Niebuhr did not wish to stay longer in Warsaw than was absolutely necessary. By 6th September he was on his way again, and after a further ten days’ journey he crossed the German border and rode into Breslau.
He writes: “There are such comprehensive maps of all the regions between Breslau and Copenhagen already in existence that it would be superfluous to continue any further with these records.”
With these dispassionate words he ends the great diary which covers a journey of about seven years, carefully surveyed mile after mile up to this point, and described in a work of more than 1,500 large printed pages. Now there was no more to tell. Niebuhr had packed up his astrolabe.
Almost, that is. From his astronomical tables, it appears that he had it out again a few more times, so we can still follow the remainder of his route. From Breslau he rode via Waldau, Dresden and Leipzig to Hanover. Professor Mayer, who had calibrated the instrument which had stood up to the whole of the long journey, had been dead several years; but Michaelis was still alive and in good health, and had even been made a knight. It would surely not be wrong to suppose that here Niebuhr received his heartiest welcome so far. In Hanover, too, he stayed only a few days. He continued north again. But not towards Denmark. Yet another little detour was added to the long road. Niebuhr travelled northwards towards the Frisian marshlands, rode through his birthplace, visited friends and relations; yet he did not stay long but continued along the familiar marshland road of his childhood until he reached the village of Altenbruch on the coast.
There he stopped. He had a special errand. In Altenbruch was the farm belonging to the uncle who had opposed his schooling, where during his youth he had worked for five years as a farm-hand. During his stay in Hanover he heard that his uncle had died in his absence. Niebuhr was his sole heir, and the farm at Altenbruch was willed to him. Once before it had served as the starting-point for a long journey, and it was natural that the town should be included in the voyage now almost at an end.
When he reached the farm near Altenbruch he dismounted, unpacked his astrolabe as a matter of course, set it up, measured the latitude of the place and calmly entered the result in his tables, where the town of Altenbruch still figures to-day in the same columns as Damascus, Jerusalem, Baghdad and Bombay. Only after this was satisfactorily accomplished did he continue his journey.
From the tables it appears that he had his astrolabe out once more; in Nyborg, on 17th November. It had been a clear winter night by the Great Belt in the Baltic. Niebuhr chooses the stars Alpha and Gamma in Pegasus, takes a bearing on the North Star, calculates the angles, makes the appropriate corrections, and records the last finding of the Danish expedition to Arabia Felix. Nyborg lies 55 degrees 19 minutes and 26 seconds North.
Three days later, on the evening of 20th November, 1767, Carsten Niebuhr rode into Copenhagen.
7
Here begins an old story. Most people carry in their hearts a picture of the land of their childhood, and while all other impressions slowly fade, this picture grows stronger and stronger. The lyme-grass standing motionless in the heat, the waves scattering their sparkling light on the white beach. Some travel to the ends of the earth to seek it, but no other strip of coast will do, and those who travel farthest—to where they begin to remember the forgotten in earnest—almost always long to return to end their life in the very district where they grew up. All men, when they grow very old, babble about going home.
This is also roughly the story of Niebuhr’s last years. The visit to Altenbruch was only preliminary. It was not the last time that he turned his horse in the direction of the flat marshlands. He had great difficulty in settling in Copenhagen, and his return to what during those difficult years had represented an almost unattainable haven, was—like most returns of its kind—a bitter disappointment. If he had expected something like his triumphal entry into Aleppo, he was soon disillusioned. The Kiøbenhavnske Tidender (“the only journal privileged to be sent through the post”) which had made a big feature of the expedition’s journey, barely reported his arrival. On 20th November there was one brief mention: “On 18th, Lieut. Niebuhr returned from his tour abroad.” Three days later the vague “tour abroad” was omitted altogether from the list of arrivals which in its entirety read: “Capt. Cruys jun. from Nivaae. Lieut. Niebuhr from Altona.”
There was no indication of who Niebuhr was. The city’s interest was taken up with other things. No doubt Niebuhr got a hearty welcome from Bernstorff, but when the first flush of pleasure at meeting again had passed, it is apparent that His Excellency also had his mind on more important things. Times had changed. Everything had changed during the long time he had been away.
In January 1766, while Niebuhr was in Baghdad, King Frederik had died. He was only forty-three. The seventeen-year-old Christian who succeeded him was sowing his wild oats in all the brothels and taverns in the town, together with his mistress. In the small hours Madame had even been seen helping His Majesty to heave the rococo furniture out of the palace windows. Such things had never happened in the good old “evil” times.
Perhaps Bernstorff discreetly tapped his temple to indicate His Royal Highness’s state of mind. These were difficult times for high-ranking officials. Moltke had been “given the push,” as the king put it with the unpleasant falsetto laugh he gave each time he amused himself by sacking an important personage. So far Bernstorff had succeeded in holding on, but he cherished no illusions; he had seen too much in his long life and even the cleverest driver can come to grief with a horse that kicks up its heels.
With all this going on, the Arabian expedition had long since been written off and forgotten. In the late King Frederik’s lecture theatre for the natural sciences Forsskål’s collections lay rotting in their cases. When Niebuhr arrived in the city after having made the journey from Bombay quite alone, he aroused no more interest than if he had ridden in from Nivaae. It almost seems as if the Danes found Niebuhr’s arrival inconvenient. Of course something had to be done. The important men flicked sleepily through the list of ranks and discovered that Niebuhr was an engineer-lieutenant, whereupon one of them put forward the idea of promoting him to captain. Admittedly, he would have become that without ever moving from his own doorstep—but officers one can only move upwards one step at a time, except in the field.
After these formalities, they would have to have the man presented at Court. This too was very much routine. Niebuhr held out his hand and passed the time of day with the king, with Professor Kratzenstein, and with the great poet Klopstock; there was a suitable moment of silence, and then the king, Professor Kratzenstein and the great poet Klopstock remarked that he must have had an incredibly interesting journey. Then they had a bite to eat, and with this the party was over. Or as it was reported in the “privileged” Posttidende, whose editor now suddenly realised what was going on: “Now that the famous Lieutenant Niebuhr has arrived home after the many years of his Arabian journey, he was on 30th ult. graciously received in audience by His Majesty the King, who with especial kindness and consideration expressed interest in him and his reports of what he had achieved. Herr Niebuhr also enjoyed the honour of being placed at the royal table.”
Niebuhr let all this pass; he had more important things to attend to. His first job after his return was to draw up the accounts of the expedition, and when all the additions and deductions had been made, the final result was that the whole journey had cost the State 21,000 Rigsdaler, or approximately one million Danish kroner (£50,000) in present-day currency. Was this too much in the interests of science and culture? Had Niebuhr been too extravagant as treasurer? Saly’s equestrian statue of Frederik V in the Palace of Amalienborg cost nearly six times as much. The Court’s annual expenditure at this time was more than thirty times as great.
Included in this sum of approximately 21,000 Rigsdaler was a small grant which Bernstorff had secured for Niebuhr to enable him to set to work on writing up his account of Arabia. He now delved into the mass of papers that had
resulted from the expedition. He felt distinctly uncertain about this tremendous task. Professor Mayer was dead and could not check his longitudinal calculations. Niebuhr submitted them to the Jesuit astronomer, Hell, who was not conversant with Mayer’s system and dismissed them blankly. They were of no interest. His words discouraged the diffident Niebuhr, who decided to omit them.
He was also hesitant about how to formulate them. His mother-tongue was Low German, and during his summary schooling he had never learned to write proper German. He chose to write the book in a dry and factual style completely without embellishment, which persisted unaltered in his later publications. He shunned stylistic finesse, his accounts were sedate and clear, a little monotonous in their limited range of vocabulary but effective all the same, not by virtue of any literary quality but because of the human story presented.
In 1772 the first result of Niebuhr’s work appeared under the title of Beschreibung von Arabien aus eigenen Beobachtungen und im Lande selbst gesammleten Nachrichten, and dedicated to the King of Denmark. The work consisted of 432 quarto pages. After an introduction containing answers to Professor Michaelis’s questions, there follows a general account of the country with reports on climate, religion, national character, judicial system, the relations between the sexes, the concept of hospitality, eating habits and housing conditions, clothes, polygamy, the alphabet, language and literature, chronology, astronomy, medical science, and the country’s flora, fauna and agriculture. Then follow chapters on the various regions such as Yemen, Hadramaut, Oman, the sheikdoms along the Persian Gulf, Hajra, Nejd, Hejaz and the Sinai desert.
The title-page of Niebuhr’s first book on Arabia
In practically every instance Niebuhr had new discoveries to report. For all that, he was unlucky from the start with its publication. The book had an indifferent reception; it was too specialised to arouse interest, although a German periodical did find room for a scandalous review, whose accusations Niebuhr could refute point by point. In the hope of arousing greater interest in the book, he decided to have it translated at his own expense into French, but this went hopelessly wrong. His own knowledge of French was too slight for him to assess the qualifications of the translator; the result was a botched job which had to be scrapped shortly after publication, so that Niebuhr lost everything he had put into it.
Much more serious was the fact that he had lost his one champion in otherwise indifferent Copenhagen. In the intervening years things had gone precisely as Bernstorff predicted. The bolting horse had wrenched the reins out of the coachman’s hands; now the carriage was being steered by a fanatical itinerant doctor from Altona by the name of Johan Frederik Struensee. Bernstorff too had had to faire le saut. After twenty years in the service of Denmark he was dismissed on 15th September, 1770, with instructions to leave the country. Niebuhr was one of the few who accompanied the deposed Minister to Roskilde. Bernstorff soon realised that nothing could be done against those in power. From Roskilde he proceeded to Hamburg, where he died in February, 1772, disappointed and weary, and without having seen Niebuhr’s book, the first concrete result of the great Danish expedition to Arabia which to a large extent had been his work.
Niebuhr now for the first time considered leaving the dangers and intrigues of Copenhagen. “He suffered greatly from a longing for the dignified peace of the Orientals, which has beset so many other Europeans who have lived in these countries,” says his son in his biography. When a high-ranking official from Tripoli came to the city, Niebuhr, as practically the only Arabic speaker in Denmark, held long conversations with him and began laying plans for a new expedition to darkest Africa. The project never came to anything, no doubt for lack of financial support; moreover, he felt he had an obligation to all the material from the Arabian expedition still waiting to be worked on. Instead, he began on his diary of the voyage, and while he was busy with this another incident occurred which was in itself enough to put a stop to any plans for further voyages.
During the years in the Orient, we have seen Niebuhr surrounded at intervals by a bevy of young girls who always got a kindly word in his diary which he wrote up in the evenings. Now another and the last, made her appearance. She was thirty-one and from Copenhagen: Miss Christiane Sophie Blumenberg. Her father had been physician-in-ordinary to the king; she was certainly a good match, but, like Niebuhr, she had lost her parents at an early age and she too seems to have been delicate and weakly. In 1773 they were married. The following year saw the publication of the first volume of Niebuhr’s diary, which comprised over five hundred pages and ranged from the moment he went aboard the Greenland in 1761 to his departure from Mocha after the deaths of Forsskål and von Haven in 1763.
This account also aroused little interest. Niebuhr decided to leave his own papers for a while and instead get to grips with Peter Forsskål’s manuscripts which still lay unopened. An indication of the indifference surrounding his already published books is that he personally had to finance the publication of Forsskål’s works. The State would not contribute a penny. Here again Niebuhr suffered from a lack of experience in literary matters. As all Forsskål’s manuscripts were written in Latin and as he himself was not qualified in this language, he had to hand over the work to the incompetent but still unidentified Swede already mentioned. As a result, the Flora ægyptiaco-arabica was a monstrosity and was attacked mercilessly by the experts. Niebuhr was distressed, but nevertheless decided to publish Baurenfeind’s work as well. Icones rerum naturalium is the most immediately attractive of the surviving works produced by the expedition. It contains forty-three hand-coloured reproductions of Baurenfeind’s drawings of sea creatures, fish, birds and plants, often of quite remarkable beauty. Niebuhr received no financial support for this book either, and it remained for the most part unnoticed. It must have cost him a fortune. By the time all these works were published, the marshland farm near Altenbruch had been sold.
After Niebuhr had done all in his power to erect a memorial to his dead colleagues, he returned to his own papers and published another volume of his diary, covering nearly 500 pages and containing an account of the trip from Bombay to Aleppo. There is every indication that he received a grant only for the book on Arabia, while his diaries, like Forsskål’s and Baurenfeind’s works, had to be published at his own expense. At any rate he had now exhausted his reserves, and had to abandon all plans for publishing the third and final volume of his diary.
Ten years had passed since his arrival in Copenhagen. It was now the spring of 1778, and Niebuhr had published in five voluminous works the greater part of the written material from the expedition without his status having essentially altered from what it was when he arrived home. It was rather puzzling to know what to do with this Captain of Engineers, apparently so addicted to writing. A new geographical survey was to be made of Norway, and somebody had the idea that Niebuhr might be perhaps able to undertake it and offered him the job of leader. The invitation was intended as a mark of honour; Niebuhr was to have a host of people under him and it was surely unprecedented for a mere captain to be entrusted with so responsible a commission.
Carsten Niebuhr declined with thanks. Amazement at his refusal gave rise to doubts of his sanity when he submitted a request to be given the vacant post of clerk to the council of Meldorf in remote and wretched Dithmarschen. As there were numerous aspirants for the post in Norway, while it was almost hopeless to fill the post in Dithmarschen, Niebuhr got the job, and in the summer of 1778 he moved there with his wife and two children.
At the end of the eighteeenth century Dithmarschen was more or less regarded as the end of the world. There was scarcely a more remote place in the whole of the kingdom. Meldorf lay along boggy roads, passable only in summer or when frost paved them in winter. It lay to the west, almost in the sea, lost in the endless sodden marshlands, miles from all main thoroughfares. Only war and destruction had ever found their way to this remote corner of the earth, but they had been singularly effective. Through practically the whol
e of Denmark’s history up to this period, freebooters had passed backwards and forwards along the marshland roads; farms had been burned down and villages ruined. Even in 1778 the after-effects were apparent. The towns looked small and poor; the district was only thinly populated; and on the flat wide marshes were deserted farms and ruins. Almost the entire landscape belonged to the mighty heavens. The spring storms could scarcely find a tree to blow through. During the long summer days the terns fished from morning till night over the Heligoland Bay, while the avocets, oystercatchers and eider-ducks bred in the dunes beneath flocks of screaming silver gulls.
Across this open landscape the Niebuhrs made their way one summer day in the year 1778, their baggage looming enormous against the low horizon. At the age of forty-five and after travelling across three continents, Niebuhr was returning to a place less than thirty miles from where he was born. He built himself a house on the outskirts of Meldorf, equipped it with a small observatory, and laid out a garden with lots of fruit trees. His health had been precarious in recent years; the curious “cold” he had contracted in the Yemen still broke out periodically and though there could be long intervals between attacks, he did not reckon to see his trees bear fruit. He was mistaken. He outlived them all. Niebuhr survived for thirty-five years as clerk to the council in Meldorf, Dithmarschen.
It was not Germany he sought by this move. He always referred to himself as Danish; he had always travelled on a Danish passport; and ever since he had entered the service of King Frederik V, he had also felt Danish. Only in the present age, which by contrast with the eighteenth century associates language with nationality, is he regarded as German. Nor was it disappointment at not being sufficiently honoured that made him leave Copenhagen; if that were so, he could easily have accepted the post in Norway. In fact, he had less and less reason for disappointment. His works were now beginning to make their mark, first abroad and later even in Copenhagen. But this did not change his decision. He was made a corresponding member of the French Academy and invited to go to Paris to receive this highest of scholarly distinctions. Carsten Niebuhr remained in Meldorf, Dithmarschen.
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