Several days later they learnt that Forsskål’s body had been dug up the next night by some Arabs, who, noting that he had been buried in a coffin, thought that certain valuables had been buried with him. The grave-robbers broke open the coffin and unwound the shroud which had been wrapped round the body. In their disappointment at finding nothing they left the body lying naked on the ground. The dola was informed and ordered a Jew to rebury the body. The Jew would not do the work without payment. The dola answered that as payment he could keep the coffin.
4
As he had after von Haven’s death, Niebuhr entered in his diary a few words of valediction, but this time there was no need for diplomacy: “We all greatly mourned Herr Forsskål, not only because by his frequent botanical excursions and by mixing a great deal with ordinary people he had become the best of the whole group at Arabic—which meant that he often acted as our spokesman—but also because he devoted himself with tremendous industry to our expedition, the successful pursuance of which lay very close to his heart. In himself, he was as though born to an expedition to Arabia. Rarely was he ill-tempered when we lacked the conveniences of life. He had from the very first learned to live like the native population—which is very necessary, for otherwise not even the most learned man would make many discoveries in these lands.”
It was not the scholar but the colleague who was remembered in Niebuhr’s words. He wrote of the loss which the expedition in its present crisis felt most seriously: the loss of the planner and organiser who did not spare himself when managing things for the others. And behind Niebuhr’s words of remembrance lay his fear for the immediate future. How would they be able to carry on the expedition alone? But Niebuhr realised very well that it was not the expedition’s fate alone that was being decided in these days in Jerim. Later he enlarged on Forsskål’s reputation to his son, and here he puts the main emphasis on the dead man’s scientific achievements: “Forsskål was the most learned man of the whole group, and if he had returned alive, he would perhaps have been the most learned in all Europe. He was industrious; he despised all dangers, difficulties, or deprivations. His shortcomings were his argumentativeness, his stubbornness and his temper.”
Again, there is no occasion to retouch Niebuhr’s brief portrait. The negative as well as the positive features are clear. Forsskål was not always easy; he was aloof and self-assured; his strict sense of justice led him to pass sharp judgment on those who, like von Haven, tried to manage their affairs by deception and evasions, while it could equally inspire him with genuine affection for the simplest of souls if only they were moved by an honest endeavour to do their best—something particularly evident in the friendship that developed between him and Baurenfeind. Forsskål was difficult to get on with because regard for the truth took precedence over all else, even over more human considerations. He was stubborn and querulous, uncompromising and tactless; he spoke his mind straight out to those who differed from him, and if they insisted they were crushed. His demands on others were great because his demands on himself were enormous.
As for his scientific standing, Niebuhr’s suggestion that he was among the most distinguished scholars in Europe is not contradicted by any serious scholar either of his own time or later. His versatility embraced theology and philosophy, philology and economics, as well as chemistry, geology, zoology and botany. In practically all these fields he made new discoveries. His descriptions of plants and animals were of a precision hitherto unknown, and his efforts resulted in tremendously extensive and valuable collections of specimens.
And yet this amalgam of insight and determination operated in vain. Nothing remains. During the entire expedition Forsskål had only one real worry; that others might steal his discoveries before he himself had had an opportunity to work on them. He would not share the honour with anybody; he invented numbered codes and filled his descriptions with abbreviations worked out to a certain system. His fears were not groundless, but it was not his enemies in Copenhagen who harvested his ideas. It was death. Even this possibility he seems to have foreseen in that letter to Linnaeus in which he wrote: “But if I am not allowed to live, then I and science will have lost more than one can say.”
When Forsskål died on 13th July in Jerim all his manuscripts and the greater part of his collections of specimens were still intact, and it is possible to make some estimate of what there was. During their stay in Constantinople in 1761 he had preserved and packed a very full collection of plants and sea animals collected during the voyage of the Greenland. Forsskål put in an urgent request for these chests to be sent off immediately, as the alcohol would otherwise evaporate in the warm climate; but von Gähler was in no hurry, and it was not until two years later that the collection was dispatched to Copenhagen. When it arrived there, the greater part of it was ruined. From Egypt Forsskål also dispatched three large packages of plants, several chests of animals preserved in alcohol, some collections of insects, and a number of stuffed birds. This consignment also reached its destination in a damaged condition because certain pirates had interested themselves in it en route. From Suez he sent another chest with natural history specimens, which went astray and was lost. From Arabia he sent nothing; everything was in those chests that Ismael Salech took to the customs house in Mocha, where, as we have seen, he was instrumental in having many of them destroyed. Again, the warm climate caused the alcohol to evaporate, with the result that several chests of fish putrefied and had to be thrown into the Red Sea. Even after all these disasters, no fewer than twelve chests remained, and after Forsskål’s death these were sent from Mocha to Bombay. From there they were forwarded to a Danish merchant in Calcutta, who sent them on to Trankebar, where they were found to have suffered considerable damage in transit: various packages were ruined by salt water; flasks containing specimens had been broken; and the alcohol had evaporated or run out. The missionaries in Trankebar had to throw large quantities away, and the rest was packed in new and stronger chests at the Asiatic company’s expense and taken aboard a Danish ship sailing for China. Only after it had completed its journey there did the ship return to Copenhagen. In 1766, three whole years after Forsskål’s death, the last part of his collection at last arrived in Denmark.
Seed is easier to send, even though for other reasons it created as much work for Forsskål as the zoological specimens. Forsskål sent seed from Constantinople, Cairo, Djidda and Loheia, carefully catalogued in lists and numbered up to 347, which is presumably the total up till then, to which must be added those which he found in the Yemen. It was thus no small collection. In addition, Forsskål actually dispatched six times this total, or altogether over two thousand separate lots of seed, for he naturally put into effect his plan to send seed to all the more important universities of Europe—a plan conceived during his stay in Marseille which would enable him to let Linnaeus share in the results of his research. From Constantinople, Cairo, Djidda and Loheia, Forsskål sent seed to botanists in Copenhagen (Oeder), Uppsala (Linnaeus), London (Miller), Paris (Jussieu), Leyden (Burman) and Montpellier (Sauvage). He wrote to Linnaeus about the trouble he had in keeping a proper account of the six different collections of seed: “It certainly adds greatly to my work, but it is work for science, and for this I shall never spare myself.” As these collections all reached Copenhagen and Uppsala in good condition, we may perhaps assume that the same applied to the lots sent to the other university towns. Finally, over and above the collections of seed, comes the large herbarium that Forsskål compiled on the expedition, which in its original form is believed to have contained thirteen hundred different plants. This herbarium also reached Copenhagen in good condition.
As for Forsskål’s manuscripts, they comprised at his death seven large packages which went by ship from Bombay to Copenhagen. They included his diary of the expedition, detailed descriptions of plants and animals, treatises on Mohammedan customs, pronunciation in the Yemen, the Coptic religion, leprosy, the early history of the Yemen, together with accounts of pri
ces, goods, coinage, and weights and measures in those countries he passed through. Forsskål also sent from Cairo the dissertations mentioned earlier, including a Flora Alexandrina et Cairina, an article entitled Von der Fruchtbarkeit der Erde in Aegypten and Ein System oder Register von den Aegyptischen Pflanzen. The first of these arrived in Copenhagen, but the last two were noted by Temler, a secretary in the German Chancellery, as “not received.”
Despite a considerable amount of damage and certain losses en route, the greater part of Forsskål’s collections and manuscripts thus succeeded in reaching their destinations. This suggests that his work was now in safe custody, assured against destruction and ready to be subjected to an authoritative and exhaustive scientific review. The bitter truth is, however, that the destruction suffered by Forsskål’s irreplaceable material en route was as nothing compared with what now occurred in Copenhagen.
It is again appropriate to begin with the zoological specimens, of which probably not less than ten chests in all arrived at their destination. These chests were received by Peder Ascanius, director of the Natural History Museum and professor at the “Economic Natural History Amphitheatre” established by Frederik V at Charlottenborg. Ascanius was a close friend of Professor Kratzenstein; these two together had urged the appointment of Kramer, and both no doubt had lively recollections of the violent battle this appointment had provoked with Forsskål. Whether Herr Ascanius still felt resentful of the clever Swede, or whether it was merely general apathy, the fact remains that, after taking over the chests and the packages containing the dead man’s specimens, he allowed them to stand unopened without submitting them to any scientific scrutiny—indeed, without so much as taking the trouble to replace the alcohol in the many hundreds of glass containers. Thus several years passed. In Uppsala, Linnaeus began to grow restive. He anxiously asked the most promising young zoologist in Denmark, Brünnich, about the state of the specimens; and at the beginning of 1765 he received the following answer: “It is still uncertain what fate awaits the wealth of material that Forsskål collected at the cost of his life. Several years ago his collections arrived here from the Mediterranean and the surrounding lands, including quite a few from Egypt itself. I saw this splendid harvest, this glorious evidence of his great industry: chests filled with insects, stuffed birds, glass vessels with fish, amphibians, snails et cetera, in alcohol, but unfortunately I saw them only for a brief moment, so that I could not examine any of them in detail. They have been handed over to Herr Ascanius, together with some other things sent here from Arabia. I do not know whether it is true or not—I sincerely hope not—that a large part, particularly of the fish, have been ruined by damp and the effect of weather.” Brünnich was clearly aware of what was going on but he could not do anything. Linnaeus attempted indirectly, through Michaelis, to inquire discreetly of Bernstorff himself, accompanying his approach with an offer to decipher Forsskål’s code. He was politely requested to mind his own business: “I cannot conceive that the man in whose custody these collections have been placed will consciously let them suffer any damage.”
Linnaeus’ fears, however, were realised. Nothing was done about the chests that had arrived; and when further consignments arrived via Bombay, Calcutta and China, these were also put on one side unopened. A few years more passed. The alcohol evaporated from the containers, the animals rotted, the dried fish were attacked by damp, the stuffed birds transformed into colonies of fleas and moths. In 1770 Zoëga reported that still nothing had been done. Then Struensee came along with his reforms and his purges. Ascanius was dismissed, and when in 1772 Brünnich took over his position and could at last set about opening Forsskål’s chests, the collections were so damaged that he had to throw a large part of them away. Brünnich, I. C. Fabricius and Otto F. Müller all used them as a basis for describing new species; but after the bombardment of Copenhagen in 1807, the chests were again put in store, and there they remained for close on thirty years without being inspected. Of Peter Forsskål’s “splendid harvest” the Zoological Museum to-day has only a collection of insects, fish, coral and shells, the latter being so designed by nature that they do not easily deteriorate as the result of human neglect.
As regards the botanical part of Forsskål’s collection, there are the two thousand sets of seed that he catalogued, packed and dispatched, often in desperate conditions, to six university towns in different parts of Europe. In the beginning things went well. Naturally Linnaeus made haste to sow Forsskål’s seed in Uppsala and he succeeded in getting no less than eighty plants to grow. Oeder in Copenhagen was also conscientious; he sowed his seed in his own botanical garden and produced in all two hundred and thirty plants. But this was only the seed that Forsskål sent from Constantinople and Cairo; the later consignments went not to Oeder but to Ascanius with the same result as with the zoological specimens. When Brünnich opened the carefully sealed and labelled packets in 1772, the seeds were naturally useless. And what happened to the seed Forsskål sent, in the interests of science, to the four other university towns in Europe? Carl Christensen has investigated the matter. From Miller in London there was not a sound. From Jussieu in Paris not a sound. From Burman in Leyden not a sound. From Sauvage in Montpellier not a sound.
Forsskål’s great herbarium with its collection of around thirteen hundred different plants was also among the things that arrived safely and in good condition in Copenhagen and were turned over to the care of Professor Ascanius. This too was allowed to wait; Rottböll described some of the plants, but not until twenty years after Forsskål’s death did Martin Wahl begin giving it proper scientific scrutiny. By then the plants were already seriously damaged by damp and insects, and many of them had disappeared; Hornemann believes the herbarium now contains only a third of what Forsskål originally found. Not until 150 years later did Carl Christensen reconstitute a Herbarium Forsskålii, the historical interest of which must be put against the bitter recognition that it never had the significance for contemporary scientific research that Forsskål had hoped for it.
The age was busy with other things. Dust settled on the chests from Arabia Felix in the silent lumber-room. They stood there year after year, waiting. No Forsskål returned to deal with them. Only rarely did anybody mount the awkward stairs that led to the loft. But two hundred years later zoologists and botanists from all over the world come to Copenhagen to bend over the remnants of Peter Forsskål’s “glad harvest.”
His manuscripts had no better fate, although manuscripts are very different from natural history collections. A manuscript is easier to send and keep than a chest of animals and plants. It cannot go rotten and it cannot gather moths. It can stand up to heavy seas and hard knocks. But it cannot withstand indifference, which is what Forsskål’s manuscripts encountered.
Only one of the three long articles Forsskål had written in Egypt—on the flora near Alexandria and Cairo—ever reached its destination. It then vanished in Copenhagen. His numerous other researches into subjects ranging from leprosy to the Coptic religion and the ancient history of Yemen were frequently used as source material, with reference given, in Niebuhr’s writings, but they were never given independent publication. His full diary, running from the very first day of the expedition to within two weeks of his death, also reached Copenhagen intact, but it was not published. In the Nya lärde Tidender for 27th October, 1774 there is a short entry about this; it is reported in Copenhagen that “the present Danish Minister of State, Count von Bernstorff the younger, has made arrangements for the late Professor Forsskål’s journal of his expedition to the Orient to be printed and published. A very welcome piece of news.” But this longed-for announcement is without substance. Forsskål’s diary was not published; it disappeared without trace, like his articles from Egypt. Throughout the whole of the nineteenth century the manuscript remained lost, and even that persistent scholar Carl Christensen abandoned hope of finding it while working on his monograph about Forsskål. Not until the early nineteen-twenties did Henrik Schück
succeed in unearthing it in Kiel University library. There was still no hurry, and neither Carl Christensen nor Henrik Schück lived to see the book published. Not until 1950, almost one hundred and ninety years after the first lines were written, was Peter Forsskål’s diary published in Uppsala under the title of Journey to Arabia Felix (Resa till Lycklige Arabien). Naturally, by this time its mass of information about the countries visited and their populations was completely out of date.
This accounts for the bulk of the seven large packages that reached Copenhagen in reasonable condition. The remainder consisted of certain long zoological and botanical descriptions in Latin, which were published in 1775, under conditions we shall return to, in under the titles Descriptiones animalium and Flora ægyptiaco-arabica. The next year another volume was published containing forty-three of Baurenfeind’s careful drawings of Forsskål’s plants, Icones rerum naturalium. With these items there seemed a chance that Forsskål’s most important discoveries in the field of the natural sciences might have been preserved, despite all indifference, for his contemporaries. But the publication was put into the hands of a so far unidentified but evidently inexpert Swede, and the Flora in particular, whose 379 pages should have constituted Forsskål’s main work, was filled with errors. The editor neglected to compare the descriptions with the plants themselves, which gave rise to repeated misunderstandings; the notes Forsskål had made in the field, which were only to be regarded as a basis for further theories, were printed uncritically in their crude and unedited state, and in complete disorder. Even the general arrangement of the material showed little regard for logical progression. Forsskål’s greatest achievement was reduced to an unintelligible mess. One hundred and fifty years later, by pulling the thing to pieces and fitting them together again like a jigsaw, Carl Christensen was able to form a proper picture of what Forsskål had had in mind while collecting this considerable material. From this it emerges that Forsskål not only discovered twenty-four different genera and about three hundred species which even in Carl Christensen’s time could be acknowledged as new, and described them with an accuracy of observation never seen before; but he also reveals a profound knowledge of the plants’ morphology; he formed theories about their metamorphosis, and in his interpretation was far in advance of his time. It is no exaggeration to regard him as one of the founders of botanical geography. But because the material was never properly classified and arranged, none of this emerged to influence contemporary scholarship. Carl Christensen concludes his appreciation of Forsskål with this melancholy remark: “If one takes the view that an historical account of an individual and his works is of interest only in so far as he can be seen to have contributed to the development of science, then in this account of Forsskål there is little of value.”
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