‘All the while I am writing now my head is running about the Tropics,’ wrote Charles Darwin to his sister Caroline from his student rooms in Cambridge in April 1831. ‘I go and gaze at Palm trees in the hot-house and come home and read Humboldt: my enthusiasm is so great that I cannot hardly sit still on my chair.’ Early the next year, Darwin sailed into the harbour of Santa Cruz aboard the Beagle, picturing to himself ‘all the delights of fresh fruit growing in beautiful valleys, & reading Humboldt's descriptions of the Island's glorious views’. Shaping the young Darwin's scientific imagination was the work of the Prussian scientist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859), whose bold new vision of the natural world understood the forces of nature as a series of dynamic, interconnected systems. Humboldt was not interested in collecting isolated facts but in representing nature ‘as one great whole, moved and animated by internal forces’ (CO I, ix). Not only did his narratives revolutionise how people thought about their world. Their accompanying illustrations also brought scientific findings into visual dialogue with each other in ways that continue to inform our understanding of ecosystems today. Humboldt's account of his voyage to the Americas with the French botanist Aimé Bonpland between 1799 and 1804 inspired many others besides Darwin. The poet Robert Southey considered Humboldt so eminent that he was ‘among travellers what Wordsworth is among poets’ (Southey 1965: II, 231). To fellow scientists like the British botanist Joseph Dalton Hooker, Humboldt was, quite simply, a ‘God’ (Hooker 1918: II, 127).

But what had fascinated the young Darwin was not the rich prose of Humboldt's travel account in its French original, the Relation historique du voyage aux régions équinoxiales du nouveau continent (1814–25). It was that of the English translation, the Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent (1814–29). The ‘glorious views’ of Santa Cruz were therefore not entirely of Humboldt's making. They were also indebted to the linguistic creativity of this work's trans¬lator, the sentimental poet and radical writer Helen Maria Williams. The role played by translators– particularly women– in the develop¬ment of science still remains a neglected field of study.