Alexander von Humboldt’s account of his American voyage (1799-1804) functionalises the body in the colonies. The traveller’s body endures strains, pains, dangers, diseases, selfexperimentation and drugs; experiences that are compensated by therapeutical effects and assuaged by acclimatisation. America is imagined to be a body which, at first glance, appears destined for rape, while the text subtly codes it as a candidate for emancipation. The indigenous bodies seem to be ‘strange’, yet a series of transcultural performances subverts the difference between European and American physicality. Over the course of the voyage, Humboldt’s colonial poetics of the body are altered.