Pehr Kalm’s depiction of a Native American
Seventeen
So Many New and Unknown Parts
Linnaeus, meanwhile, continued to anoint apostles from among his students, scraping together a patchwork of free passages and scant funds, and dispatching them to their fate. There is a great deal to admire in the apostles themselves. They were, after all, risking their lives in the service of knowledge, a risk nobly undertaken and executed with sincerity. Linnaeus certainly did not force them into the field; they were eager to go. As demonstrated by the independent Adanson, the former prodigy of the Jardin, they were not the only naturalists straying far from home on improvised and slender means. But the first wave of Linnaeus’s apostles produced an extraordinary number of harsh lessons, and cautionary tales.
In Pehr (Peter) Kalm, the second apostle, Linnaeus ran up against the protracted nature of the journeys, and the fact that even an acolyte ultimately wished to lead a life of his own. “I found that I was now come into a new world,” Kalm reported, landing in Philadelphia in September of 1748. “Wherever I looked to the ground, I everywhere found such plants as I had not seen before…. I was seized with terror at the thought of ranging so many new and unknown parts of natural history.”
His first stop was the home of a forty-two-year-old printer with a reputation as an amateur savant. “I invited him to lodge at my house,” Benjamin Franklin would fondly recall, “and offered him any service in my power.” Franklin and Kalm were soon debating North American geology, pondering evidence that seemed to suggest the continent had once been covered with water. Franklin showed him samples of a mineral called asbestos (“It came from New England, stones there are utilized for fireplaces, because it does not change or crumble in the least from the action of fire”), and together they experimented with feeding ants and designing more efficient candles. When Kalm moved into his own quarters for the winter, Franklin gave him one of his latest inventions, the improved Franklin stove.
Kalm enjoyed himself so thoroughly in the Colonies that the following spring he was reluctant to head north to Canada (with some reason, as the region was embroiled in the French-Canadian War), but leave he did in May of 1749. Accompanied by a manservant, he borrowed a birchbark canoe and paddled up the Hudson River, encountering by his account hostile natives brandishing scalps, and then even more hostile French soldiers, who suspected him of being a spy for the English. In a letter to Franklin, Kalm reported (in somewhat creaky English) on a sight only a few travelers had described before, the astonishing falls called Niagara.
It is the most rapid water in the world…. When all this water comes to the very fall, then it throws it self there down perpendicular; the hairs will rise and stand upright upon your head, when you sees this; I can not with words express how amazing this is.
Kalm ventured farther north reluctantly, and never traveled as far as the expected Canadian latitudes that paralleled Sweden. His instructions from Linnaeus were to range as far north as Hudson Bay, but Kalm came to a halt only a little past Quebec City. The land was “five times worse than the Lapland region,” he reported. “Nothing of value grows in the northern part of Canada; my time is too precious to waste it there.” At any rate, the arctic beyond was dominated by the “Esquimaux” people, who, he reported, “are false and treacherous, and cannot suffer strangers among them…. They kill all that come in their way, without leaving a single one alive.”
He did not mention the real reason it had taken him a year and a half to travel from Philadelphia to Canada: He had fallen in love with a widow in New Jersey, whom he was anxious to marry. When the stoic Finn and his American bride finally departed for Europe in 1751, Franklin was sad to see him go. “Our friend Mr. Kalm, goes home in this Ship, with a great cargo of curious things,” he wrote. “I love the man, and admire his indefatigable Industry.”
Realizing that he had likely disappointed the master, Kalm bypassed Uppsala and headed instead for his homeland of Finland. He delayed meeting with Linnaeus for months, until Linnaeus sent a pointed letter. “Take burning firebrands and throw them at Professor Kalm,” he wrote, “so that he might come without delay to Uppsala, for I long for him as a bride for the hour of one o’clock at night.” The bounty Kalm laid before Linnaeus’s feet was, in fact, impressive. It included cuttings of sugar maple (the source of maple syrup), gourds of native squash, a North American variety of ginseng, a winter-hearty mulberry tree, and a quantity of blue lobelia, a plant touted by the Cherokee as a cure for syphilis.
Sadly, none of these plants delivered on its promise. Before its supposed cure could be tested, the lobelia withered and died. (Linnaeus labeled it Lobelia siphilitica anyway.) The mulberry and sugar maple refused transplantation. And while the squash yielded what Linnaeus called “beautiful and ripe fruit,” he couldn’t interest anyone in eating it, much less converting it into a commercial crop. He rewarded his apostle to North America with literal laurels, naming the entire genus of New World laurel trees Kalmia in his honor, but ultimately their relationship grew strained. Linnaeus’s lofty expectations had not been met.
For the next several years Kalm begged Linnaeus to send him back to North America on a second expedition, to give him another chance and to assuage the homesickness of his American bride. His appeals were ignored. He accepted the snub, thanked Linnaeus for his “peculiar friendship and kindness,” and settled down to teach botany in Finland for the rest of his days.
The third apostle provided a painful reminder that ranging great distances took a physical toll. The pupil Fredrik Hasselqvist (“modest, polite, cheerful and intelligent,” according to Linnaeus) departed for the Middle East in 1749, having picked that destination after hearing Linnaeus complain about a lack of specimens from the region. He had a tenuous connection, a relative who was Consul-General in Smyrna, but he departed with a thin purse, and less than robust health. After five months in Egypt, Hasselqvist was destitute and suffering from a wasting disease that was likely tuberculosis. Linnaeus raised and sent sufficient funds to rescue him (a sum one-third greater than Linnaeus’s own annual salary), but instead of heading straight home, Hasselqvist ignored his health and wended through Egypt, Palestine, and Syria, attempting to collect as many specimens as possible. He died in the field in 1752, two and a half years into his mission.
Linnaeus mourned the death of Hasselqvist, eulogizing him as “like a lamp whose oil is consumed.” But he was further aggrieved to find that creditors had seized “all his collections of natural curiosities, observations and manuscripts, which they would not part with, until their demands were satisfied…. We knew no means of collecting on a sudden such a sum of money.”
This was “a double death, since not only he has disappeared, but also all his work.” Linnaeus appealed to the queen of Sweden, who paid the debt out of her own purse. Unfortunately, it was not an act of largesse but a purchase. She ordered Hasselqvist’s collection delivered directly to her at Drottningholm Palace, where she exhibited them as curiosities; Linnaeus, who had counted on adding them to his collection, was instead compelled to examine them on visits. After the expense of over six hundred pounds, as well as a life, he swore off future expeditions, vowing never again to send an apostle abroad.
That vow was almost immediately broken. After seven years of faithful service in Linnaeus’s household, Peter Lofling, affectionately nicknamed the Vulture, had grown into a physically impressive young man, and he was anxious to embark on his own adventure.
Lofling had completed his graduate thesis (on the taproots of trees) in 1749, and was voted into the Swedish Academy in 1751. As his mentor himself admitted, he seemed well suited for the rigors of exploration. “It was a matter of complete indifference to him whether he slept on the hardest boards or in the softest bed,” Linnaeus wrote, “but to find a little plant or scrap of moss the longest road was not too long for him.” It was time for him to go, but with no funds at hand Linnaeus kept him busy by sending him to Madrid, where King Fernando VI requested assistance in building a royal botanical garden.
In October of 1753, the Spaniards invited Lofling to join a surveying party, seeking to fix the borders between several South American possessions of Spain and Portugal. Linnaeus gladly gave him permission to go, cheered that at last an apostle of his would not be a solo traveler but part of a proper expedition. The master bade his student to preserve butterflies between the pages of books, and worms in brandy; Swedish aquavit would be in short supply.
After fifty-five days at sea, Lofling landed in Venezuela in April of 1754. On the long overland journey to Nueva Barcelona, he reported “colic and pains throughout my body…pains in the whole body and spine.” He pressed on, but by the time the expedition had reached Guyana he was too weak to go farther. Racked with intermittent fevers, he died on February 22, 1756.
The expedition buried him under an orange tree, and marched on.
“The great Vulture is dead,” Linnaeus lamented. “Lofling gave his life for Flora and her lovers, and they mourn his loss…. Such a profound and attentive botanist has never set foot on foreign soil, nor has there been a traveler who has had the opportunity to make the great discoveries that Lofling was able to make.”
But those discoveries were irreparably lost. After spending decades preparing to make his mark in the world of natural history, Lofling had died before sending home more than a few field notes. Unknown hands shook the butterflies from his books and tapped into his brandy supply. Not a single one of Lofling’s specimens survived.
Linnaeus was still mourning the loss of the Vulture a few weeks later, when a fourth apostle returned to Uppsala. Marten Kahler’s account of his tribulations bordered on the fantastic, and demonstrated the dangers of not planning for the unexpected.
Despite being dispatched to South Africa all of five years earlier, Kahler had never gotten any farther than southern Europe. While sailing from Denmark, his ship had been caught in a storm so violent it flooded his cabin and swept away all of his possessions. Landing destitute on the coast of Bordeaux, he was forced to confront the fact that his charter from Linnaeus had come without contingency plans—if something unforeseen arose, there were no fallback instructions, no names of colleagues who might be enlisted to help him out.
Kahler begged and borrowed funds for another passage, only to yet again board a ship that became endangered as soon as it left port. In this case it was a pursuit by pirates, only narrowly escaped by a race to Marseille and emergency refuge there. His passage canceled, the apostle was once again stranded and broke. Not knowing what else to do, he began walking south, crossing into Italy and collecting specimens along the way. These he sent to Linnaeus via a third ship—which was successfully captured by pirates. The specimens never reached their destination. Kahler walked as far as Rome, where he abandoned any further hope of getting to South Africa and turned his attention to returning to Sweden.
But there remained no contingency plan. Why did Kahler not, like Hasselqvist, write to Linnaeus and inform him of his plight? Probably because Hasselqvist had been able to borrow money to live on in Syria while awaiting Linnaeus’s reply. Finding no such beneficence in Rome, Kahler had begun walking home, all the way to Uppsala. It had taken him three years.
If the weary Kahler was expecting a hero’s welcome, he did not receive it. Linnaeus hosted him for dinner and politely listened to his story, but otherwise seems to have mustered no sympathy or support. The former apostle had nothing to offer but a woeful tale; his very presence served only to remind the rest of Linnaeus’s student circle that field assignments did not always yield glory and adventure. Kahler seems to have gotten the hint. He departed Uppsala, abandoned botany altogether, and signed up as a physician in the Swedish Royal Navy.
One month later, yet another wayward apostle unexpectedly arrived at Linnaeus’s doorstep.
In 1754, a sugar plantation owner had approached Linnaeus, asking him to recommend a tutor for his children in the Dutch colony of Surinam. Jumping at the opportunity to land an apostle in South America, Linnaeus offered the services of his student Daniel Rolander, a twenty-nine-year-old from his own home province of Småland. Rolander had misgivings about taking the job—he was interested in botany and entomology, not teaching colonial children—but he’d been studying with Linnaeus for almost a decade, and his mentor was eager to push him out of the nest. After proddings and reassurances that he’d have plenty of time for field research, he agreed to go.
The assignment did not begin promisingly. Just before boarding ship in Amsterdam, Rolander suffered from an attack of fever, causing his new employer to delay the voyage for several months. But upon arrival in Surinam the following year, Rolander was a blaze of activity and discovery. He documented an abundance of novel rainforest life—anteaters, sloths, glow-worms, and magnificent butterflies—as well as one creature that had seemed mythical: the chameleon. He gleefully experimented with placing one in front of different-colored clothes, marveling at its ability to change patterns and colors at will. Rolander appeared to have years of productive work ahead of him in Surinam, with a seemingly endless supply of species to collect and describe.
But he was desperately unhappy, and increasingly on edge. His illness in Amsterdam left him worried about his health, fretting that the tropical climate would cause the fever to return. He despised the Dutch colonists, who he described as boorish, hard-drinking, and unspeakably cruel to the enslaved population. After just six months, in a fit of weariness and emotional exhaustion, Rolander impulsively decided to leave the Surinam rainforest on the next ship out. “I went to visit the forest one last time to examine its pleasantries and bid it farewell,” he wrote in his journal. “I was not ignorant of the fact that the recesses of these forests held gifts from Nature; gifts that remained unseen to me at that point and would escape my last glimpses.” The sudden retreat required a circuitous route through the Caribbean and across the Atlantic. By the time he arrived in the Dutch port of Texel in April of 1756, he had spent twenty months at sea and only four on land. Upon his return to Uppsala, Rolander was as penniless as Kahler before him.
Rolander was also in a fragile mental state. Upon his premature return, his attitude toward his mentor was strangely altered. Instead of paying obeisance and politely turning over his specimens, he kept them hidden away, demanding that Linnaeus either secure him an academic post or provide financial support as compensation. Unsociable and seemingly paranoid, he grew increasingly convinced of his collection’s immense value. One specimen, he said, was a plant that produced a harvest of pearls. Another “might prolong human life, if not permanently, to an extraordinary length of time.” Whether he was delusional or still suffering from the aftereffects of fever is undetermined, but no one disputes Linnaeus’s reaction to his claims and demands.
The recent developments of the apostles—one death, two sudden returns with scant specimens—could not have come at a more stressful time. Linnaeus was grappling with an urgent crisis: Thousands of his fellow Swedes were starving to death. A series of crop failures had plunged large regions of the nation into famine, and the Swedish parliament was desperate for solutions. Linnaeus exhorted the starving to eat fir bark, nettles, acorns, Iceland moss, seaweed, burdock, polypody, bog myrtle, cherry tree resin, and thistles, but none of these could be harvested on a scale large enough to make a difference.
Linnaeus’s patience was at an end. He went to Rolander’s quarters and, finding him absent, broke in through a window. He emerged without the purportedly miraculous plants—Rolander was likely carrying them on his person—and with only a single specimen in hand. It was a plant he would name sauvagesia, a small creeping herb of minor medical significance (the natives of Surinam used it to treat diarrhea) but useless as a food stock.
Rolander soon discovered the burglary, but Linnaeus was not about to apologize. As a mark of his wrath he named only a single specimen after Rolander, a tiny beetle he dubbed Aphanus rolandi. In Greek, aphanus means obscure. The meaning was clear: Rolander was consigned to oblivion.
The former apostle moved to Stockholm, and by 1751 seemed recovered enough to be seriously considered for a teaching position there. Linnaeus used his influence to ensure that he was denied the job. Desperate, Rolander worked for a while as the gardener of Stockholm’s Seraphimer Hospital, then drifted to Denmark, where he sold his specimens and his Surinam journals for a pittance (the miraculous plants turned out to be an ordinary lithosperm and a hibiscus). He died in 1793.
Linnaeus remained unrepentant of his treatment of Rolander. But the loss of Hasselqvist and Lofling, combined with Kahler’s suffering, had begun to take a toll. “The death of many whom I have induced to travel have made my hair grey,” he confessed to a friend. “And what have I gained? A few dried plants, with great anxiety, unrest, and care.” He did not, however, refrain from anointing apostles.