When the first copies came off the printing presses in mid-May 1839, Darwin sent one to Humboldt in Berlin. Not knowing where to direct his correspondence, Darwin asked a friend ‘for I know no more than if I had to write to the King of Prussia & the Emperor of all the Russias’. Nervous about sending the book to his idol, Darwin employed flattery and wrote in his covering letter that it had been Humboldt’s accounts of South America that had made him want to travel. He had copied out long passages from Personal Narrative, Darwin told Humboldt, so that ‘they might ever be present in my mind’.
