The Invention of Nature

Marsh was certainly more scholarly than entrepreneurial. In the 1840s he had helped to establish the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC – the United States’ first national museum. He had published a dictionary of Nordic languages and was an expert on English etymology. He had also been a congressman for Vermont in Washington, but even his loyal wife admitted that her husband was not the most inspiring politician. He was, Caroline Marsh said, ‘entirely without oratorical charm’. Marsh tried his hand at so many different professions that one friend quipped, ‘If you live much longer you will be obliged to invent trades.’

There was one thing Marsh was certain about: he wanted to travel and see the world. The only problem was that he never had enough money. The solution, he had decided in spring 1849, was to seek a diplomatic post. His dream posting would have been Humboldt’s hometown of Berlin, but Marsh’s hopes were dashed when a senator from Indiana, who also had his eyes set on Berlin, sent several cases of champagne to Washington with which to bribe the politicians who would decide on the candidate. Within hours the men were in such ‘a state of fearful intoxication’, Marsh heard from friends, that they were dancing and singing. By the end of the night the drunken politicians announced that the senator from Indiana would be going to Berlin.

Marsh was determined to live abroad. Having been a congressman for several years, he was certain that with his contacts in DC he would be able to find a position. If not Berlin, then he would go elsewhere. He was lucky, because a few weeks later, at the end of May 1849, he was made the American Minister to Turkey in Constantinople with instructions to expand trade between the countries. Though it was not Berlin, the lure of the Ottoman Empire at the crossroads between Europe, Africa and Asia was exciting enough. The administrative tasks were supposed to be ‘very light’, Marsh told a friend. ‘I shall be at liberty to be absent from Constantinople a considerable part of the year.’

And so he was. Over the next four years Marsh and his wife Caroline travelled a great deal through Europe and parts of the Middle East. They were a happy couple. Intellectually, Caroline was very much her husband’s equal – she read almost as voraciously as he did, published her own collection of poems and edited every article, essay or book that her husband ever wrote. She was vocal about womens’ rights – as was Marsh, who supported female suffrage and education. Caroline was sociable, lively and a ‘brilliant talker’. She often teased Marsh, who was prone to gloom, for being an ‘old owl’ and ‘a croaker’.

Much of her adult life, though, Caroline struggled with ill health – an excruciating back pain that often left her unable to walk for more than a few steps. Over the years, doctors prescribed a wide assortment of remedies from sea bathing to sedatives and iron supplements, but nothing had helped and just before they left for Turkey, a doctor in New York pronounced her mysterious illness ‘incurable’. Marsh nursed her devotedly and often carried her in his arms. Amazingly, Caroline still managed to join her husband on most of his travels. Sometimes she was carried by local guides, and at others she had to lie on a contraption that was strapped on a mule or even a camel, but she was always in good spirits and determined to accompany Marsh.

When they first travelled from the United States to Constantinople, they made a detour of several months to Italy, but their first real expedition was to Egypt. In January 1851, a year after their arrival in Constantinople, they went to Cairo and then sailed down the Nile. From the deck of their boat they saw an exotic world unfold. Date palms lined the river and crocodiles basked in the sun on sandbanks. Pelicans and flocks of cormorants accompanied them and Marsh admired the herons that were gazing at their own reflections in the water. They acquired a young ostrich ‘fresh from the Desert’, who often rested his head on Caroline’s knees. They saw a patchwork of fields hugging the river, planted with rice, cotton, beans, wheat and sugarcane. From early dawn to late at night they heard the creaking wheels of the irrigations systems – long chains of jars and buckets pulled by oxen that delivered the Nile’s water to the surrounding fields. Along their way, they stopped at the remains of the ancient city of Thebes where Marsh carried Caroline through the great temples, and further south they visited the pyramids of Nubia.

Fields and terraces along the Nile at Nubia