by What Linnaeus Saw- A Scientist's Quest to Name Every Living Thing (retail) (epub)
Despite these blunders, Pehr Kalm was the first trained scientist to comprehensively study the natural history of northeastern America. He brought home to Scandinavia 150 live perennial plants and trees and described at least sixty plant species that were new to science. Other curiosities included a hummingbird’s nest, a live opossum, a turtle, three guinea pigs, and, preserved in alcohol, a praying mantis, a star-nosed mole, more turtles, and snakes. The grateful Linnaeus named several plants for Kalm, including the mountain laurel, Kalmia latifolia, today the official state flower of both Pennsylvania and Connecticut.
Linnaeus tried and failed to establish tea plants in Sweden. He thought they could be adapted to the colder climate. He imagined cinnamon groves growing in Sápmi and wild Canadian rice in the lakes of Finland. However, many attempts at same-latitude-same-climate transplants were doomed to fail. Linnaeus’s theory that plants could be successfully transplanted from one place on the same latitude to another had a flaw: latitude was not the only influence on climate. Ocean currents and soil types also affect climate and growing zones. A half century later, the German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt would gather temperature records kept by observers in different parts of the world. For North America, he used temperatures recorded by Pehr Kalm with a thermometer that Linnaeus had given him for the trip—one of the first redesigned Celsius thermometers. Humboldt drew lines on a map connecting points of equal temperature. These lines, called isothermals, crossed through the latitude lines, swooping above and below them. One of the causes was the warming effect of the Gulf Stream on the climates of Europe and coastal North America, observed by Franklin and others.
Pehr Kalm was the first scientist to describe Niagara Falls. This engraving ran in London’s Gentleman’s Magazine in 1751. In the center is a ladder of linden bark, made by members of the Six Nations confederacy.
Another rising star in Linnaeus’s galaxy of students was the friendly and outgoing Daniel Solander, his favorite. They had worked side by side cataloging the royal natural history collections. After pressure from his English friends to send one of his best students to help catalog their collections, Linnaeus suggested that Solander travel briefly to England in 1759. The professor expected that one day this promising young man would be his successor—the next botany professor at Uppsala. He also thought that Solander would marry his daughter. So did Solander. He wrote often from London inquiring about seventeen-year-old Lisa Stina and calling her his “sweetest mademoiselle.”
But when, against his former professor’s advice, Solander declined an important botanical job in Russia and accepted a permanent post at the newly formed British Museum in London, things changed. Five years later, Solander was still in England, and Lisa Stina had married someone else. The circumstances are unknown. Had Lisa Stina ever been in love with Solander? Had Solander’s obsessive passion for plants—like professor, like student—kept him in London too long?
Whatever the cause, Daniel Solander was on the ship Endeavour when Captain James Cook sailed it out of Plymouth harbor in the south of England in 1768 on a dangerous three-year circumnavigation of the globe. Cook’s main goal was to position the ship near Tahiti in the south Pacific as the planet Venus passed in front of the sun. Astronomers onboard were to calculate the distance from the Earth to the Sun.
Cook’s voyages were hardly luxury cruises. Sailors were plagued with scurvy and dysentery. Many died from diseases including malaria and yellow fever. While mapping the coastlines of New Zealand and Australia, the Endeavour ran aground on shoals off the Great Barrier Reef. It took seven weeks to repair the badly damaged hull. However, seven weeks on land was a botanist’s dream—uninterrupted time for plant hunting. It was so productive that Cook later named the place of their first Australian landfall Botany Bay, after the ship’s three botanists.
“The Simpling Macaroni”: a London cartoon from 1772 mocked Daniel Solander. “Simpling” was the collecting and studying of simples, or herbal medicines with only one plant ingredient. Young travelers were often derided as “macaronis” for their fashionable attire, mannerisms, love of Italian food, and rustic lifestyle.
In his last letter to Linnaeus in 1768 from the Endeavour, then anchored off Rio de Janeiro, Solander concluded with greetings to Linnaeus’s family and to “your eldest daughter, whom I had hoped would make me happy.”
All we know is that Lisa Stina landed in an unhappy marriage to an abusive, unfaithful husband, and Solander never married. Still separated by the North Sea and the British Channel, Lisa Stina died in April 1782 and, in a final twist of fate, Solander died four weeks later.
A tropical American plant genus, Solandra, and a few Australian plant species are named for him.
Another traveling “apostle” was Pehr Löfling. He was the teenager who chased hungry goats in Linnaeus’s agriculture survey in 1748. Five years later, the Spanish ambassador told Linnaeus that his country was outfitting an expedition to the Amazon River in South America. They intended to survey the boundary and the natural resources of the colony of New Andalusia, today known as Venezuela. Linnaeus recommended Löfling, one of his most brilliant students.
An evergreen shrub found in Australia by botanists aboard the Endeavour and sketched by one of them, Sydney Parkinson. Carl Linnaeus the Younger named it Banksia serrata in 1782 to honor Joseph Banks, Solander’s friend and the chief botanist onboard.
Löfling jumped at the chance. However, unlike Pehr Kalm, who considered commercial usefulness his main purpose, Löfling had a different motivation. He told Linnaeus up front, “Economy is more of an obligation to me.” What really excited him was pure research. He studied nature to understand it better.
In South America, Löfling hunted for plants and closely observed dolphins and manatees. To him, the Amazon freshwater dolphins seemed more like the animals that gave birth to live young than like fishes. He wrote that these “fish breathe through lungs.”
Löfling died of malaria in Venezuela, at only twenty-seven years old. Linnaeus mourned his passing and named a plant genus, Loeflingia, after him.
Daniel Rolander headed to the same part of the world in 1754. The Spanish had been hiding a secret there for centuries—a mysterious natural product that the Aztecs had used to produce a vivid red color. It was “the brightest, strongest red the Old World had ever seen.” This exotic pigment, called grana cochinilla or cochineal (caw-chin-eel), did not fade or wash out. Artists wanted to paint with it, kings and cardinals wanted to wear clothes dyed with it. Only the wealthiest people could afford it.
One day in 1755, a package arrived at the Uppsala University garden. A gardener opened it and panicked when he found a dying cactus. The plant was being devoured by an infestation of tiny beetles. He killed all the insects and tried desperately to revive the dying cactus.
Illustration of a Mexican cochineal plantation from Sir Hans Sloane’s book, A Voyage to the Islands of Madera, Barbadoes, Nieves, St. Christopher’s and Jamaica—the book that Linnaeus was “traded” for in 1735. In the field, people harvest cochineal beetles, while on the right, a person makes tortillas.
The gardener had no idea that these were rare cochineal beetles, or that Professor Linnaeus had been waiting for months to receive them. Linnaeus wanted to study the live beetles that the Aztecs had ground and dried to make the exotic red dye.
Rolander had finally managed to procure some live beetles at a Dutch colonial plantation. To keep them alive, he carefully packed them with their preferred food plant, a live prickly pear cactus.
Now all the precious beetles were exterminated, and the professor, who suffered from migraines, wound up with his most severe headache ever.
Rolander had grown up in the same province as Linnaeus and attended Växjö Cathedral School. As a boy, he spent hours alone observing insects, even bringing live wasp nests back to his room to study. When he arrived at Uppsala University, Linnaeus liked him right away. “Greatly impressed” by his enthusiasm and keen observations, Linnaeus encouraged him to
submit several papers about insects, including an important one on the deathwatch beetle, to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
When Pehr Löfling left for South America, Rolander took his place as tutor for Linnaeus’s son. For four years, he benefited from daily conversations with his mentor and access to Linnaeus’s library, collections, and gardens. The professor was constantly busy writing books, dissertations for students to defend, and letters to international correspondents and his “apostles” away on expeditions.
In 1754, Linnaeus secured a job for Rolander as tutor to the children of a Swede who owned a large plantation in the Dutch colony of Suriname in South America. In a letter requesting a scholarship to fund Rolander’s trip, Linnaeus praised him. “As you know,” Linnaeus wrote, “for every creative spirit we have a thousand collectors.” This young man was a creative spirit.
Once in Suriname, Rolander found the heat unbearable and the plantation owners’ cruel treatment of slaves shocking. He preferred collecting plant and insect specimens to socializing with the colonists and teaching their children. He spent only seven months there.
Twice he faced serious bouts of fever that delayed his travels by months—first in Amsterdam on his way over and then in Germany on his way back home. Finally strong enough but bankrupt, he returned to Sweden in October 1756. When Linnaeus offered free room and board in his home, Rolander turned it down but promised Linnaeus a tropical plant called Sauvagesia.
No plant came. Soon Linnaeus realized that, unlike other returning “apostles” who eagerly shared their results, Rolander had no intention of giving him any specimens or even letting him see his herbarium. The reasons remain unclear. Rolander may have felt abandoned and blamed Linnaeus for the journey’s difficulties, his suffering and lack of extra financial support during his illnesses. He may have worried that if his Suriname findings were published by Linnaeus first, he would not be able to use them to land a professorship.
Whatever the reason, Linnaeus was furious. He stormed into Rolander’s apartment and took the promised Sauvagesia specimen. Usually Linnaeus’s fiery outbursts dissipated quickly, but not this time. Rolander had created an enemy. Linnaeus never saw Rolander’s enormous plant collection from Suriname. He blocked Rolander from getting a job lecturing on plants. It is not known whether Linnaeus prevented the appointment out of spite or because he did not realize that Rolander had become an expert in plants in addition to insects.
As agreed before the trip, Rolander gave a crate of Suriname insects to a benefactor, who was one of the richest Swedes of the time and had contributed money for Rolander’s trip. The man, a professional entomologist, lived not far from Linnaeus and allowed his neighbor to study the box of insects. Linnaeus wrote later that he “made me a present of every one of them.” As a result, the tenth edition of Systema Naturae, published in 1758, included eighty-five new insect species. Linnaeus gave credit to Rolander for their discovery but renamed each and every one.
Despite the rift, Abraham Bäck, Linnaeus’s best friend and the king’s physician, hired Rolander to direct Stockholm hospital’s new botanical garden. But after a number of jobs and help from another of Linnaeus’s former students, Rolander still couldn’t make a go of his career. He floundered for the rest of his life and never published the seven-hundred-page manuscript he had prepared about his research in Suriname.
Linnaeus named a small beetle Aphanus rolandri. The genus name Aphanus came from the Greek meaning “invisible.” Unfortunately, Rolander’s good work went unnoticed for years and was finally published in 2008.
Pehr Forsskål had already made a serious study of coral reefs near his home in Finland when as a ten-year-old he enrolled himself at Uppsala University. Seventeen years later, while studying with Linnaeus, he wrote a controversial pamphlet about civil liberty and freedom of expression and of the press, which was censured by the political party in power. Linnaeus helped him land a professorship in Denmark. Forsskål sailed on a Danish ship with a scientific expedition to the Sinai Peninsula. He explored Egypt, the Arabian coast of the Red Sea, and Yemen, where he found ninety new species of fish and thirty new genera of plants, and sent many plants home to his professor. Sadly, one after the other, the crew and expedition members died. Forsskål died of malaria in Yemen. Only one expedition member survived.
Linnaeus named a tough plant after this tenacious and persistent young man, Forsskaolea tenacissima.
Anders Sparrman first traveled as a ship’s surgeon on a two-year journey to China. He was only seventeen. At twenty-three, after studying medicine with Linnaeus at Uppsala, he followed in Daniel Solander’s footsteps, joining Captain James Cook on the English explorer’s second circumnavigation of the globe in 1772.
During the Resolution’s four-year voyage, Sparrman explored South Africa, the Cape of Good Hope, New Zealand, Tahiti, and many other Pacific islands, as well as the icy southernmost continent, Antarctica. He was a skilled naturalist, friendly and genuinely interested in people, their languages, and their cultures, and devoted to Linnaeus. He wrote to Linnaeus from the Cape in 1775 that his botanical work was often interrupted by spears, clubs, and poisoned arrows. Sometimes he wrote plant descriptions with a pencil in his right hand, a pistol in his left.
The sloop HMS Resolution anchored near an iceberg while men in small boats collect ice blocks to provide a supply of fresh water on board.
In Antarctica, amid fog, howling wind, icebergs twice as tall as the ship, and beneath rigging trimmed with icicles, Sparrman and his fellow explorers drank to the health of his aging professor back in Uppsala. They ate salted meat and picked weevils out of their moldy biscuits. They shook snow out of the sails. When they had traveled as far as they could among the icebergs, they turned back. As the ship came about, Sparrman, showing his playful sense of humor, ran to the stern of the ship so that he could claim that he’d been farther south than anyone in the world.
Twelve years later, Sparrman embarked on another expedition. His teenage adventure to China was in the distant past now, and Linnaeus had died. This time Sparrman went to Senegal in West Africa. While many of Linnaeus’s traveling “apostles” set off as students and returned seasoned naturalists, Sparrman experienced a different transformation. He was already a seasoned naturalist. He returned an abolitionist, adding his voice to those who wanted the inhumane practice of slavery stopped.
During three months of exploring West Africa’s coastal environment for native plants and animals, Sparrman and his colleague, a Swedish mining engineer, were eyewitnesses to the brutal horrors of the transatlantic slave trade. They talked with slave traders, enslaved people, and several African kings. On their return to Europe in 1788, they testified about what they had seen in Senegal at a government inquiry before the British Board of Trade in London.
Sparrman, a medical doctor, explained that the French Senegal Company’s director had asked him to examine some prisoners in the company’s dungeons. Dr. Sparrman found the captives desperate and their conditions miserable. His testimony was summarized in the hearing record:
The slaves he [Sparrman] saw expressed the greatest Concern and Apprehension at the Loss of their Liberty. Many of those he witnessed in his physical Capacity, on his feeling their Pulse and examining them, trembled with Fear, thinking he was a Purchaser, and would send them to the Islands, which they dread.
Sparrman’s fellow traveler had accompanied him into the dungeons. “Their situation was very pitiful,” he told the British House of Commons, “. . . particularly one, who was lying in his blood, which flowed from a wound from a ball [bullet] in his shoulder.”
In addition to describing the atrocities by slave traders, the two Swedes praised the Africans’ economic development and their skillful cultivation of maize, sugar, tobacco, cotton, rice, and indigo—exotic plant crops that Europeans clamored for. Sparrman’s colleague raved about the beautiful gold craftsmanship in Senegal: “I never have seen better made articles of that kind in Europe.”
As curato
r of the natural history collections of the Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences and a practicing physician, Dr. Sparrman was known in intellectual circles. With no financial stake in the slave trade, he was considered an impartial and rational scientific observer. After testifying, Sparrman returned home to his work. Even though he’d played only a small part in the overall abolitionist struggle, his testimony swayed the committee and impressed William Wilberforce, a member of Parliament. Wilberforce used Sparrman’s account during his campaigning, which eventually led to the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833.
In 1782, Carl Linnaeus the Younger named a shrub or small tree that grows in the open woodlands of Africa, South Africa, and Madagascar Sparrmannia africana. Up close, its dramatic clusters of white flowers with red and yellow stamens look like miniature fireworks.
After Carl Peter Thunberg visited Japan, this adaptation of Georg Ehret’s floral plate was published in Shokugaku Keigen, an influential 1837 book which introduced Linnaeus’s plant classification system to Japan.
The last “apostle,” Carl Peter Thunberg, explored South Africa, Sri Lanka, and Indonesia, and was the first Western naturalist to visit Japan in a hundred years. He learned about Japanese plants and medicine and taught Western medicine to Japanese practitioners in 1775 and 1776. He was so successful in spreading the Linnaean system there that his fame has endured. During the 2007 celebrations of Linnaeus’s three-hundredth birthday, the Japanese emperor, himself a university-trained marine scientist, visited Sweden to pay his respects to Thunberg’s teacher.