It forces us to cross linguistic and geopolitical frontiers,
since regions such as the “Land of the Amazons” were disputed by the
Portuguese, Spanish, French, Dutch, and British, and traversed in the eigh-
teenth and nineteenth centuries by Bohemians, Hungarians, Italians, and oth-
ers still, not to mention innumerable Africans and African-descended peoples.
As such, South America is a cosmopolitan, transimperial space that is refer-
enced as the archetype of the torrid zone, a far cry from the lifeless, searing
territory that it was posited to be two millenia before.17
The Torrid Zone of Antiquity Disparaged
Theories using climatic zones to explain similarities between far-flung regions

abounded in classical antiquity. The Ionian mathematician Pythagoras proposed
a model in the sixth century b.c.e., whereby he posited that the southern,
“summer” zone of the earth would be uninhabitable because of the heat. A cen-
tury and a half later, the physician Hippocrates applied this zonal theory to argue
for physical and moral differences between the peoples of Asia and Europe. He
called Asiatic nations gentler and less warlike due to local seasonal differences.
The dominant view that emerged in the writings of Ovid and Pliny several centu-
ries later argued in favor of an earthly climate divided into five separate zones: two
frigid zones surrounding both poles, two temperate zones moving inward toward
the equator, and one torrid zone at the center. Early on, the connection between
climate and behavioral characteristics of human populations was emphasized, a
theory that would be reborn with a vengeance in the eighteenth century.18
17 Most certainly, a similar analysis can and should be undertaken for regions in Asia and
Africa, but that lies outside of the scope of this essay, which emphasizes the eighteenth-
century representation of the torrid zone in the Americas and the Atlantic. For one illus-
trative example, see Ines Zupanov, Missionary Tropics: The Catholic Frontier in India
(16th-17th centuries) (Ann Arbor, MI, 2005).
18 Okihiro, Pineapple Culture, 6-8; Nicolás Wey Gómez, The Tropics of Empire: Why Columbus
Sailed South to the Indies (Cambridge, MA, 2008), esp. 180-88.
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Given that the non-temperate zones were thought to be uninhabitable in

antiquity, it was not until many centuries later that theories began to pos-
tulate the habitability of these zones. New translations of Greek and Arabic
sources flooded the West in the thirteenth century and provided important
early sources to refute the earlier model. It was this tradition that was picked
up by the Dominican Albertus Magnus, among others, who likely affected
Columbus’s thinking about the habitability of places outside the temperate
zone through his De natura loci. Put to the empirical test during voyages down
the African coast past Cape Bojador and on to India and the Americas, these
theories spurred Columbus to consider his westward voyage not only a trans-
atlantic traverse, but as a voyage specifically destined for the tropics, where
he would not only “extract the natural resources of the belt of the tropics, but
also . . . harness its considerable human resources in the service of an overseas
empire.”19 To do this, Columbus had to argue against an ancient philosophical
tradition, and instead support a theory that posited land-based populations
that could be coerced into serving a distant ruler.
In the wake of Columbus’s voyages, Spanish pilots and navigation experts
frequently discussed the torrid zone, recognizing that it was an idea whose
years were numbered. In 1545, the Spanish pilot Martin Cortés published his
Arte de navegar in Valladolid, a text that would become an important guide for
those traveling to New Spain, New Granada, or the Viceroyalty of Peru. Cortés
summoned ancient geographers to discuss their theories, concluding that con-
temporary experience refuted the writings of these otherwise estimable
seers.20 Cortés also summoned non-American geographic evidence to his
cause, discussing early voyages to Arabia, Ethiopia, and Borneo, as well as
those to India and the Moluccas. For Cortés, terrestrial paradise was located
within the torrid band in the East, and its climate was “extremely temperate,
full of coolness and delight.”21
Others were equally disparaging of the classical traditions that argued for
the torrid zone’s uninhabitability. “We can clearly see how great man’s curios-
ity is,” wrote André Thevet. Having recently passed the equatorial line in the
narrative of his journey from Europe down the coast of Africa and across the
Atlantic, Thevet mustered biblical history and his own experience to debunk
the theory of the uninhabitability of the region below the equator. In the pre-
ceding chapter, Thevet had set out the classical theory in unequivocal terms,
19 Wey-Gomez, Tropics, quotation on p. 222.

20 Martín Cortés, Breve compendio de la sphera, y de la arte de navigar, con nuevos instrumen-
tos y reglas, exemplificado con muy subtiles demonstraciones (Seville, 1551), folio xxii/verso.
21 Cortés, Breve Compendio, folio xxii/verso.

but he resisted the call of ancient authority and insisted upon the importance
of more recent knowledge. “Nonetheless,” he wrote, “for some time now, this
zone has been discovered . . . as being inhabited, as being fertile and abundant
in many good things, despite the heat.”22 Thevet’s comments reflect a discur-
sive trope of abundance and fertility that would find echo in many eighteenth-
century texts. But most importantly at this stage, Thevet’s navigations led him
to remark on climatic conditions not based on the brittle doctrines of the
ancient philosophers, but rather employing a language of experience familiar
to those who sailed the high seas. Seeing copious quantities of fish and hearing
the sounds of their frolicking represented an entirely different level of veracity
for Thevet, a shift in authority from the armchair philosopher of antiquity to
the briny seafarer riding the waves of first-hand experience.23
More than fifty years after Cortés and Thevet launched their attacks against
the theory of an uninhabited torrid zone, a Spanish subject born within the
bounds of the two tropical lines invoked this notion to describe the equatorial
regions, using the torrid zone rhetorically to portray the New and Old Worlds
as part of the same historical continuum. Born in Cuzco to a Spanish father
and a mother who was a member of the Inca nobility, Garcilaso de la Vega “el
Inca” presented himself as uniquely suited to discuss the geographical situa-
tion of the Inca empire, having a full understanding of the subtleties of the
indigenous languages of Peru. Garcilaso invoked the torrid zone in making
claims about the authority of his own account. At the outset of his Comentarios
reales, published in Lisbon in 1609, Garcilaso lost no time in conforming to
what he called “the common custom of writers” [“el comun costumbre de los
escriptores”] by responding to the most pressing cosmographical queries of his
day: whether there was one world, or many; whether the earth was flat or
round; whether all parts of the earth were inhabitable, of the existence of the
Antipodes, and “other similar things that the ancient philosophers treated at
length, with curiosity, and that modern [writers] do not avoid writing and
discussing.”24 But he emphasized that not only could an Indian not “presume”
to have the energies necessary to accomplish such a task (adopting a critical
stance toward his own indigenous culture that gives some indication of
the degree of cultural prejudice already inherent in colonial Spanish society),
22 Thévêt, Singularités de la France antarctique (Paris, 2002).

23 Frank Lestringant, in the critical edition of Thévet’s Singularités, has warned us not to
take at face value all of Thévet’s descriptions, signaling that the “fraîcheur apparente de la
vision ne doit pas dissimuler la construction érudite qui la supporte.”
24 Garcilaso de la Vega, Comentarios reales de los Incas (Mexico, 2002), 1:9.
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but that the actual experience of life in Peru had disabused the Spaniards
of these notions.25
Garcilaso took the idea of the torrid zone, however, and used it as a birth-
right to speak from experience about the parts of Peru which lay within its
bounds. “I can affirm,” he wrote, “that I was born in the torrid zone, that is
Cuzco, and I grew up there until my twentieth birthday, and I have been in the
other temperate zone on the other side of the Tropic of Capricorn.” He was also
privileged to have traveled across its entire range to arrive in the northern
climes of Spain, from which he would compose his text. “In order to arrive in
this other temperate zone of the North, from which I write this text,” he
responded, “I had to cross all of it . . . by which I declare that the torrid zone is
as inhabitable as the temperate [zone].”26
Although he began by invoking the torrid zone as the place of his birth,
Garcilaso ended by transforming it into a very different incarnation: the site of
an earthly paradise. It was an argument, above all, for the religious subjugation
of the inhabitants of the New World. The discovery of equatorial South
America’s extraordinary diversity as a region—from the snowy peaks of the
Andes to the humid rainforests of the Amazon River basin—may have allowed
the torrid zone to survive as a geographic term long after the purely climatic
notion of an uninhabitable region was drained of all plausibility by the
experience-laden descriptions from the New World. And it was precisely these
wildly divergent climatic and geographic accidents in South America that
caught the attention of those who traveled to the New World in the name of
science after the first waves of European exploration had crested upon
American shores.
Temperate Climates and Healthy Inhabitants: Tropical Travelers

from Around the Globe
Inca Garcilaso de la Vega and other New World residents proudly described
their native lands as anomalies to the classical climatic theory, especially since
the character of a single region like Peru that contained high-altitude plateaus,
low-lying rainforests, and one of the highest mountain ranges in the world
argued against a reductive reading of the relationship between climate and
latitude. But other regions throughout the circum-Atlantic world also provided
important points of comparison. Travelers to the Caribbean, where climatic
25 Garcilaso de la Vega, Comentarios reales, 1:10.

26 Garcilaso de la Vega, Comentarios reales, 1:10.

conditions were far less diversified, offered similar observations. The

Dominican Father Jean-Baptiste Du Tertre, who traveled to Martinique in the
1640s, was primarily interested in local exotic flora and fauna, but in order to
understand the distinct climatic features of the Caribbean, he started with the
divisions proposed by the ancient geographers. “The devouring heat of the
sun’s rays,” Du Tertre wrote, “burns and dries out the earth to such an
extent . . . that it is not only incapable of supporting inhabitants and animals,
but cannot even maintain trees or plants.”27 Like Garcilaso, however, Du Tertre
made clear that a century and a half of commerce with these regions had
transformed the understanding of their climate and character. Not content to
describe the torrid zone merely as the world’s most pleasant region, Du Tertre
added that it was for this reason that “many Theologians have held that the
land of Eden, or the terrestrial Paradise, was situated beneath the Equinoctial
line, as the most agreeable site of all the earth.”28 In the mold of Garcilaso,
the torrid zone of the Caribbean was, for Du Tertre, also a site of divine
providence.
What transformed the tropical archipelago from a desert to a paradise was
not only the different qualities of air. Du Tertre also connected the pureness of
the climate with the extraordinarily docile and pleasant nature of the inhabit-
ants, echoing Columbus’s earlier characterization of the Taíno peoples as a
group that would be easy to subjugate and profitable to incorporate into a colo-
nial context. “Just as I have shown the air of the Torrid Zone to be the most
pure, the most healthy, [and] the most temperate of all airs . . . [so are] the
Savages of these Isles the most contented, the happiest, the least vice-prone,
the most social, the least phony, and the least tormented by illness of all the
nations of the world.”29 His was an idyllic portrait of the inhabitants of these
islands that posited the foundation of their flawless character in nature itself:
“they are such as nature has made them.”30 For Du Tertre, they were less prone
to disease and more disposed toward sociability, and they limited themselves
“to that which is useful and strictly necessary for them, and they curse that
which is superfluous.” Eschewing possessions, their central characteristic
seems to have been in Du Tertre’s eyes a desire to satisfy their alimentary needs
whenever they saw fit. The description of their healthy ways was not merely
cosmetic, but utilitarian as well, since it was they, along with a massive number
27 Jean-Baptiste Du Tertre, Histoire générale des Antilles habitées par les françois (Paris, 1667-
1671), 2:64.
28 Du Tertre, Histoire générale, 2:65.
29 Du Tertre, Histoire générale, 2:357-8.
30 Du Tertre, Histoire générale, 2:357.
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of imported Africans, who would soon be asked to work the indigo and sugar
plantations on these same Caribbean islands for the benefit of the European
economy.
While Du Tertre argued that the quality of the air was the cause of cultural
differences across Caribbean populations, later visitors would expand the cri-
teria affecting indigenous behavior. When Charles-Marie de la Condamine
explored the South American interior on his return from Quito to Cayenne via
the Amazon River, he also focused on the indigenous inhabitants. For La
Condamine the rusty color of the natives’ skin was not only due to the tem-
perature of the air, but also a result of myriad cultural circumstances that var-
ied with the climates of the various regions. Rather than relying on a reductive
reading of temperature, La Condamine emphasized the “variety of foods, the
small amount of commerce they have with neighboring nations, and a thou-
sand other causes that must have introduced differences in occupations and
customs amongst these peoples.”31 He also acknowledged the effect that
Christian proselytization and Iberian colonial subjugation would have
inflicted. Finally, he emphasized the differences between a “Savage from the
Continent’s interior” and an Amerindian resident of a colonial village or of an
ecclesiastical mission, recognizing that these circumstances might have
affected the behavior of an American native far more than the climate under
which he had been born or raised.
Despite all these factors, however, La Condamine infamously concluded
that “insensitivity is the base [of their character],” adding that their behavior
could best be described as gluttonous, pusillanimous, and lazy. According to La
Condamine, most if not all Amerindians were drunkards and “enemies of
work,” whose sole focus was on satisfying their needs in the present moment.
Despite having earlier distinguished between the interior Savages and those
who lived in and around the missions, he concluded that their character was
ultimately the same, those “who enjoy their liberty being just as limited, which
is not to say just as stupid, as all the rest.”32 The fact that all of these observa-
tions were based not on his own eyewitness observations—despite his pre-
senting his conclusions as if they were—but rather on the ethnographic
descriptions given to him by a Swiss Jesuit named Jean Magnin did not dimin-
ish their impact on later writers, including Buffon, Rousseau, and Cornelius de
Pauw, who used La Condamine as the raw materials in building an environ-
31 Charles-Marie de La Condamine, Relation abrégée d’un voyage fait dans l’intérieur de

l’Amérique méridionale (Paris, 1745), 49.
32 La Condamine, Relation abrégée, 53.

mental analysis of culture in equatorial South America.33 His flattening out of

the behavior of indigenous populations in spite of the varied environments in
which they lived corresponded to the way in which the torrid zone seemed to
predispose its residents to behave in particular ways, regardless of the cultural
or historical conditions of their communities.
While La Condamine perceived the character of the indigenous populations
of the Americas to be of a singular nature, the dramatic diversity of animal life
found between the two tropics, and especially along the banks of the Amazon
River, was a consistent theme through his Relation abrégée. He was particularly
struck by the extraordinary multitude of birds and their colorful plumage.34
His use of the torrid zone in this context reflects an increasing perception
of the equatorial climes as a repository for a tremendous biological diversity.
This extreme biological diversity was also reflected in later readings of La
Condamine’s Relation abrégée. Jozé Monteiro de Noronha, a native of the
Brazilian city of Belém do Pará at the headwaters of the Amazon, was one such
traveler who relied on the Frenchman’s account. In his “Roteiro da Viagem da
Cidade do Pará athé as últimas Colonias dos Dominios Portuguezes em os Rios
Amazonas e Negro,” Monteiro de Noronha placed La Condamine’s descriptions
of oils and resins from throughout the Amazon basin alongside his own obser-
vations, pointing out in one instance that oil from the “ybacaba” seed (presum-
ably native to Pará) was called by a different name (“ungurave”) by the Maynas
Indians thousands of kilometers to the East. While most of Monteiro de
Noronha’s commentaries related to La Condamine’s Amazonian map and the
geographical features upon which La Condamine had commented over
the course of his journey, the Brazilian ecclesiastic also paid close attention to
corresponding natural products that may have been found elsewhere along
the equatorial band.
Through a thorough reading of La Condamine’s account, then, Monteiro de
Noronha effected a biogeographical mediation that linked the western limits
of the Amazon mission region under Spanish control with the “Estado do Pará”
subject to Portuguese dominion. La Condamine’s movement between
these two regions had allowed for a reconfiguration of natural historical knowl-
edge that in turn enabled a more panoptic view of the flora of the Amazonian
basin. It is these textual mediations, carried out through a traveler’s account
and later codified through the actions of another eyewitness observer, that
led—imperceptibly, at first—toward a conception of the equatorial regions of
33 On La Condamine’s use of Magnin’s manuscript observations, see Neil Safier, Measuring

the New World: Enlightenment Science and South America (Chicago, 2008), 71-76.
34 La Condamine, Relation abrégée, 171-2.
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South America as a unified zone of ecological importance. Travelers like La

Condamine and Monteiro de Noronha were important in forging tropical eco-
logical concepts avant la lettre, stretching local histories to encompass much
larger regions and setting the stage for Humboldt’s Géographie des plantes and
the much later ecosystem model. They had been influenced by earlier authors
such as Thevet and Garcilaso, who saw the torrid zone as inhabited but whose
portraits were sufficiencly malleable to allow for the subsequent description of
local populations as degenerate and rude. La Condamine’s Relation abrégée
rewrote this Amazonian history for an eighteenth-century audience. His dis-
cussion of Amerindian cultures, the region’s flora and fauna, the mythological
history of the Amazon basin, and the origins of one of the world’s largest flu-
vial system high in the Andes gave eighteenth-century readers a new view of a
huge swathe of colonized territory along the equator.
Climate and Cultural Determinism
Notwithstanding their independent assessments about the nature of the

human and animal populations found within the torrid zone, travelers like La
Condamine were also influenced by a host of European armchair philoso-
phers, whose writings on climate and cultural determinism influenced a gen-
eration of European thinkers. Jean-François du Bos, who made connections
between climate and the characteristics of societies living in different regions
of the globe, was particularly fierce in his denigration of non-European cul-
tures, emphasizing the quality of the air as a determinant factor in the intelli-
gence (génie) of an entire people. Whereas Du Tertre saw the climate of the
Caribbean as a benevolent influence on the character of the residents of
Martinique, Du Bos saw non-European air as a decidedly detrimental force:
“We can therefore hold the climate responsible for certain deficiencies of intel-
lect [disette de génies & d’esprits] . . . among certain nations.”35 Du Bos’s writ-
ings found common ground with writers such as John Arbuthnot, who believed
that Asian society valued despotism because of the heat of their climate, as
well as Montesquieu, who argued that environmental influences served
to cement the character of diverse human societies. Hume’s later critique
of Montesquieu, and the examples he provided of societies with similar cli-
mates but dramatically different cultures, helped to break this consensus
35 Jean-Baptiste Du Bos, Réflexions critiques sur la poësie et sur la peinture (Paris, 1770),
302-3.

around the influence of climate on the development of human culture in the

eighteenth century.36
In the long history of European armchair philosophers who discussed cli-
mate and culture, there has been a strong scholarly bias against any tradition
that was not French, English, or Scottish. Yet Spanish travelers also reflected on
the importance of understanding the historical formations of contemporary
societies through climatic theories, including that of the torrid zone. They did
so not by using a paradigm of degradation but rather one of abundance.
Politically, the Spanish were keen on maintaining a separation between the
different populations that inhabited their colonies, since allowing Creoles too
much authority over their own affairs was rightly judged to be dangerous for
the long-term sovereignty of the Crown. Writing at the end of the eighteenth
century, Alejandro Malaspina used the connection between climate and a
nation’s cultural characteristics to inform his Axiomas políticos de América, a
treatise dealing with “the political state of Spain’s ties with America.” Part of
that understanding included demonstrating the divergence between the polit-
ical interests of the various classes: the Spaniard in Europe, the Spaniard of
America, and the Amerindian living under colonial rule. What he concluded
was not far from what either Abbé Du Bos or La Condamine had written in
radically different contexts: “[Beyond subsistence] the Indian has no needs,
either because of the climate he lives in, or because of excessive perspiration,
which is the origin of a certain lazy indolence in later adulthood, or because of
the pattern developed since the conquest of not enjoying the fruit of his
labours or, finally, because the soil, with an always living vegetation, produces
for him throughout the year what he requires for his subsistence.” Malaspina
concluded by commenting that this complacent attitude toward acquiring the
necessities for survival was “common to all the inhabitants of the torrid zone,
since in all places vegetation, animals, and fisheries furnish them with a cheap
and easy food supply.”37 Here, rather using the heat to explain why the torrid
zone’s inhabitants were necessarily lazier and less industrious than their
northern neighbors, Malaspina placed the blame squarely on the zone’s abun-
dance. Instead of subscribing to Buffon and Cornelius de Pauw’s views of the
New World as degraded and corrupting, it was precisely this trope of excess
that caused the well-being of indigenous (and Creole) populations. This trans-
formation in the discourse about the torrid zone, from one of i mpoverishment
36 For an overview of the climatic theories of Du Bos, Arbuthnot, Montesquieu, Hume, and
others, see Golinski, British Weather, esp. 173-184.
37 Alejandro Malaspina, Axiomas políticos de América, as quoted in John Kendrick, Alejandro
Malaspina: Portrait of a Visionary (Montreal, 2003), 111.
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to one of excess, was representative of a broader change in understanding the

equatorial regions of the globe. But what did not change, as evidenced by
Malaspina’s characterization of the “Indians,” was how those populations were
seen to adapt to these circumstances. The articulation of the torrid zone idea
was not meant to homogenize climate, but rather to reflect a homogenized
portrait of equatorial populations. Despite the reversal of the definition of the
torrid zone, the description of the indigenous populations as docile, naive, and
lazy did not change. Later writers used the phrase torrid zone to refer to the
inherent inferiority of the native populations, be they in America or Africa.
Skin color, affected by temperature, was merely the visible marker of a cultural
difference that was quite profound.
Like Malaspina, the naval officer Antonio de Ulloa also understood the tor-
rid zone’s indigenous inhabitants to be culturally homogenous, despite the
abundance and diversity of the region’s natural products. Ulloa was one of two
Spaniards who accompanied La Condamine, nine other Frenchman, and a col-
league from the naval academy at Cadiz on a journey to South America to mea-
sure the shape of the earth at the equator.38 Writing in the wake of his equatorial
journey and a brief stint two decades later as governor of Spanish Louisiana,
Ulloa found that within the “hot temperatures of the Torrid Zone there is
incomparably more fecundity of species, and more beautiful trees.”39 Never
theless, he also maintained the link between climate and character in the
Americas, even as he sought to debunk the ancient theory that proclaimed
the torrid zone’s uninhabitability. Ulloa’s views on the indigenous populations
of Quito were articulated most forcefully in his Relacion histórica de un viage a
la América meridional, published in 1748 immediately following Ulloa and
Juan’s return to Madrid. For Ulloa, it was necessary to understand the “tem-
perament” of Quito based on the “light of experience” rather than imagining,
with only philosophical texts to guide one’s reflections, what the climate might
in fact be like.40 By emphasizing his own experience, Ulloa transformed Quito
from a land of extreme climatic zones that were uninhabitable according to
ancient theories to a place of extraordinarily pleasant climatic circumstances:
38 On Ulloa’s participation in the Franco-Hispanic expedition, see Safier, Measuring, esp.

chap. 5.
39 Antonio de Ulloa, Noticias americanas: entretenimientos phisicos-historicos, sobre la
América Meridional, y la Septentrianal [sic] oriental: comparacion general de los territorios,
climas, y produciones en las tres especies, vegetales, animales, y minerales (Madrid, 1772),
106.
40 Antonio de Ulloa, Relación histórica de un viage a la América meridional (Madrid, 1748),
5:6:380.

“Quito’s situation is so moderate, that neither the heat bothers [its residents],
nor are its frosts unpleasant . . .”41
Ulloa recorded fluctuations in the temperature of Quito and correlated
them explicitly with the characteristics of the indigenous populations. Using
Réaumur’s thermometer, Ulloa sought to update a geographical tradition that
had posited the torrid zone as anathema to human habitation even before the
Renaissance. Ulloa reaffirmed the idea that the torrid zone’s inhabitants were
inferior and lazy, an attack on indigenous culture as described in some of
the earliest European accounts of equatorial Spanish America. Ulloa’s judg-
ments regarding the character of the Indians were legitimated through the
provision of instrumental measures.42 Punctuating his account with the tem-
peratures and climatic observations in and around Quito, he built a reputation
as an infallible observer by linking his debunking of the torrid zone myth with
another layer of myth that posited the inferiority of the populations that lived
within its bounds.
Several decades after Ulloa’s experiments with the thermometer in Quito,
he published his Noticias americanas (Madrid, 1772). A series of twenty-two
relatively short and piquant chapters, the Noticias americanas discussed
themes from natural history to the character and customs of Amerindians, and
presented itself as a “general comparison of the territories, climates, and pro-
ductions of the three species, vegetable, animal and mineral.” Although his
reflections extended well beyond the northern limits of the Tropic of Cancer,
embracing portions of Canada as well as the southern portions of what is today
the United States, Ulloa perceptively described the transformation then taking
place to the notion of the torrid zone in an even broader geographical field.
It came as no surprise to Ulloa’s contemporaries that the equatorial climes
were inhabited, but the range of temperatures and the singular climatic condi-
tions in some portions were still largely unappreciated. “For many years, the
Torrid Zone has been known to be inhabited: but it has not been so many years
since intelligent men and consummate physicians have understood that not
41 Ulloa, Relación histórica, 5:6:381.

42 The rhetorical importance in eighteenth-century European scientific culture of relying
on eyewitness observation corroborated by instrumental devices has been studied in
Marie-Noëlle Bourguet, Christian Licoppe, and Otto Sibum, eds., Instruments, Travel and
Science: Itineraries of Precision from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century (New York,
2002). On the history of thermometers in particular, see Bourguet, “Measurable Difference:
Botany, Climate, and the Gardener’s Thermometer in Eighteenth-Century France,” in
Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce, and Politics in the Early Modern World, ed. Londa
Schiebinger and Claudia Swan (Philadelphia, 2005). On climatology and instruments, see
Golinski, British Weather.
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only was the region inhabited, but that there were vast parts that experienced
frigid and temperate conditions.”43 For Ulloa, his experiences in South America
had instructed him that rather than viewing particular territories as having
certain environmental characteristics based on a presumably uniform set of
temperatures, it was possible to conceive of nature as pluriform and variable,
“placing the coldness of the glacial regions within the ardors of the warm Zone
(Zona calurosa).”44
For Ulloa, the forty-seven degrees that comprised the torrid zone, stretching
from one tropic to another and from near the Island of Cuba in the north to the
Peruvian coastal city of Cobija in the south, contained many different climates
and distinctive territorial dispositions. Certain territories far from the equator
maintained high agricultural yields while others nearer to the line had modest
levels of productivity, and this apparent disjuncture could not be resolved by
the “speculation of physics” but rather exclusively with “the aid of experience.”45
Ulloa’s experience had taught him that even between Panama and Louisiana,
there were “diverse temperaments” that he considered to be “extraordinary,”
and which he described by referring to their appearance outside of the
torrid zone.
Ulloa’s interest in emphasizing the American landscape’s variability, even
within the same climatic zone, appears as an empirical dagger in the battle to
banish vestiges of Scholastic thinking from Spanish scholarship. Earlier publi-
cation projects, such as that undertaken by Andrés Gonzalez de Barcia’s proj-
ect to republish earlier classic accounts of Spain’s New World encounters, had
not helped fortify the Scholastic tradition. Indeed, Ulloa’s Noticias americanas
may have implicitly been in dialogue with texts such as Gregorio García’s
Origen de los Indios, originally published in 1607 but republished in 1729 as part
of Barcia’s project. But his insistence on including measurements of tempera-
ture in the Noticias americanas, as we saw earlier with the Relación histórica,
was meant to make “the consequences that were drawn from these constant
results” more certain.46
Like Humboldt after him, Ulloa believed in a tangible torrid zone with par-
ticular characteristics, not some metaphorical idea about a land of searing
heat.47 Ulloa referred to the “moderation” of the sun and emphasized that
differences in altitude, among other factors, accounted for the “variety of the
43 Ulloa, Noticias americanas, 2.


climates.”48 Ulloa’s observations reflected what was in fact a sophisticated

empirical refutation of the Scholastic theory of climatology and an attempt
not only to break down the rigidity of the idea that similar latitudes would
contain similar temperatures, but also to connect the characteristics of ecosys-
tems along a north-south axis. Ulloa united Spain’s fleeting imperial experi-
ence in Louisiana and its more long-lasting successes in South America,
merging radically different cultural and climatic environments in order to
bring them under a rubric in which divergence from a hollow theoretical frame
was made evident through radically different, yet somehow interconnected,
imperial domains.
But ultimately, Ulloa too felt that human behaviors would follow the “tem-
perament”—read climate—of a given location, and that it would be possible
to determine the nature of a population based on the prevailing climatic con-
ditions. “It is normal that the nature of the peoples and the animals partake in
the distinct qualities of the region’s temperatures [temperamentos],” he
explained, insinuating that individuals would take on characteristics of the
places into which they were born or transplanted. In this sense, it could actu-
ally work in one’s favor to spend time within the torrid zone, since the extremes
to which the frigid and temperate zones are subjected would make it difficult
to maintain a neutral temperament. “Those territories that are outside the
Torrid Zone,” Ulloa continued, “partake in both extremes . . . passing from one
to the other, since in the summertime they experience the effects of the heat,
and in the winter those of the cold.”49 This is one of the few instances in which
places outside the torrid zone were considered inferior climatically—and thus
culturally—to the regions between the tropics, and where the stable equato-
rial temperature came to be seen as advantageous. For Ulloa, the torrid zone
could be a place of climatic calm, but also of danger, where the “diverse tem-
peraments” could lead to cultural traits that Europeans were loathe to admit.
The “Proper Character of the Torrid Zone”
How, then, were the tropics to be portrayed in the wake of these seventeenth-
and eighteenth-century writers? As a site of peril or a site of abundance? As a
place of degradation or as a terrestrial paradise? As a pleasant refuge or as a
torrid zone? While authors such as Ulloa seemed to spend little time reflecting
on this problem of representation, the question began to occupy travelers and
48 Ulloa, Noticias americanas, 84-85.

49 Ulloa, Noticias americanas, 195-6.
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naturalists with increasing urgency over the course of the late eighteenth cen-
tury. In the Cosmos, Humboldt discussed in great detail the challenges of por-
traying tropical nature in visual terms, noting that the voyages of European
discovery, the commerce in spices and materia medica, and the establishment
of botanical gardens had allowed painters to become more familiar with the
“marvellous forms of a large number of exotic products, which give some idea
of the tropical world.”50 But this idea of a tropical world, according to Humboldt,
began to be captured in visual media as early as the mid-seventeenth century,
when landscape depictions by on-the-spot artists such as Franz Post and Albert
Eckhout faithfully started reproducing “the proper character of the torrid
zone.”51 For Humboldt, Eckhout had presented “palm trees, papaya trees,
banana trees, and the heliconia. . . . in their characteristic fashion,” even though
scholars have more recently shown the highly stylized and fabricated nature of
much of Eckhout’s and Post’s drawings, leading us to sense the extent to which
Humboldt himself was misled by the dazzling paintings of an earlier genera-
tion of Dutch painters. Nevertheless, Eckhout and Post inaugurated what
would eventually come to be a sub-genre of the Romantic sublime, where the
portrait of tropical nature began to take on a mimetic life of its own.52
But what exactly did Humboldt mean by the “proper character of the torrid
zone”? Was this term merely a synonym for a region that had by Humboldt’s
time come to be known as “the tropics”? Or did Humboldt use the torrid zone
as a form of poetic license, when desiring to amplify the distance between a
burning atmosphere of seared earth and the exuberant products contained
within the equinoctial regions? Looking at Humboldt’s celebrated narrative
account of his journey to South America is instructive. Humboldt began his
Personal Narrative by referring to his expedition as “a voyage to the torrid zone,”
a spatial category that would delimit the activities undertaken in pursuit of the
“principal objects” of his travels. When he was not referencing the torrid zone
explicitly, Humboldt also referred to his journey as a “voyage to the tropics,”
occasionally using both terms in proximity to one another, even in the same
sentence. For Humboldt, the torrid zone seems to have been as much a poetic
as a pragmatic concept. After reflecting on the tropical imagery in the Cosmos,
Humboldt waxed lyricaly about the torrid zone’s beauty, beginning with the
50 Humboldt, Cosmos, II: 95.

52 Stepan, Picturing Tropical Nature, esp. chap. 1. On Eckhout, see Rebecca Parker Brienen,
Visions of Savage Paradise: Albert Eckhout, Court Painter in Colonial Dutch Brazil
(Amsterdam, 2006).

snow-covered Andes, passing through the mountains of the Himalayas, and

ending with the “virgin forests” of the Amazon River basin:
The individual who is sensitive to the natural beauty of territories

[contrées] that are divided by mountains, rivers, and forests, who has him-
self traversed the torrid zone, who has contemplated the richness and infi-
nite variety of its vegetation, not only along the inhabited coasts, but also
atop the Andes covered with snow, along the cliffs of the Himalayas and
the Nilgherry mountains, in the kingdom of Mysore; he who has traversed
the virgin forests enclosed in the basin between the Orinoco and river of
the Amazons, only that person can understand what an unlimited field is
open to the painting of landscape between the tropics of the two conti-
nents, in the archipelagos of Sumatra, of Borneo, of the Philippines, and
how the admirable works that have been accomplished to this day could
never be compared to the treasures that nature holds in reserve for those
who would wish to make themselves her master.53
This tropical world tour portrayed the torrid zone as the privileged site of the
peripatetic observer, the sole region where one could observe the infinite vari-
eties of virgin forest and vegetation, and, more important still, a place where
one could become master of the natural world. It speaks to the integrated way
that nineteenth-century travelers would begin to conceive of the equatorial
band as a unified space, linking together the Himalayas and the Orinoco,
Mysore and the Philippines. But it also reveals the blind spots that emerge
when thinking across these spaces, especially as concern the African conti-
nent, which begins to be excluded from the considerations that give rise to this
integrative view from this point onward.
Humboldt’s own ideas about the interconnected nature of botanical, geo-
graphical, and climatic phenomena began to take shape well before he
embarked on the five-year voyage to the Americas that would solidify his
reflections vis-à-vis the tropics. It was in 1790 that he gave a preliminary sketch
of his “Géographie des plantes,” then in manuscript form, to his friend Georg
Forster, recently returned from a circumnavigatory expedition with James
Cook.54 The mature articulation of a theory by which botanical species in dif-
ferent regions could be correlated through an examination of the local climate
would have to wait another seventeen years. With the publication of his Essai
sur la géographie des plantes (Paris, 1807), Humboldt would do his best to

54 Humboldt, Essai sur la géographie des plantes, préface.
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“[paint] in broad strokes the immense expanse that plants occupy from the
zones of perpetual snows to the bottom of the Ocean.”55 He had set out to “col-
lect under a single point of view the whole of the physical phenomena of that
part of the New Continent, comprised in the torrid zone from the level of the
South Sea to the highest summit of the Andes.”56 Humboldt’s larger project was
thus to encompass all the phenomena of a large and diverse region in a single,
connected network of physical causes. Nevertheless, as he laid out in the intro-
duction to his Personal Narrative, there were many topics to which he did not
devote a single text, which included treatises on “the races of men in South
America; on the missions of the Orinoco; on the obstacles to the progress of
society in the torrid zone, from the climate and the strength of vegetation,” and
others still. It is worthy of our attention here that he employed the torrid zone
in the context of how societies had progressed, or were in the process of pro-
gressing, although at times the term and its ancient connotations acted like an
anchor to this otherwise buoyant concept of societal change. As we will see,
the context in which Humboldt used torrid zone frequently reflected this ret-
rograde notion of a region and its inhabitants struggling to find their future.
In order to establish the contexts in which Humboldt employed the con-
cept of the torrid zone, we return to the Essai politique sur le royaume de la
Nouvelle Espagne (1811). On a general level, Humboldt employed the term when
dealing with large geopolitical units. “The Spanish possessions in the Americas
are divided into nine large governments, which one can regard as independent
from one another,” Humboldt wrote, subdividing these different governing
units by location. “Of these nine governments, five, which is to say the
vice-royalties of Peru and New Granada, [and] the captaincies-general of
Guatemala, Puerto Rico, and Caracas, are entirely found within the torrid
zone.” But despite using the term to denote something resembling a consistent
climatic zone, Humboldt continued to remark that each region’s geographical
situation “is not deterministic of the natural productions each of these beauti-
ful regions offers,” implying a disjuncture between the employment of this geo-
graphical moniker and the real condition of each region’s environmental
characteristics. Yet again, Mexico defied the rules: “The geographical latitude
influences little the fertility of a land where, along its spine and upon the crest
of its mountains, nature has brought together all the climates.”57 Throughout,
55 Humboldt, Essai sur la géographie des plantes, 14.

56 Humboldt, introduction to Personal narrative, xix.
57 Humboldt, Essai politique, I: 192-3. Note that all citations are from the 1825 Paris edition,
most of which can also be found, in slightly modified form, in the earlier Paris edition of
1811: the Essai politique. . . . (Paris, 1811).

Humboldt used the idea of the torrid zone to emphasize the expectation that
the temperature should be hot, but rather was cold, emphasizing that many
regions “situated beneath the torrid zone enjoy a climate that is colder or at
least temperate rather than searing (abrasado).”58
Another context in which Humboldt invoked the notion of the torrid zone
related, significantly, to population statistics. In drawing up a statistical census
of the Mexican population, Humboldt took pains to mitigate the tendency to
exaggerate the number of inhabitants, and was encouraged in his efforts by
parish priests who he said were “interested in the solution of so important a
problem as the augmentation or diminution of our species.”59 But the problem
was particularly important for this region: “they are so much the more interest-
ing as we have yet no statistical data on the relation of the deaths to the births
under the torrid zone.”60 Here, we see Humboldt engaging directly with the
legacy of a geographical concept, since the torrid zone was previously con-
ceived as being uninhabited. The particular relevance of his statistics thus
related to the mathematical resolution of an age-old problem shrouded in
myth. His use of the torrid zone contained the metaphorical flavor necessary
to make his point.
The torrid zone also came to be useful in making comparative assertions
between population numbers in other parts of the world. For example,
Humboldt contrasted the potential agricultural abundance of the Mexican
land with the paltry winter production encountered in Russia’s northern
climes. Despite this fact, the Russian population was much higher, and
Humboldt emphasized the natural “obstacles” that nature put in front of the
Russian people. “What a contrast,” he wrote, “between the fertility of the
Mexican soil, enriched with the most precious vegetable productions of
the torrid zone, and the sterility of plains for more than half the year buried
under ice and snow.”61 Capturing the metaphorical use of the torrid zone as a
site of abundance, Humboldt contrasted an earlier notion of the torrid zone as
a lifeless waste with the realities of central Mexican harvests, despite the much
larger populations present in the Russian tundra. This idea of the torrid zone
as a site of abundance was also emphasized when contrasted with the effects
of famine, “common to almost all the equinoxial regions.”62 Humboldt
described the occasional crises that forced indigenous populations, from the
58 Humboldt, Essai politique, 66.

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Andes to the South Seas, to contemplate dire measures in order to feed them-
selves. In the case of the Amerindians, Humboldt depicted a desperate set of
alimentary tactics, including the consumption of potter’s earth to stave off
hunger. Despite purportedly fertile soils, the Mexicans’ antipodal brethren in
the Pacific islands were, according to Humboldt, “frequently driven by famine
to devour one another,” implying that anthropophagy, in this case, had utilitar-
ian roots. These behaviors struck Humboldt as peculiar, and unexpected, and
he employed the notion of the torrid zone to inflect his analysis with an under-
lying air of disbelief: “Under the torrid zone, where a beneficent hand seems
everywhere to have scattered the germ of abundance, man, careless and phleg-
matic, experiences periodically a want of nourishment which the industry of
more civilized nations banished from the most sterile regions of the north.”63
It is precisely the expectation of abundance that provided this statement with
its polemical force. For Humboldt, the industry of the northern nations coun-
teracted the environmentally determined paucity of agricultural production
within less robust territories, while the “careless and phlegmatic” nations of
the torrid zone squandered the resources with which they were so generously
bestowed. Humboldt even used the idea of the torrid zone to contrast such
ideas about degeneracy and disrepair with the “great and solid scientific estab-
lishments” present in the Mexico’s capital. The artistic achievements of this
city were no less striking to the Prussian traveler, including the transportation
of statues and other artifacts through winding roads and over mountainous
peaks. “We are surprised,” he wrote, “at finding these masterpieces of antiquity
collected together under the torrid zone,” reaffirming a northern prejudice
against any kind of cultural achievement between the tropics.64
While their apparent lack of industry seemed in this instance to have led
Humboldt into derogatory remarks along the lines of the Americas’ earliest
detractors, elsewhere in the same text Humboldt pointed to the extraordinary
labors undertaken by Amerindian workers, especially in the Mexican mines.
Accounts of indigenous degeneracy, linked to the theories of the Comte de
Buffon and others, seemed to be fallacious and misleading when set alongside
the strength of young men working to hoist stones and haul minerals.
“The appearance of these robust and laborious men would have operated a
change in the opinions of the Raynals and Pauws, and a number of other
authors . . . who have been pleased to declaim against the degeneracy of our
species in the torrid zone.”65 This is a good example of how eighteenth-century

64 Humboldt, Essai politique, 159

ideas not only influenced and shaped the language Humboldt used, but also
constrained the conceptual framework through which Humboldt articulated
human behavior.
Not only did the Indians Humboldt encounter work harder than those ste-
reotypical degenerate populations described by Buffon and Raynal, they also
had darker skin than those populations from warmer (South American) cli-
mates. Again, Humboldt marveled that the “American and negro” races seemed
to “resist in a singular manner the impressions of the ambient air.”66 Whether
or not they inhabited high peaks or shallow valleys, with cold or hot tempera-
tures respectively, their skin color seemed to differ not at all, or at least it did
not conform to any predetermined formula for predicting the tint of the body.
“The Indians in the torrid zone who inhabit the most elevated plains of the
Cordillera of the Andes, and those who under the 45° of south latitude live by
fishing among the islands of the archipelago of Chonos,” Humboldt explained
in his inimitable language of extreme comparison, “have as coppery complex-
ion as those who under a burning climate cultivate bananas in the narrowest
and deepest valleys of the equinoxial region.” Ambient heat and the color of
these populations’ skin seemed to have no correlation. “We everywhere per-
ceive that the colour of the American depends very little on the local position
in which we see him.”67
Beyond the American tropics, Humboldt added a twist to his understanding
of the torrid zone by expanding its geographical bounds, in one case describ-
ing the Arabian peninsula with reference to this ancient climatic concept.
Unhinged from the straitjacket of climatic determinism, but paying some lip
service to the importance of specific environments, Humboldt pointed out in
the Cosmos that for those living in these regions, “the organs are provided with
a more intense vital force; the vegetable kingdom provides fragrances, bal-
samic liquids, and positive and dangerous substances for mankind in
abundance.”68 “Within these parts of the torrid zone,” he wrote, “the organic
forms affect the singular characteristics which diversify practically at every
step.”69 That is, the specific character of each individual product of nature
affected the activities and sensations experienced by those who lived nearby,
to an extent quite different according to which region was under discussion.
This was not, then, a homogenous band of searing heat that predetermined the
relationship between humans and their environment, but rather a formula

68 Humboldt, Cosmos, 259.
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Humboldt revealed by which each region fostered a particular kind of interac-

tion amongst its living inhabitants, animal and vegetable: “Every corner of the
earth offers special products, and by constantly awakening his attention, ren-
ders more active and more varied man’s commerce with nature.”70 Ultimately,
Humboldt capitalized on the flexibility of the torrid zone model, its status as
both a land of searing heat and a place of intense biodiversity. What remained
was precisely the intensity of this environment—a region in which bountiful
products from incense to medicinal herbs incited human curiosity, yielding
not a heat-induced torpor but rather rousing a vibrant form of intrepid inquiry
into the natural world, unique in its multiple productions.
In the end, Humboldt allowed the torrid zone to speak for itself through the
sensorial images that were scattered throughout his many texts and which
bore the textual icon of the torrid zone in Humboldt’s florid prose. “We
felt . . . how strong are the impressions left on the mind from the aspect of
those countries placed on the limits of the torrid zone,” Humboldt reflected in
one of many poetic references to this equatorial image, “[a zone] in which
nature appears at once so rich, so various, and so majestic.”71 The torrid zone
was for Humboldt, as for Ulloa before him, a real entity, not some vague geo-
graphical metaphor. In describing the sky in Tenerife, he partially attributed its
cause to the “proximity of the torrid zone,” as if it were a literal line that could
be touched and felt. To a far greater extent than earlier travelers, Humboldt
relied on his own observations to make connections between climates, envi-
ronments, and populations, between the tropics and beyond their bounds.
Humboldt referred to the visual valence of these connections as a particular
atmospheric transparency. “This transparency,” according to Humboldt, “may
be regarded as one of the chief causes of the beauty of the landscape under the
torrid zone; it is this which heightens the splendor of the vegetable coloring,
and contributes to the magic effect of their harmonies and their contrasts . . .
A lucid clearness in the conceptions, a serenity of mind, correspond with the
transparency of the surrounding atmosphere.”72
Conclusion
The transparent veil that Humboldt attributed to the atmosphere under the
torrid zone contrasts starkly with the thick metaphors of degradation and

71 Humboldt, Personal narrative, 229.
72 Humboldt, Personal narrative, 155.

social decay that plagued the term’s use over the centuries. The docile and lazy
stereotype of the equatorial Indian went hand in hand with another set of ste-
reotypes that saw Amerindians as culturally and technologically backward,
existing in harmony with one another and with their environment, and living
in sparsely-populated, mobile communities where they were incapable of
creating art, pottery, or the accoutrements of a more sedentary society.
Archeologists and anthropologists have instead described interactions
between early indigenous societies and their natural environment that were
complex and multifarious, allowing scholars in other fields to recognize that
various ecosystems around the world—and particularly in the Americas—
were considerably altered by the behavior of early inhabitants. Recent studies
have sought to problematize our view that indigenous peoples always lived in
harmonious balance with their natural resources, a timeless equilibrium that
served as a basis for the homogenous views put forth by early modern observ-
ers and armchair philosophers. New research is modifying our view of the
Indian as an innocuous actor in the process of humankind’s interaction with
the natural environment. William Cronon’s Changes in the Land, which chron-
icles the ecological changes brought about by early European settlers interact-
ing with indigenous groups in colonial New England, argued that contrary to
popular belief, “Indians were anything but passive in their response” to the
changes brought about by European colonization. Shepard Krech III’s The
Ecological Indian, a later and far more controversial account, offered startling
evidence for the ways that indigenous peoples in today’s Southwestern United
States manipulated the natural features of the great Arizonan desert, perhaps
leading to further desertification. All of these positions were articulated against
the backdrop of debates over ecology and the environment, questioning the
role human beings played in the state of the earth’s natural resources. Like
those historians of environmental change who are advocating for a new geo-
logical epoch known as the anthropocene, characterized by vast changes to the
planet’s underlying systems brought about by human activity, these scholars
acknowledged that Amerindians played a central role in the ecological change
in the Americas, and wondered how to integrate their perspectives into a
deeper history of geographical understanding.
On one level, this essay’s analysis of the use of the term “torrid zone” has
aimed to catalog the pejorative characterization of the region’s indigenous
inhabitants and their supposed cultural backwardness in seventeenth- and
eighteenth-century European travel literature. More ambitiously, however, and
in conclusion, it asks us to consider an epistemological challenge: how to inte-
grate indigenous conceptions of ecology into our understanding of the envi-
ronmental history of the tropics. As Warren Dean has written with reference to
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the Brazilian Atlantic Forest (mata atlântica), prior to the eighteenth century
Europeans had been able to acquire some knowledge of the forest and its spe-
cies “through the dimly remembered lore of the indigenes, transmitted with
difficulty to the caboclo and African fugitives from the colonial pale.” But it was
the “discovery” of the tropical forest by scientific explorers that, according to
Dean, allowed “indigenous knowledge that the first invaders had contemptu-
ously ignored . . . to be . . . re-created and finally surpassed,” spurred by the
“curiosity” of a new wave of traveling naturalists that would culminate later in
the nineteenth century in Humboldt and his Prussian compatriots.73
Is there no way to connect indigenous practices and scientific interest in the
tropical regions of the globe? Amazonia is only one such region that is relevant
to responding to this question, but its importance to contemporary ecological
debates and its position at the center of global flows of tropical knowledge
make it a useful point of departure. As a place whose very name derives from a
myth from Asia Minor that traversed the Atlantic Ocean at the dawn of the first
era of globalization, it is a region that in the centuries after 1492 witnessed
waves of influence—and invasion—from around the globe. Thousands of
years ago, human populations from Asia came via the Bering Land Bridge to
settle throughout the Americas, and there is ample evidence of settlement in
the equatorial forests of South America early in this process.
These early “immigrants” captured the world’s imagination. Consequently,
during the five-hundred year history of its contact with the European world,
Amazonia has had a central role in determining how the outside world viewed
the nature of indigenous knowledge and customs, often fighting against the
observations made and codified by La Condamine, Louis Agassiz, and others,
who made observations regarding the indigenous populations and the degree
to which these groups fit within a hierarchy of the world’s “civilizations.” In the
twentieth century, at its southern borders with Mato Grosso, the Amazon River
basin served as a field site for Claude Lévi-Strauss during his ethnographic for-
ays in the 1930s and 40s, and later was the setting for other structuralist-
oriented anthropologists who transformed Lévi-Strauss’ approach into one of
the leading interpretive paradigms of the last century. Along the Andean cor-
dillera, more recent disciples of Lévi-Strauss and others have carried out
fieldwork on the Achuar and Runa peoples of the Ecuadorian Amazon. They
argue that trans-species interaction and a fluid boundary between the human
and the “natural” speak to an epistemology—universal but that appears with
particular force in certain indigenous groups—that operates beyond the para-
73 Warren Dean, With Broadax and Firebrand: The Destruction of the Brazilian Atlantic Forest
(Berkeley, 1997).

digm opposing nature to culture. These studies emphasize a contextual

knowledge that accords with categories regnant in a particular community or
ecosystem.74 At the eastern end of the Amazon basin, particularly in the region
of the island of Marajó near the Amazon’s headwaters, archaeologists discov-
ered ceramic artifacts (so-called Marajoara pottery) that radically reformu-
lated assumptions about the carrying-capacity of the Amazonian ecosystem
and the cultural development of its inhabitants, with important implications
for lowland urbanization patterns and the history of indigenous technologies
throughout the Americas.75
Other work has challenged established paradigms of historical temporality,
using indigenous frames and a deeper history to understand aspects of indig-
enous culture that were previously inaccessible to ethnographers and ethno-
historians. Archaeologists have advocated for a deeper history of the region
that would provide a template for understanding long-term ecological changes
and changes to social structures. In order to understand this deeper history,
however, certain myths associated with centuries of Amazonian history have
been revised or rejected, including the idea that prior to 1492 Amazonia was a
harmonious and pristine ecological paradise, untouched by human activities.
It is now clear that the Amazon River basin was not a culturally homogenous
environment. Instead, it was a place in cultural and ethnic flux, a crossroads for
groups migrating between the Andean highlands and the Colombian plateaus,
bringing with them their cultures and technical skills. The resources of the for-
est and fluvial environments, then, were landscapes that bore deep records of
their human histories; the Amazon basin evinced “a deep history of human
interaction with, and transformation of, the natural world.”76 Recent studies
into the ecological behaviors of the peoples that created the so-called “terra
preta do índio,” or black soil of the Indians, have confirmed that large, complex
societies transformed the Amazonian lowland landscape through such early
interventions. This was no static, harmonious torrid zone, but rather a land of
shifting ecologies that can be revealed through a deeper ecological and cul-
tural history of the region.
74 Philippe Descola, Par-delà nature et culture (Paris, 2006); Anne-Christine Taylor, “The
Soul’s Body and its States: An Amazonian Perspective on the Nature of Being Human,”
The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 2, no. 2 (1996): 201-15: Eduardo Kohn,
“How Dogs Dream: Amazonian Natures and the Politics of Transspecies Engagement,”
American Ethnologist 34, no. 1 (2007): 3-24.
75 Colin McEwan, Cristiana Barreto and Eduardo Neves, eds., Unknown Amazon: Culture in
Nature in Ancient Brazil (London, 2001).
76 McEwan, Barreto, and Neves, eds., “Introduction” in Unknown Amazon.
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Through these efforts, the representation of the life of the torrid zone’s
indigenous inhabitants will eventually be rewritten. Until then, however, the
representation that was settled and sealed in the eighteenth century will per-
sist. It was, as this essay has attempted to demonstrate, a mixed and ambiguous
legacy. On the one hand, the eighteenth century saw the region’s transforma-
tion from a zone of insufferable heat to one of extraordinary abundance, diver-
sity, and pleasant airs. On the other hand, the torrid zone became a place
whose myriad inhabitants could be seen as tired, torpor-laden automatons.
The eighteenth century merely confirmed, vehemently, the presumption that
regardless of the changes that had modified an earlier climatic image of the
torrid zone, the region’s inhabitants were still caught in a zone of static tempo-
ralities, if not temperatures. From André Thevet to Alexander von Humboldt,
the travelers who solidified this pejorative image failed to realize that their
own vision was limited to what they happened to observe upon passing
through South America. It would fall to future generations to recognize that
human beings have always adapted creatively to their climatic circumstances,
long before European philosophers made specious claims about the degraded
behaviors and monotonous character of the torrid zone’s earliest inhabitants.


The Tenacious Travels of The Torrid Zone and The Global Dimensions of Geographical Knowledge in The Eighteenth Century

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Journal of early

modern history 18 (2014) 141-172

The Tenacious Travels of the Torrid Zone and the

Enlightenment geography – torrid zone – Garcilaso de la Vega – Antonio de Ulloa –

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���4 | doi 10.1163/15700658-12342388

1 Alexander von Humboldt, Essai politique sur le royaume de la Nouvelle-Espagne, deuxième

Journal of early modern history 18 (2014) 141-172

2 Humboldt, Personal narrative of travels to the equinoctial regions . . . (Philadelphia, 1815), xviii.

European interest in the natural history of the tropics without considering an

Journal of early modern history 18 (2014) 141-172

7 Jean-Marc Drouin, L’écologie et son histoire (Paris, 1993).

10 Jean-Charles Maclot, Précis sur le globe terrestre, ou explication de la mappemonde; Ornée

Journal of early modern history 18 (2014) 141-172

broader environmental history that was effected through (largely) European

Journal of early modern history 18 (2014) 141-172

occurred following Humboldt’s journey so radically different than ideas

The Torrid Zone of Antiquity Disparaged

Theories using climatic zones to explain similarities between far-flung regions

Given that the non-temperate zones were thought to be uninhabitable in

19 Wey-Gomez, Tropics, quotation on p. 222.

Journal of early modern history 18 (2014) 141-172

22 Thévêt, Singularités de la France antarctique (Paris, 2002).

Temperate Climates and Healthy Inhabitants: Tropical Travelers

25 Garcilaso de la Vega, Comentarios reales, 1:10.

Journal of early modern history 18 (2014) 141-172

conditions were far less diversified, offered similar observations. The

31 Charles-Marie de La Condamine, Relation abrégée d’un voyage fait dans l’intérieur de

Journal of early modern history 18 (2014) 141-172

mental analysis of culture in equatorial South America.33 His flattening out of

33 On La Condamine’s use of Magnin’s manuscript observations, see Neil Safier, Measuring

South America as a unified zone of ecological importance. Travelers like La

Climate and Cultural Determinism

Notwithstanding their independent assessments about the nature of the

Journal of early modern history 18 (2014) 141-172

around the influence of climate on the development of human culture in the

to one of excess, was representative of a broader change in understanding the

38 On Ulloa’s participation in the Franco-Hispanic expedition, see Safier, Measuring, esp.

Journal of early modern history 18 (2014) 141-172

41 Ulloa, Relación histórica, 5:6:381.

43 Ulloa, Noticias americanas, 2.

Journal of early modern history 18 (2014) 141-172

climates.”48 Ulloa’s observations reflected what was in fact a sophisticated

The “Proper Character of the Torrid Zone”

48 Ulloa, Noticias americanas, 84-85.

50 Humboldt, Cosmos, II: 95.

Journal of early modern history 18 (2014) 141-172

snow-covered Andes, passing through the mountains of the Himalayas, and

The individual who is sensitive to the natural beauty of territories

53 Humboldt, Cosmos, II: 97.

55 Humboldt, Essai sur la géographie des plantes, 14.

Journal of early modern history 18 (2014) 141-172

58 Humboldt, Essai politique, 66.

63 Humboldt, Essai politique, 92.

Journal of early modern history 18 (2014) 141-172

66 Humboldt, Essai politique, 108.

Humboldt revealed by which each region fostered a particular kind of interac-

70 Humboldt, Cosmos, 260.

Journal of early modern history 18 (2014) 141-172

Journal of early modern history 18 (2014) 141-172

digm opposing nature to culture. These studies emphasize a contextual

Journal of early modern history 18 (2014) 141-172

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© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��4 | doi 10.1163/15700658-12342388

Temperate Climates and Healthy Inhabitants: Tropical Travelers