444. Mystery Man

BROWDERBOOKS

This is the first post using my new Mac desktop computer.  Some of you know the horrors I've been going through, horrors of transition, which I've recounted on Facebook.  But also, here's a

                                  FRAUD  ALERT

In the course of installing my new printer and computer, I've encountered them three times.  

1.  Having trouble with my old printer, I googled for help, found myself on the website of some outfit called adv soft LLC that I'd never heard of.  A male Asian, fluent in English but with a noticeable accent, worked with me for two hours trying to fix the printer, finally gave up and said I needed a new one -- advice that, even now, I think justified.  He then offered me various pricey plans for support, once I got a new one, and I settled for the 6-month plan, subject to my review.  I then, in a moment of sanity, googled adv soft LLC and learned that its services were unreliable, and that many complaints had been lodged with the Better Business Bureau.  Contacting the outfit, I got a smooth-talking woman and told her I didn't want or need their services.  She canceled my plan, but said I would be billed for a one-time session.  Though I anticipated a big bite of a charge, I was never billed, probably because I knew too much about them, might cause trouble.

2.  While trying to install my new computer, I asked for help, got a phone number online, and got the same male Asian with the same outfit.  Once again, I had been lured onto the adv soft LLC website.  "I don't know you!" I told him (though I really did) and hung up.

3.  The following day, when I tried to sign in to my new computer, I got a dramatic big-screen message that Mac OS X had been invaded by a virus; serious damage would be done, unless you phoned this phone number for help.  It sounded a bit like a scam, but when I was blocked again and again from signing in, I tried the phone number, but got no answer because it was early -- before 9 a.m.  Then, remembering another phone number given me by Apple Support, I tried it, got an immediate answer, explained the situation, and was told, "Don't phone them. This is a scam!"  Up until now, I thought adv soft LLC guilty only of overcharging -- legal and all too common in the capitalist world.  But now, with their phone number associated with a scam, questions of legality came up.  The Apple Support specialist I was dealing with spent a whole hour trying to remove the malware from my computer, and finally succeeded.  Day 2 on my new Mac, and it had been invaded by malware -- what a downer!

FRAUD  ALERT:  Beware of an outfit called adv soft LLC.      They are suspect, have many BBB complaints.

Why is this outfit still in operation?  I have no idea.  But now, on to another mystery, a man of mystery to many of us.

                                  Mystery Man  

                      He knew Goethe and Jefferson, inspired 

                      Darwin, and was celebrated worldwide, 

                       yet we don't even remember his name.

Until recently the name “Humboldt” meant only one thing to me: a river in Nevada that in the nineteenth century surged up mysteriously from a spring, then flowed sluggishly in a somewhat westerly direction, and finally sank down into the ground and disappeared.  It was a rule among the explorers of that time that if you got lost in a desolate hinterland, the only thing to do was follow a stream until it flowed into a river, and then follow that river, and any larger one it flowed into, until you reached the coast.  Rivers were supposed to always flow downstream toward a coast.  And what is now the states of Nevada and Utah then constituted the Great Basin, a desolate region where rivers like the Humboldt rose up out of nowhere, flowed on for a while, and then sank back into the earth.  God help any lost wanderer who followed them in hopes of reaching the coast.

Settlers camping by the Humboldt River, 1859 (retouched).

         When the westward covered wagons of the emigrants reached this region, hoping to make it over the Sierras into California before the first snow, their trail followed the Humboldt.  The native peoples of the Great Basin were not formidable mounted warriors like the Sioux or Cheyenne or Apache, but weaker tribes supposedly pushed by stronger ones into this desolate area, where they survived by eating roots and grasses. The coming of the wagon trails was a blessing for them, since here was food waiting to be snatched.  No need to attack the settlers; just send a few arrows into their livestock and wait.  The settlers might then carved out some choice meat for themselves, but they would have to lave the carcasses behind.  Then, as the wagon trains plodded dustily into the distance, the native peoples would help themselves to a banquet of carcasses.  They’d never had it so good.  And that was all I knew of the Humboldt River and   history, without a clue as to where the name came from, and why, or what the river’s condition is today.  

(Note: The above account of the native peoples of the Great Basin along the Humboldt River are my recollection of accounts by the early settlers of that time, who had little interest in studying the aborigines.  I doubt if it does justice to the inhabitants of that desolate area, who were probably Paiutes.)

         The first traders and pathfinders to discover the Humboldt gave it a series of names, none of which stuck.  Then, in 1845, the pathmarker and future presidential candidate John C. Fremont made a map of the region and gave the river its name.  So Wikipedia informs us, without bothering to explain who or what Humboldt was.  But Fremont knew.  Humboldt was Baron Friedrich Heinrich Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859), the son of a Prussian noble, a much-traveled scientist and explorer famous in his time, but for many of us, forgotten today.

         And how do I connect Humboldt to New York City?  It’s a strain, I’ll admit, but in 1869, the centennial of his birth, there were worldwide celebrations, and 25,000 people marched along Manhattan’s flag- and bunting-adorned streets in honor of him.  Today I have to wonder what scientist’s name could inspire such festivities in this busy metropolis.

Humboldt in old age, 1857.

         Here I won’t give a detailed account of Humboldt’s lifelong pursuit of scientific knowledge, but only a few highlights.

·      Though his widowed mother thought him dull-witted and therefore destined for a career in the Prussian public administration, where she could keep an eye on him, his early contact with the botanist on one of Captain James Cook’s voyages to the Pacific inspired in him a longing to become a world traveler and explorer himself, and so escape maternal domination.

·      Even though his passport from King Carlos IV of Spain allowed him to visit Spain’s vast holdings in the Americas from 1799 to 1804, he described objectively what he saw there, and denounced Spain’s monopoly of the booming silver mining in Mexico, and the abject poverty of the people in Mexico City.

·      In 1804, when on his way back to Europe, he was invited to the United States, so President Jefferson could get advice from him about exploring his recent purchase from Napoleon of a huge territory, the so-called Louisiana Purchase, that almost doubled the nation’s size. Jefferson then corresponded with him for years.

·      In that same year he was introduced to Napoleon, whose subsequent coronation he attended.

·      He was a friend of Goethe, who shared many of his interests and delighted in his conversation.

·      The young Charles Darwin signed up for his famous 1835 voyage to the Galapagos Islands as a result of reading Humboldt’s seven-volume account of travels in Spanish America.

·      In 1827 he began giving lectures to European audiences, free and open to both sexes and all classes, about his earlier explorations in Spanish America.  He wanted to summarize all that was known to the natural science of his day, and how it was all interconnected.  As a result, he has been hailed by some as the father of environmentalism.  

·      Little of his personal life is known, but he seems to have fought off an attraction to young men in his early days, and later may have fathered three or more children with the wife of a servant whose family lived with him for years.

·      When, in 1859 at age 90, he died, he received a state funeral in Berlin.  Ten years later, in 1869, the centennial of his birth was celebrated worldwide, with festivities in New York, Buenos Aires, Mexico City, Moscow, Alexandria, Egypt, and Melbourne and Adelaide, Australia.  His fame, a London newspaper reported, was “bound up with the universe itself.”

A statue of Humboldt at the Humboldt University in Berlin, 2015.
Christian Wolf

         Given his deserved renown, I am chagrinned at learning only now something about the career of a man whose name I formerly associated with a sluggish river in the desolate stretches of nineteenth-century Nevada.  Also bearing his name are the Humboldt Current, which flows along the western coast of South America, and the town of Humboldt, South Dakota, in the township of that name, in (I'm not making this up) Minnehaha County.  

          (Never heard of Minnehaha?  For shame!  You must never have read Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's epic poem The Song of Hiawatha, published in1855, where she figures prominently as the love interest of the protagonist, Hiawatha.  I'll say no more of Longfellow's masterpiece, except that it begins "on the shores of Gitche Gumee," a name that has lived in literary infamy ever since.  But I digress; forgive.)

Source note:  This post was inspired by “The Magnetic Polymath,” Miranda Seymour’s substantial review of two recent books on Humboldt in the New York Review of Books of December 5, 2019.  Which proves that I read more than the Sunday New York Times, though not, I confess, The Song of Hiawatha.  

Coming soon: The Killer of Alexander the Great.

©  2020  Clifford Browder.