The reaction was swift. Professor Kratzenstein had heard that Forsskål had been describing him in the town as a person incapable of cataloguing natural history specimens, saying that this was something Linnaeus alone knew how to do. He now saw his own pupil described in black and white as inferior to one of Linnaeus’s students. He was deeply offended, and went at once to Bernstorff to protest that Forsskål’s excessive partiality for his own countryman must surely derive from Swedish national prejudice. Bernstorff allowed himself to be persuaded. Immediately after Forsskål’s fatal letter, the Danish Government appointed Christian Carl Kramer.
This meant war. As soon as Forsskål heard of the appointment, he stamped off, shaking with fury, to seek out Kratzenstein. We shall never know in detail what happened during the tempestuous meeting between them, but we are fortunate enough to have Kratzenstein’s own account, contained in a letter to Linnaeus a year later. Even though this account is inevitably one-sided, it agrees so closely with what we already know of Forsskål’s temperament that it cannot be far from the truth:
He called on me personally, and as I do not find it easy to forget my natural good breeding, I received him with particular friendliness. But he behaved in a hostile and ill-tempered fashion. Without further ado he began upbraiding me with so many curses and oaths that I almost began to think he was ill of a fever, or else was simply not in control of himself. I answered him that this offensive vituperation should not be directed at me, but rather at Ascanius, who had taken the initiative in Kramer’s appointment; and that, moreover, I was not accustomed to this kind of conversation. But he did not stop at this. Whereupon I lost my patience and said to him: “How is it that you can come here and insult me in my own home when I am innocent in all this? I should rather castigate you for the evil gossip you have spread about me in the city and at court.” Whereupon he said: “Ah, Professor Kratzenstein! You cannot really take offence if I say publicly that you are much inferior to Linnaeus, for that is nothing to be ashamed of.” “On the contrary,” I answered, “here in the University of Copenhagen, the foreigner Linnaeus is not to be praised to the skies in order that I may be humiliated. Here, where I, not Linnaeus, profess natural history, it is essential that our students should not be given the erroneous idea that I am incompetent to teach this branch of science. If in my own mind I am ready to give Linnaeus precedence, that is my affair. And you, in particular, can hardly be a competent judge, since you are completely ignorant of what I do and do not know.” Whereupon he said: “I do not wish to make you angry, but I tell you that in comparison with Linnaeus you are a mere dwarf.” I got up from the sofa to prevent myself from striking him, and answered: “Very well! Dwarf I may be, but a dwarf who stands on Linnaeus’s shoulders.” After this it was the turn of other members of the expedition. Then he switched his attack to Kramer; but I advised the latter not to enter into any more discussions with this lunatic, who in his madness did not hesitate to insult me in my own home.
But Peter Forsskål had not yet finished. After Kratzenstein, it was Bernstorff’s turn. On 24th November, Forsskål informed the Danish Minister that he had just had a visit from a student calling himself Kramer and insisting that he had been selected as Forsskål’s colleague and equal on the forthcoming expedition. Forsskål reminded Bernstorff that he had asked for an assistant, but that “as this new colleague is to be in no way subordinate to me, I cannot take it upon myself to test his suitability. If, as I have every reason to believe, he has not studied natural history as thoroughly as I have, but we are nevertheless to be regarded as equals, this will mean that I shall have to do the work alone and he will still have the honour of it.” Forsskål asked once more to be given “Dr. Linnaeus’s very competent pupil and my own staunch friend, whom I have already proposed,” i.e. Falck. If Bernstorff could not agree to this, Forsskål asked that he at least be allowed to examine Dr. Kramer and report on the results before he was finally accepted.
With this letter Peter Forsskål exceeded the limits of even Bernstorff’s patience. After the Minister had definitely decided to appoint Kramer, he found himself exposed once again to Forsskål’s pressure to appoint Falck, coupled with his attempt to sit in judgment on a person already accepted and recognised by the Danish professors and the Danish Government. Bernstorff was so incensed at the Swede’s insolence that for the next few days Forsskål’s future in the service of the Danish king hung by a very thin thread. However, it was quite clear to Bernstorff that it would be virtually impossible to find another botanist so soon before the expedition’s departure. Nevertheless, Forsskål seems to have found some support from Moltke, whose collection of shells he had ordered and arranged in Copenhagen. Moltke did not forget that behind Forsskål’s extraordinary temperament lay his equally exceptional talents. It is very probable that with his cool, dispassionate outlook he saw clearly that the real trouble lay not so much in Forsskål’s breach of manners, as in the fact that he was right.
When the king’s instructions to the members of the expedition were made known four days later, they contained a clear reprimand for Forsskål, together with a rejection of the requests in his original petition to Bernstorff. “As we are defraying the expenses of the Arabian expedition, it is only natural that everything that the expedition collects in the way of animals, birds, fishes, and such-like be dispatched direct to us at the address of our Asiatic company, and not by any other route. If there are among these any duplicates which we do not need ourselves, we can then in the light of circumstances bear in mind Professor Forsskål’s wishes. Since, as has already been mentioned, we alone defray the expenses of the expedition from beginning to end, it is obvious that we ourselves select the persons who are to undertake it. It is therefore our gracious wish that Candidatus Medicinæ Kramer should make ready to accompany it.”
In answer, Forsskål sent a long letter to Bernstorff assuring him that it was not national prejudice but academic concern that had dictated his behaviour. He begged Bernstorff not to think ill of him, for this would destroy any pleasure he had in the work; and he declared himself ready to tender his resignation. After receiving this letter, Bernstorff presumably forgave the difficult professor. That Forsskål’s own wrath was not abated is shown by a letter to Linnaeus in which Kramer’s doctoral dissertation receives the following notice: “My colleague Kramer recently took his Doctor Medicinæ with a miserable thesis called Specimen insectologiae Danicae. If you come across it, you will see that there is not a single new thing in it, everything in respect of the entomology is plagiarised from Lesser, and in respect of the rest from your Systema Naturae. They brought in a collection of insects from Sweden, all previously labelled. And now they want to shine as genuine experts, bunglers that they are.”
This last letter from Forsskål to Linné is dated 1st January, 1761, only four days before the expedition’s departure. The dispute about Kramer had lasted until the end of the year 1760. Then the drama suddenly intensified in an unexpected direction. A new figure suddenly appeared on the scene and occupied its centre. Magister Friedrich Christian von Haven arrived from Rome.
6
The last we heard of von Haven was a letter from him to Bernstorff, written in April, 1759, from Frankfurt, which he reported reaching after frightful struggles six months after leaving Copenhagen on his journey to Rome. After this fell a profound silence. Nobody knew what the Danish scholar was doing, and in August Michaelis had had to ask Bernstorff to try to obtain von Haven’s address from his relatives in Denmark. The inquiries do not seem to have produced any result. Von Haven had vanished; and in October, 1759, the Danish ships set sail for Trankebar without the learned expedition aboard.
Not until this programme had been thwarted, and von Haven had thereby succeeded in getting his time extended by another year, did Bernstorff receive a letter from him. It reached Denmark on 11th November, 1759. At this point, when he should have long been back in Copenhagen, von Haven had the honour humbly to announce to His Excellency that he had arriv
ed in Rome. The journey had taken him over a year; and apart from immediate travelling expenses, it had cost the Danish state one year’s grant of 500 Rigsdaler.
In his letter to Bernstorff von Haven paved his long way with good excuses, mile after mile of them. He told how he left Frankfurt on 22nd May, travelling via Mainz, Strasbourg, Basle, Berne, Geneva, Chambéry, Turin and Genoa, and eventually reaching Leghorn on 20th July. “Doubtless it would have been possible to leave from there and travel direct to Rome in eight days, but the thought of the bad air in Rome in the summer restrained me. Everybody warned me against this, and I had no particular reason for rejecting their good advice, as I was convinced that my mission did not require me to hazard life and health merely to get to Rome five weeks earlier or later [sic]. Meanwhile, fate unhappily decided that what I had feared in Rome I should succumb to in Florence. Knowing that I could work with advantage in the mild climate of Florence and in the libraries of the Grand Duke, I decided to wait there until the worst of the season was past and postponed my departure for Rome until the middle of September. But just then I was struck down by a fever, which delayed me so that I did not arrive here until the beginning of this month.”
In Rome, too, innumerable difficulties seemed to have conspired against him. On an earlier occasion, Professor Michaelis had emphasised the pointlessness of going to the Italian capital for instruction in Arabic, since nobody there knew the dialect spoken in Arabia Felix. Instead, von Haven’s instructions supposed that he was “to gain practice in the reading and copying of Oriental manuscripts.” Naturally, this could be done only in the Vatican library. But three months after his arrival in Rome he wrote to Bernstorff that he was receiving instruction in Arabic from a Syrian priest every morning and afternoon. Not until four months later did he report that he had been given a letter of recommendation to the Vatican library; and not until five months after that, thanks to the French Ambassador, had this letter of recommendation become a ticket of admission. Six months after arriving in Rome and eighteen months after leaving Denmark, the scholar was more or less able to begin his studies. Then once again fate took a hand. He wrote on 22nd March to Bernstorff that the Vatican library was unfortunately open only from nine until noon. “But,” von Haven continued, “in matters of discussion and learning I prefer the living to the dead; and as I can meet my Syrian priest only in the mornings, I am afraid there is nothing I can do but let others copy the manuscripts at the library.”
The consequence of this unhappy coincidence was that von Haven did not manage to copy a single manuscript during his stay in Rome. But he succeeded in getting an extra 200 Rigsdaler for travelling expenses.
By this time it was summer. On 15th July Michaelis wrote to von Haven and informed him of the royal decree that members of the Danish expedition were to present themselves in Copenhagen by the end of September at the latest. The King of Denmark would cover their travelling expenses. Forsskål and Niebuhr were each to receive 100 Rigsdaler, while von Haven, who had the longest journey, was allowed 300 Rigsdaler.
We have seen how the first two obeyed this royal command. For von Haven the matter was somewhat different. “Monseigneur! This is a complete and utter impossibility!” he expostulated in a letter to Bernstorff of 16th August. “I have no money to travel with. I have not even received the 200 Rigsdaler which through the goodness of Your Excellency I was granted by His Majesty. I need 400 for the journey. If I can have this money by the end of next month—and I can see no other possibility, since letters take seven weeks from Copenhagen to Rome—I shall leave at once and be home by November.” Von Haven evidently underestimated the postal communications between the two cities, for his money was already on the way: a grant of 200 Rigsdaler plus an extra grant of 300 to cover travelling expenses, i.e. more than he has asked for. He received the money in mid-September, but he did not leave for Copenhagen. While Niebuhr and Forsskål joined their respective mail-coaches for Denmark, this master of delaying tactics remained blithely sitting in the Italian city, where the air that summer was apparently not as bad as the previous one.
Perhaps von Haven would have hurried a little more if he had known the consequences. In Göttingen, Professor Michaelis was indignant at his evasion of the royal command. On 25th August, he wrote to Bernstorff that he must humbly request the Danish Government to show forbearance and send von Haven the desired sum, but that in other respects he could not approve of his disrespectful remarks. “Certainly I have always regarded him as a capricious person; but when I recommended him, I had regard mainly for his talents, although I had already had several brushes with him. Nevertheless, it is clearly evident from his letters and his character that he should have no greater control over the affairs of the expedition than any of the others, and that the expedition’s funds should be administered not by him but by Niebuhr.”
We have seen how Bernstorff followed the professor’s advice in this. Von Haven further ruined his chances of becoming the expedition’s leader by behaviour which now amounted to positive sabotage of Bernstorff’s plans. After receiving his travelling expenses from Denmark, he waited almost a month before leaving Rome, because (as he wrote) he had to postpone his departure on account of the farewells he had to make. Not until 9th October did he arrive in Venice, where he intended remaining only three days, “but against my will I was unfortunately kept here for a further three.” The journey through Germany went even more slowly. By 28th October he was no farther than Augsburg, where he wrote asking to be excused for his slowness and hoping “that Your Excellency will agree with me that it is better to arrive safe and sound, albeit a little later than envisaged, than to neglect certain safety measures and thus expose oneself to the possibility of accident or loss as a result.” By 14th November he had reached Hamburg, where again he needed to rest for some days; not until December did he arrive in Copenhagen. The only regrettable occurrence was that for the second time the Danish ships had left for Trankebar without the Danish expedition.
The plan to send the expedition the long journey south round Africa to Trankebar in South-East India and then make it travel all the way back to Arabia Felix was a survival from the original project, which assumed that the investigations in Arabia would be carried out by missionaries from the Danish colony. When the last part of this project was abandoned, it was forgotten to alter the first part—which had now become meaningless. Von Haven was one of the first to see this; he dawdled over his homeward journey not merely from general indolence but also from a desire to kill this inappropriate part of the project. In a letter of 23rd August from Rome, he had already told Bernstorff what was in his mind: “If we are to leave Copenhagen with the ships that are sailing for Trankebar, then obviously I can scarcely expect to get there in time. But seeing that there is nothing for us to do in Trankebar anyway, this is neither the shortest nor the safest nor the best route.” Von Haven pointed out how the idea of a journey to Trankebar derived from the original missionary project, and he suggested instead that the expedition travel to Arabia by the shortest route via Cairo, Suez and the Red Sea, where (according to what he had heard) it was not nearly so dangerous as Professor Michaelis supposed.
Von Haven was not the only one to be thinking along these lines. In February of 1760 Michaelis had received a memorandum from the Royal Chancery Counsellor and Syndicus of the town of Oldenburg, a certain Herr von Hamel, which was sharply critical of the Trankebar project and instead proposed a plan for letting the expedition travel direct to Arabia by way of Constantinople, “where the members of the expedition can be initiated by the businessmen and merchants there into the best ways of conducting themselves, and with assistance from the Royal Danish Ambassador accredited to the court can also familiarise themselves with Oriental manners and customs.”
Bernstorff had been against any such plan, but now that the two months delay in von Haven’s arrival in Copenhagen presented him with a fait accompli, he accepted it on behalf of the Danish Government. On 14th December, Forsskål wrote to
Linnaeus that their route had now been altered: “We are leaving on a warship bound for Constantinople, thence to Egypt, then from Alexandria to Suez, and so down the Red Sea to Djidda, near Mecca, and from there also by the Red Sea to Mocha in Arabia Felix.”
This established the final itinerary of the expedition. Von Haven’s ideas had triumphed, but he now learnt that his victory was accompanied by an ignominious defeat. He was to be given the title of professor, like Forsskål, but he could not be the expedition’s leader; all the members were to rank equally. Nor was he to be allowed any control over its finances; Niebuhr had been selected as its treasurer.
The news came as a painful blow. He was the oldest member of the party. Apart from the youthful Kramer, he was the only Dane. He had been receiving the king’s money for almost five years to prepare himself for the expedition. And now he was not to be its leader. Originally he had not believed that the expedition would take place; when it began to seem that it would, he had done what he could to delay it. He was apparently more interested in a royal pension than in a lot of hard work in Arabia. If, despite all his scepticism and all his delaying tactics, it still proved necessary to go on with the enterprise, he had comforted himself with the thought that as leader he would at least have the last word in allocating that hard work. He had assumed this from the start, and for that reason he had thought himself reasonably immune. By doing what he chose he had made the others wait two months for him in Copenhagen and imposed an important alteration upon the programme; and he had never for one moment doubted that he would have a similarly decisive voice in the expedition’s future affairs. This was his frame of mind when he arrived in Copenhagen; and he learned that he was not to be the expedition’s leader, and that the governing factor, the control of the purse-strings, had long ago been transferred to a rustic some six years younger than himself.
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