The Prussian naturalist Alexander von Humboldt sailed for Spanish America on the Pizarro. He arrived in the Spanish viceroyalty of New Granada (in the area of modern Venezuela), at the start of his five years of exploration in South America.
Friedrich Wilhelm Heinrich Alexander von Humboldt (September 14, 1769 – May 6, 1859) was a Prussian geographer, naturalist and explorer, and the younger brother of the Prussian minister, philosopher and linguist Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835). Humboldt's quantitative work on botanical geography laid the foundation for the field of biogeography.
Between 1799 and 1804, Humboldt travelled extensively in Latin America, exploring and describing it for the first time in a manner generally considered to be a modern scientific point of view. His description of the journey was written up and published in an enormous set of volumes over 21 years. He was one of the first to propose that the lands bordering the Atlantic Ocean were once joined (South America and Africa in particular). Later, his five-volume work, Kosmos (1845), attempted to unify the various branches of scientific knowledge. Humboldt supported and worked with other scientists, including Joseph-Louis Gay-Lussac, Justus von Liebig, Louis Agassiz, Matthew Fontaine Maury and Georg von Neumayer, most notably Aime Bonpland, with whom Humboldt conducted much of his scientific exploration.
Humboldt sailed from Coruma, Spain, for Spanish America aboard the Pizarro. Accompanying him was French botanist Aime Jacques Alexandre Bonpland. Bonpland traveled with Humboldt to Cuba, Mexico and the Andes. Bonpland became a professor of natural sciences at Buenos Aires from 1818 to 1821 and was imprisoned by the dictator of Paraguay from 1821 to 1830.
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