What Linnaeus Saw
Page 13
Promptly at 7 a.m., the group—a couple hundred young men of various nationalities, and rarely a few women—gathered at a tollgate where the road led out into the countryside. Excitement crackled through the crowd.
Professor Carl Linnaeus organized his “army of botanists” into companies, military style. The general, Linnaeus of course, appointed captains and second lieutenants. Also chosen were shooters to kill birds for close examination, a secretary to record results, and a law enforcer to keep discipline.
The troops came armed with field equipment, including butterfly nets, pins, pocket knives, collapsible microscopes, magnifying glasses, paper, and black lead for writing notes. Most carried a vasculum, a long copper cylinder which opened lengthwise, to keep plant specimens fresh until evening.
Linnaeus varied the experience by alternating among eight routes with different habitats. At stops along the way, he sent the hikers off to explore. In meadows and marshes, they collected plants, insects, stones, reptiles, fish and “little birds that are shot.” When someone made a spectacular find, a bugle was blown to call the group together. Every half hour they gathered so that Linnaeus could guide them in identifying their specimens. He discussed the best ones in detail, yet had something to say about even the least significant finds. Often he added humorous stories, like the one about the German clergyman Pastor Hieronymus Bock who, while writing a book about plants in the 1500s, found one in a field that he didn’t recognize. He asked a student visiting from Sweden if he knew its name. The boy answered in Swedish, “Knäfvelen vet,” meaning “the devil knows.” Thinking the boy had told him the plant’s name, the pastor wrote down what he heard: “Knavel.” Linnaeus had high standards for plant names—no swear words allowed, including this botched spelling of an old Swedish word for “devil.” Linnaeus changed the name to Scleranthus annuus, but his students would always remember the uninteresting-looking weed by its story.
At two o’clock, the hungry group stopped for lunch, sometimes at the invitation of one of Linnaeus’s botanical friends, a local baron whose estate was on the route, or later at one of Linnaeus’s farm cottages in Hammarby and Sävja. Johan Christian Fabricius, a Danish student, described the typical picnic scene:
A table was spread for twenty, provided with fruit and syllabubs [a sweet, foamy milk drink], and those who had found the rarest plants sat with the Master at this table; the rest ate standing up, hoping one day to enjoy the honour all envied and which was enough to stimulate the most lively competition among these young rivals.
At 9 p.m., after an especially long hike, the boisterous, ragtag bunch marched back into Uppsala shouting, “Vivat Linnaeus!” Long live Linnaeus! Fabricius wrote, “They returned into the town with Flowers in their hats, and with Kettle-Drums and Hunting Horns followed their leader to the Garden through the entire Town.”
On their way back, some students did last-minute botanizing in professors’ hop gardens and plucked cabbages from fenced garden patches owned by city officials. Some even climbed onto the low “house roofs in Uppsala, which are covered with green growing sods of turf,” to add to their plant collections. Needless to say, the residents and other professors did not appreciate the noisy nighttime botanical invasions or boys climbing on their roofs.
Linnaeus already was seen as self-important and egotistical among professors whose own classes were much less popular. Some years later, the secretary of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences would write in a letter that everybody valued Linnaeus, but “hardly anyone loves him, not even here.” At one point in 1748, the university forced Linnaeus to stop the rambunctious field trips, at least temporarily.
Botanical excursions were only one way that Linnaeus prepared his students to go out on their own and work independently. His demonstrations in the medical garden and longer expeditions with small groups of student assistants to explore other regions of Sweden also gave them firsthand experience.
Back at the university, students often packed Linnaeus’s lectures and private tutoring sessions. Unlike many professors who droned on as they read their written lectures, Linnaeus was an enthusiastic teacher, animated and funny. He lectured mostly from memory. His teaching methods were nothing like those he’d suffered as a boy, when schoolmasters beat students for giving wrong answers or misbehaving. Those experiences inspired him to be a different kind of teacher. Instead, he won over his students by caring about them—he invited students to dinner, hired some as live-in tutors for his son, helped them secure financial grants. He encouraged them and shared with them his obvious excitement about natural science.
One student recalled that Linnaeus’s voice was not strong or pleasant, and sometimes he slipped into the heavy dialect of Småland, the southern province where he grew up. Knowing that Latin when spoken in his regional accent could be hard for foreign students to understand, Linnaeus often began private lectures with an apology. Another student, who later became a medical professor himself, marveled that Linnaeus “never failed to captivate his audiences. He knew how to emphasize certain words in his short sentences so expressively that no one could possibly fail to be convinced by his argument.” In addition to persuasiveness, the student said:
. . . he had the advantage of a clear mind and incomparable memory, so that he could deliver a long oration or a lecture from a few notes scribbled on a scrap of paper . . . which he would hold between his fingers, marking with his thumb the point he had reached.
Another student noted the professor’s ability to move his listeners:
If Linnaeus spoke of the power and majesty of the Creator, reverence and wonder showed on every face; . . . on the rules of diet, he often made his students roar with laughter by his descriptions of the follies of fashion, using a joke and a light touch to teach a valuable lesson about the care and preservation of health.
Students flocked to Uppsala to study the revolutionary new botanical system with the man who had created it. He was a magnet. He drew students from across the Scandinavian peninsula and from Denmark, Finland, England, Germany, Spain, Italy, Russia, Switzerland, and even South Africa. They were various ages, some as young as nine but most between twenty-five and thirty-five years old. They came from families rich and poor. Sons of a wealthy nobleman from Russia were sent by the tsar to learn the Linnaean system, but many of his students were penniless sons of rural Swedish clergymen, as he had been.
During Linnaeus’s thirty-five years as a professor, he taught hundreds of students. Most became physicians. Some made their careers as surgeons and veterinarians, others botanists and naturalists, as well as mine inspectors, government officials, and clergymen. Twenty-three became professors teaching at various European universities. But seventeen of his best and bravest students became explorers. Although he never used the word in print, informally Linnaeus called those traveling disciples his “apostles.”
Between 1745 and 1799, the “apostles” took part in important scientific expeditions to distant regions of the world. They had no idea whether they’d make it back alive; in fact, several didn’t.
How did the dream of one man propel so many others to take such risks? Why did these young people choose to go on such dangerous journeys into the unknown?
Like their professor, they were passionate about the world’s plants and animals. The natural world was not only their classroom, it was their life’s work. They thrilled at its wonders. They longed to solve its mysteries. They too saw the urgent need for taking stock of all the world’s species. They believed in their professor’s work and wanted to contribute. But they were individuals, and their reasons weren’t only idealistic; they also needed to launch their careers.
Why did Linnaeus encourage them to go? For his part, Linnaeus had had enough roughing it in Sápmi to last him a lifetime. He liked the comforts of home and family. Still, he needed data to accomplish the task that he and Peter Artedi had begun back when they were students. These rugged young explorers could assist him in two ways: by discovering new species—the d
ata—to help complete his global list, and also by spreading enthusiasm for his revolutionary system.
What part did Linnaeus play in the travel of these young naturalists? He suggested places to explore. He wangled money for their trips through grants from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, wealthy patrons, and governments. He leaned on his carefully cultivated global network of influential botanists, monarchs, and sea captains to help them find paying jobs as ship’s doctors, surgeons, chaplains, or naturalists on expeditions and as tutors of the children of men stationed at colonial outposts. For some of his students, he was able to secure promises of professorial posts at universities or botanical gardens for their return.
Later Linnaeus would depict this as a grand campaign, planned and directed from “central command” in Uppsala. But in fact, these former students were now adults. They were well-trained scientists, taught by the best. They chose to venture out in the name of science. They were heavily inspired, of course, by their charismatic teacher, but he didn’t “send” them. He was the persuader-in-chief.
The sea routes of some of Linnaeus’s student “apostles” traced on a map of the globe.
These explorations had a discouraging start. In 1746, Linnaeus’s first “apostle,” Christopher Tärnström, died of a tropical fever on an island near Vietnam in the South China Sea. He was thirty-five years old and left behind a family back in Sweden, two daughters and a devastated wife who blamed Linnaeus. The death shook Linnaeus deeply. From then on, he encouraged travel only among strong young bachelors who could sleep as well “on the hardest bench as on the softest bed, but to find a little plant or moss the longest road wouldn’t be too long.”
The travelers were sometimes given direction by their paying sponsors or employers, and by Linnaeus—lists of plants, animals, and minerals to look for on particular continents and protocols for preparing and packing specimens for shipment back to Uppsala. Seeds were folded into paper packets. Acorns, wrapped individually and pressed into a box filled with soft wax, would keep for a year. A plant’s root ball could be shipped if first moistened and tied into an ox bladder. Insects were packed in vials. Small animals were preserved in jars of alcohol or in boxes of fine wood shavings called excelsior. Even when perfectly wrapped, specimens were often lost in transit to insects, rats, dampness, and mold, and even washed overboard by heavy seas.
Over a span of fifty years, nearly twenty of Linnaeus’s former students traveled to North and South America, Africa, Asia, Australia, and islands in the tropical Pacific Ocean, today called Oceania. Some of their trips lasted only a few months; others took as long as ten years. Their journals, filled with stories of hardship, adventure, and scientific discovery, were as varied as the students who wrote them. Linnaeus urged them to write about science in a readable style—to “imitate nature in such a way that anyone reading the description may feel as though they had the objects in front of their eyes.”
They used Linnaeus’s contacts and made new ones of their own. They sweated in the heat of tropical jungles. They froze on the polar ice caps. They crawled through thickets and portaged along roaring rivers. They were building careers. They were the next generation of scientists.
The stories of seven—Pehr Kalm, Daniel Solander, Pehr Löfling, Daniel Rolander, Peter Forsskål, Anders Sparrman, and Carl Peter Thunberg—stood out.
On the globe that sat in Linnaeus’s study, the 60th parallel was of particular interest. It circled through Uppsala, through Scotland, Canada, Alaska, and Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula. Linnaeus was convinced that lands at the same latitude around the world had the same climate. If this was correct, plants thriving in parts of all those countries would also grow in Sweden. To test his theory, in 1748, he urged his next “apostle,” Pehr Kalm, to go to North America.
Kalm’s mission was to collect North American plants that could survive the harsh Swedish climate—chestnut and other nut trees, red and white cedar, sassafras, sugar maples, wild rice, maize, bay myrtle for making candles, potatoes, and wild grapes. Plus, he was to send back shipments of red mulberry, a tree whose leaves were the preferred food of silkworms. The mulberry was expected to launch a silk industry in Sweden. As Linnaeus had done in Sápmi, Kalm also planned to study any plants eaten or used as medicine by the people who lived there. All seeds were to be collected in the most northerly, coldest part of each plant’s range.
Kalm arrived in Philadelphia in September 1748. Along the city’s riverfront, a jagged row of sixty wooden wharves with countless masts and sails, like the ocean’s laundry hung to dry, sprawled a mile in either direction. Kalm stepped from his ship, the Mary Gally, onto the wharf and made his way along cobbled streets to the home of Benjamin Franklin. This distinguished man of science was known to Professor Linnaeus through mutual friends in England.
Franklin received the young man graciously, offering advice, a tour of the city, a place to live—and, most importantly, the loan of books. All winter Kalm read books from Franklin’s library to help in his research of American plants. Needing a place quieter than Franklin’s hectic household to concentrate on his work, he rented a room in a village called Raccoon in what is now Swedesboro in southern New Jersey. Most residents there were descendants of Swedish colonists. The economical landlord kept Kalm’s room so cold that he had to tuck his inkstand in his pocket or warm it on the hearth to keep his pen from freezing. Luckily, Franklin loaned him a wood-burning stove.
In June 1750, Kalm began his trek north then west. Travel was tough. He and his guides portaged along the Hudson River around rapids and waterfalls until they reached one so large they abandoned the canoe and made their way through fifty miles of dense forest. Sometimes they crawled on hands and knees through snake-infested woods and tangles of thorny vines. During the day they sweltered. At night the deafening whine of crickets and cicadas, along with the bites and buzzing of mosquitoes and gnats, kept them awake. Tree branches groaned and snapped above them, sometimes crashing to the ground under the weight of thousands of roosting passenger pigeons.
Kalm pressed plants and described them in detail, even those that seemed to be no particular value. He explained:
I often hear myself reproached when I gather most plants: “He who has nothing else to do must run to and fro and gather moss and more moss for what purpose?” I have found in my travels that the plant most neglected may prove to be the most useful. I have learned that man at first may consider a plant or an insect as a mere curiosity, a nuisance and a trifle in nature. However, when the uses of this new thing are understood, it cannot be too highly valued.
The practical-minded Kalm was right in step with one of his professor’s central themes: commercial usefulness. Botanical explorers were expected to bring back plants that could be cultivated in Sweden and would boost the country’s struggling economy by avoiding the financial drain caused by expensive imports.
Kalm also had a long-range view. He complained about the colonists’ destruction of forests and whole bird populations, saying, “Hardly could we in Sweden and Finland treat our valuable forests with more hostility than is happening here: they look only to immediate profits, and never even dream about the future.”
Like Linnaeus’s Arctic journal, Kalm’s diary recorded experiences and details about the environment and stories of colonial life in North America. All this, he hoped, would be valuable when he began his promised job teaching at a university in Finland.
Kalm was anxious to see what was said to be a spectacular waterfall. A Franciscan missionary claimed it was 600 feet tall. Kalm and a French acquaintance calculated it more accurately at 160 feet, still an impressive height. An excerpt of his description of Niagara Falls, published by Benjamin Franklin in his Pennsylvania Gazette in September 1750, conveys his excitement:
On both sides of this island runs all the water that comes from the Lakes of Canada, [namely] Lake Superior, Lake Michigan, Lake Huron, and Lake Erie, which you know are rather small seas than lakes. . . . When all this water comes to t
he very fall, there it throws itself down perpendicular! The hair will rise and stand upright on your head, when you see this! I cannot with words express how amazing this is! You cannot see it without being quite terrified; to behold so vast a quantity of water falling headlong from so surprizing [sic] a height!
After more than two years in North America, Kalm returned to the port of Stockholm. Linnaeus wrote to a friend, “Take fire-brands and throw them after Professor Kalm that he may come without delay to Uppsala.” But he could not wait: impatient and hurting from a crippling episode of gout, he boarded a boat to Stockholm to meet his student.
Kalm shared his huge collections with his former professor. Even though tensions between French and English colonists in the lead-up to the French and Indian Wars had kept him from traveling as far north into Canada as Linnaeus had hoped, Kalm did bring back hundreds of pressed plants and seeds of species that might survive the cold Swedish climate, including an early-ripening maize, pumpkin, cotton, beans, watermelon, the sugar maple, and three species of walnut trees. Kalm also described an orange dye made from sassafras bark, a blue dye made from red maple, and native sweet potatoes that “almost melt in the mouth.”
Cartographer Lewis Evans made this map expressly for Pehr Kalm’s trip north in 1750. It shows his route from Raccoon, New Jersey, his home base for exploring eastern North America, to Albany and on to Canada. Evans labeled Raccoon, south of Philadelphia, by its church, “T. Suecicum,” meaning “Swedish temple.”
Benjamin Franklin praised him: “Our Friend Mr. Kalm, goes home in this Ship, with a great Cargo of Curious Things. I love the Man, and admire his indefatigable Industry.” But Kalm, consumed by botanical work and a new job at a university in Finland, unfortunately neglected some basic courtesies: acknowledgments and letters of thanks. Franklin did not forget. Even years later, in 1773 during the hectic days before the Revolution, he wrote, “Kalm’s Account of what he learned in America is full of idle Stories, which he pick’d up among ignorant People, and either forgetting of whom he had them, or willing to give them some Authenticity, he has ascrib’d them to Persons of Reputation. . . . It is dangerous conversing with these Strangers that keep Journals.”