As he hacked a passage through jungles and mangrove swamps, Von Humboldt’s true genius was revealed. Nothing escaped his notice: tropical seeds, monsoon rainfall and tectonic geology – he studied and analysed everything.

And this is the point at which I would have joined him on his travels, helping him to paddle up the muddy backwaters of the Orinoco. In this vast river, he first saw electric eels – massive ones – with a shock so powerful they could kill.

Von Humboldt’s goal was to catch one, using his expedition horses to lure them to the riverbank. He then dissected them and, with his findings, developed a wholly new way of looking at electricity.

Travelling with Von Humboldt would have been physically exhausting. He carried barometers, thermometers and sextants and collected vast sacks of seedpods. He also uprooted plants and carried them to the coast, from where they were shipped back to Europe. Of the 6,000 species he sent home, one third were previously unknown.

After helping him paddle up the Orinoco, I’d have had to scale the snow-capped Andes and clamber the near-vertical ridges of Mount Chimborazo – Ecuador’s highest peak. Such gruelling treks were never gratuitous: in the case of Mount Chimborazo, he wanted to study the region’s flora and fauna at different altitudes and climactic conditions.

As he read through his botanical notes (with me as his assistant), he began to view the natural world in a radically different light from his contemporaries. He realised that the old scientific classifications failed to acknowledge that every species was part of an interconnected ecosystem. ‘In this great chain of causes and effects,’ he wrote, ‘no single fact can be considered in isolation.’