In the previous year Bolívar had written a letter to Humboldt that underlined how important his descriptions of South America’s nature had been. It had been Humboldt’s evocative writing that had ‘uprooted’ him and his fellow revolutionaries from ignorance, Bolívar wrote; it had made them proud of their continent. Humboldt was the ‘discoverer of the New World’, Bolívar insisted. And it may well have been Humboldt’s obsessive interest in South American volcanoes that also inspired Bolívar’s rallying call to unite his country in their fight: ‘a great volcano lies at our feet … [and] the yoke of
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