Aimé Bonpland Biography

Aimé Bonpland

(Aimé, Amado or Amadeo Jacques Alexandre Bonpland; La Rochelle, 1773-Saint Anne, 1858) French naturalist.A member of the scientific expedition that accompanied Humboldt to South America, he collected the results of that trip in several volumes.His work Journey to the equinoctial regions of the new continent (1813 and 1815) stands out.

Amado Bonpland, a French scholar who lived in Argentina in 1817 in 1858, he was a doctor and botanist, academic and horse gaucho, farmer and industrialist, scholar and simple man; He rendered multiple services to Argentina and his biography could serve as a plot for a novel.The son of a doctor and farmer, he was born in La Rochelle on August 28, 1773.He studied medicine in Paris, but his vocation inclined him to the natural sciences, particularly botany, and he listened with fervor to the classes of the greats: Jean-Baptiste by Lamarck, René Desfontaines and Antoine Laurent de Jussieu.

Bonpland later moved to Rochefort, where he studied naval surgery, later being posted by the navy to the port of Toulon and assigned to the ship Ajax; but later he left his post and returned to Paris.There he had been fortunate to be admitted to the circle of friends of the physician and professor Jean-Nicolas Corvisart des Marets, a man of great prestige and Napoleon Bonaparte's first physician.Among them was the German naturalist and traveler Alexander von Humboldt, whom he had the opportunity to meet in 1798 or 1799, establishing a deep and fruitful friendship with him that decisively influenced his future.Both young men had a passion for the natural sciences; Humboldt had already written his Flora of Freiburg , but Bonpland had delved deeper into botanical studies.Both exchanged their knowledge: Humboldt dealt with mineralogy and meteorology; Bonpland, of Comparative Anatomy and Botany.

As a result, Bonpland and Humboldt decided to join and participate in the scientific expedition to Egypt (1798-1801) organized by Napoleon, although once in Marseille they were disappointed when verifying that the ship that was supposed to transport them did not come, so they had to give up the trip.Dreaming of expeditions to other continents, they began by walking almost all of France and Spain collecting specimens and studying stones, plants, animals or the sky; nothing escaped them.In Spain, Minister Mariano Luis de Urquijo gave them a passport to Latin America.

Finally, in 1799, they embarked on the great adventure to the other side of the Atlantic.They embarked in La Coruña, aboard the Spanish war corvette Pizarro, bound for Havana; they planned to move on to Mexico, cross the Pacific, and head for the Philippines.His goal was to go around the world.They took advantage of a stopover in Gran Canaria to herbalize and ascend the Teide peak.But the corvette Pizarro did not reach Havana.An epidemic on board forced a change of course and the traveling scientists had to disembark in Cumaná, Venezuela.

Humboldt and Bonpland in the Amazon rainforest (Oil by Eduard Ender)

The American adventure of Humboldt and Bonpland began there.This stage lasted more than five years.Practically the entire northwest of South America was explored by them: from the Orinoco basin to Peru, from the source of the Amazon to Quito; They ascended Chimborazo and Cotopaxi, explored Mexico and the island of Cuba and even, on their return trip, they went to Philadelphia and Washington, invited by President Thomas Jefferson.Upon their return to Europe they were received with great respect by scientific circles.They gave the Museum of Paris forty-five drawers with some 60,000 specimens of herbal plants, many of which were of genera and species hitherto unknown to science.Humboldt himself pointed out that this huge herbarium had been made by Bonpland, who had described more than four-fifths of it.

In 1805, by Napoleon's imperial decree, the donated collections were accepted and assigned to Bonpland an annual pension of three thousand francs, which was recommended by those who had been his teachers: Lamarck, Jussieu, and Desfontaines.Empress Josefina Bonaparte wanted to meet the already famous sage and invited him to his residence, which Bonpland attended bringing as a present a collection of seeds brought from America.The Empress urged him to plant and care for them in the greenhouses of her gardens, and appointed Bonpland mayor of the Malmaison, a castle located in the town of Rueil, in the department of the Seine and Oise, on the banks of the first of these rivers and near Paris, where she would reside from 1809 (the year she was repudiated by Napoleon Bonaparte) until her death in 1814.

The attention of the imperial garden distracted Bonpland quite a bit from his botanical studies, especially from the description of the specimens collected in America, which made Humboldt uneasy.On Josefina's death in 1814, the naturalist found himself lost and wished to return to America.Despite this, in 1815 the first volume of the monumental work Nova genera et species plantarum (New Genera and Species of Plants) appeared, the publication of which took ten years to complete.The large volume received the praise of two great sages of the time, Gay-Lussac and François Arago.

In 1814, 1815 and 1816, Bonpland made several trips to London, where he treated Bolívar and to other South American patriots, among whom was Bernardino Rivadavia, who spoke with enthusiasm about the future of the Silver countries.These words and the defeats of the Venezuelan patriots decided him to embark for Buenos Aires.Many years later, in a letter sent in 1840 to Dr.Pedro Serrano, General Paz's army physician, Bonpland would express the singular love for the American lands that his trip with Humboldt had awakened and his support for the emancipation of Spanish America, referring to modestly to his "small services" to the independence cause.Forty-one years later he would live in those lands; for nine years he was a prisoner of a South American dictator (in Paraguay), and then he remained in the fledgling nations until his death, always a prisoner (but now a volunteer) of his love for the plains, jungles and rivers of the Plata region.

At the end of 1816 he embarked with his wife Adelaine (twenty years his junior), their daughter Emma and two gardeners.He arrived in Buenos Aires in 1817, bringing his library, seeds, 2,000 plants, 500 feet of vines, 600 willows, and 40 orange and lemon trees.After a short stay in an inn, near the Fort, he settled in the so-called "Hueco de los Sauces", where today the Plaza Garay is located, and started his plantations there.The naturalist was received with great interest by Buenos Aires society: Vicente Fidel López describes his visits to the gatherings of the De Luca family, and tells that he arranged his umbrella, upon entering, next to the sword of José de San Martín, whom he had known at the house of Mariquita Sánchez de Thompson.

Aimé Bonpland

At that time, Bonpland herbalized in the surroundings of Buenos Aires, and on the island Martín García found yerba mate plants that the Jesuit priests had brought.This was Bonpland's first contact with the so-called "Paraguayan tea", and the prelude to a later stage in the sage's life: yerba mate and its cultivation, which would become a true obsession for him.Bonpland had big projects: building a botanical garden, reorganizing the Museum of Natural History, studying the nature of the entire territory, reaching Tucumán; But he was only able to travel to Areco and Chascomús, without receiving practically any help, since the country was committed to sustaining the San Martín company and divided by the civil war.

As he could not live only with practice of medicine, he decided to go to the area of ​​the old Jesuit missions, between the Paraná and Uruguay rivers, where yerba mate grows spontaneously.He left alone, in October 1820, leaving his wife, whom he would never see again, as she later returned to France.In the then Republic of Entre Ríos, which also included the current provinces of Corrientes and Misiones, Bonpland studied the flora of the region and decided to found an agricultural establishment to dedicate himself to the cultivation of yerba mate.In 1821, the newly created University of Buenos Aires appointed him professor of medical matters, but he did not come to take over the chair, because in Corrientes he had achieved the confidence of the Supreme Entrepreneur, Francisco Ramírez, who was enthusiastic about the prospect that the yerba mate business could offer.

Bonpland settled in the place called Santa Ana, where he makes his elbow the Alto Paraná, almost in front of the Paraguayan city of Encarnación.There he installed an agricultural colony with a group of indigenous peons, and after six months his work began to bear fruit.At that time, Paraguay was governed by Dr.José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia, with the title of Perpetual Dictator and the treatment of "Excellence", which he himself demanded, to the point of having the letters sent to him returned without that denomination.In fact, he was a doctor of theology and laws, and a graduate of the Argentine University of Córdoba.There, according to what is said, his Cordovan classmates, with their traditional penchant for giving nicknames, called him "the black cat".

Doctor Francia believed that Bonpland was a spy, as he was French and a friend of Ramírez and the artiguistas caudillos.In addition, it considered that the territory of the Missions where it was installed belonged to Paraguay.But above all, he could not allow anyone to conspire against the Paraguayan monopoly on yerba mate.On December 8, 1821, at midnight, a force of five hundred Paraguayan soldiers crossed the river and entered the Santa Ana plantations with fire and blood.They set fire to the ranches and the yerbal, beat the defenseless peons, and killed nineteen of them.them and seized sixty-three.Bonpland, although he did not resist, was wounded with a saber blow to the head and then tied with chains and taken prisoner to the other bank of the river, to Itapúa, near Encarnación.

The captivity of Bonpland in Paraguayan lands, where the request for clemency from many world personalities, including Bolívar, who wrote to José Gaspar de Francia reached.But the prisoner learned nothing of it.Confined to the south of the country, in Santa María, department of Misiones, he practiced medicine and pharmacy, in addition to dedicating himself to the distillation of essences and promoting the progress of culture in those lands.Barefoot, he spoke Guaraní with his patients, cultivated the land, and sold his honey sitting on the ground in the recesses of Itapúa.Nine years passed and one day in February 1831, without any explanation, Bonpland was released and ordered to quickly leave Paraguayan territory.The following year he arrived in Buenos Aires, after wandering through southern Brazil.He was then 59 years old.At no time did he complain about his captivity; He spoke kindly of the sweet Paraguayan people and was still enthusiastic, as when he was young, when discovering the natural beauties of the subtropical zone.

In Palermo he met with Juan Manuel de Rosas and found no sympathy for his work.From Europe they demanded it; He knew that honors awaited him there, but Bonpland had already made his decision and would never abandon those lands in which he had taken root.He settled on the Uruguay River and founded an establishment in San Borja, in Brazil, and another on the Argentine coast, near Paso de los Libres, in a place that he called Santa Ana, after the destroyed missionary colony.When Justo José de Urquiza spoke out against Rosas, Bonpland joined the Entre Ríos caudillo.He visited it frequently in his palace in San José and contributed his botanical knowledge to the magnificent park.Later, as a doctor, he assisted the soldiers of the Big Army.

Bonpland's old age on the shores of the Uruguay River was not only contemplative.On the contrary, the sage undertook new tasks; he tried sheep farming, periodically visited the city of Montevideo, and resumed his forgotten correspondence.It was written with Berón de Astrada, José María Paz, Juan Lavalle, Madariaga, Hilario Ascasubi and Valentín Alsina.He had married a second nuptials with a Creole, with whom he had three children from Corrientes: Carmen, Amado and Anastasio, born, respectively, in 1843, 1845 and 1847.Years later a grandson, Pompeyo, received his medical degree in Buenos Aires.

His native country agreed to give Bonpland a lifetime pension and the Cross of the Legion of Honor.The Academy of Paris made him an academic.The King of Prussia made him a knight of the royal order of the Red Eagle.Europe what he claimed and covered him with honors, but Bonpland stayed in the Silver.He accepted from the governor of Corrientes, Dr.Juan José Pujol, the position of director of the Museum of Natural History of the provincial capital.

At the age of eighty-five he fell ill in his establishment in Santa Ana, and died on May 11, 1858.When he learned of the sage's death, his friend, Governor Pujol, ordered that his remains, embalmed at the spontaneous request of the people, be sent to the capital of the province to be buried.Before being buried, the embalmed body of Amado Bonpland was veiled in a room on the street in the small town of Paso de los Libres.It is said that, as a tribute, friends and neighbors left doors and windows open and the room illuminated.The body of the wise man was lying at night, in the mortuary room, which had been left alone.A drunken civilian from Corrientes, who stopped in front of the door, was struck by that quiet man, dressed in a tailcoat, pale and yellowish, who was lying under the candlelight; he greeted him and, outraged by the lack of response, stabbed the corpse.

The French naturalist bequeathed the fruits of his industriousness and erudition in a herbarium made up of 30,000 species, in various botanical treatises and in other works, including some written in collaboration with Humboldt, in particular twelve volumes of the monumental work Voyage aux regions equinoxiales du Nouveau Continent ( Journey to the equinoctial regions of the new continent ) and two others of the same work corresponding to the part titled Vue des cordillères et monuments des peuples indigènes de l'Amérique .The German botanist Karl Sigismund Kunth (1788-1850) also participated in this great work, who in 1813 moved to Paris to collaborate in the writing of Mimosées et autres plantes légumineuses du Nouveau Continent and Methodical distribution of the famille des graminées .Kunth was also the author, along with Humboldt, of several more volumes on the famous voyage.