by What Linnaeus Saw- A Scientist's Quest to Name Every Living Thing (retail) (epub)
During their several years at Uppsala, Carl Linnaeus and Peter Artedi worked so closely that it is sometimes hard to tell where the ideas of one ended and the other’s began. They both had been examining animals and minerals as well as plants. So it was a logical next step for the two to tackle one of the eighteenth century’s most pressing natural science challenges: the organization of nature. Plants, animals, minerals . . . everything.
An encyclopedia of life.
This was a pivotal decision. Needing to break the monumental task into manageable chunks, they first assessed their individual passions, strengths, and weaknesses. Then they carved up the three kingdoms.
Artedi took fish, amphibians, and reptiles.
Linnaeus took birds and insects.
Both worked on minerals and the four-footed creatures called quadrupeds.
Artedi took the umbellate plants, and Linnaeus dealt with all the others.
As they made their selections, these two forward-thinking friends were motivated not only by scientific ideals and a sense of mission, but also by their need to make a living. Their choices clearly aligned them with the interests—and possibly even the jobs—of their aging mentors: Linnaeus with Rudbeck, Artedi with Roberg.
They realized that they needed to examine animals, plants, and minerals from around the world to do this work. But they also understood a reality of their time—that travel was dangerous. So the two friends swore a pact: if either died before they finished their joint task, “the other would regard it as sacred duty to give to the world what observations might be left behind by him who was gone.”
They believed their work was that important.
3
INTO THE ARCTIC!
Mountains upon mountains rose before me in every direction . . . I now beheld the Lapland alps.
—CARL LINNAEUS’S JOURNAL, 1732
The day before his twenty-fifth birthday in May 1732, Carl Linnaeus saddled a horse. With the spring semester behind him, and having secured Artedi’s promise in case he didn’t return, he was looking for adventure. Captivated by Professor Rudbeck’s stories and thrilled by the possibility of finding rare northern species for his big project, he set his sights on a place the Swedes called Lapland.
Lapland straddles the Arctic Circle, an imaginary line that rings the globe far north of the Equator. Inside is the top of the world.
This frozen frontier seemed a mysterious, dangerous, even frightening place to Europeans. Fed by rumors and travelers’ tales, they believed it was inhabited by trolls, witches, and hostile worshippers of pagan gods. The people who lived in this wild country were called Lapps. A common theory is that this was an old Finnish term meaning “people who live apart from others.” Today their descendants are called by their own term, the Sami people, pronounced “sah-mee.” They call their region Sápmi. These nomadic reindeer-herders, hunters, and fishermen have lived in this glacial wilderness for thousands of years, but in Linnaeus’s time the region remained largely unknown to outsiders.
Funded by a small grant from the Royal Society of Arts and Sciences, Linnaeus’s mission was twofold. First, identify plants, minerals, and animals that could be used as foods, medicines, building materials, paints, or dyes. Second, study the lifestyle and health of the Sami people. He wanted to find out how they lived in such a cold climate, what they ate in times of scarcity, and how they used plants. From the Samis, he hoped to learn different ways of using naturally-occurring materials that could benefit the rest of the country.
Linnaeus packed two maps of the northern region, plus a journal with an inkhorn and goose quills, several unfinished manuscripts, paper for pressing plants, a spyglass, a magnifying glass, and an eight-sided measuring stick. He brought clothes for his five-month expedition—one shirt, two pairs of detachable half-sleeves, two nightcaps, a comb, and a hat with netting to protect against mosquitoes. He wore leather trousers bought secondhand at an auction, and a tied-back wig. He carried a short sword, a pistol for shooting birds and other small animals for his specimen collection, and, in his pocket, a passport and a three-by-five-inch field notebook. Its pages had been specially treated by rubbing chalk on the surface until the paper was smooth, hard, and could be wiped clean with water. While traveling, Linnaeus penciled hasty notes into the notebook. At the end of each day, he inked the notes into his permanent journal, then wiped the notebook’s pages.
Alone and riding a hired horse, Linnaeus pushed the pace and covered forty-three miles on the first day. Over the next weeks, he mounted and dismounted, examining trees, smaller plants, and dew-sprinkled “mathematical webs” of spiders. He noted mineral springs, quicksand by the coast, and, along the road, chunks of “spar full of talc, or Muscovy glass, glittering in the sun.” He noted changes in soil and rock types and various kinds of plants and animals.
On the coast, Linnaeus visited Swedish and Finnish settlers. Never passing up a chance to talk with local people, he peppered them with questions. This young man, who collected insects from cattle and later from reindeer up north, and asked countless odd questions, must have seemed strange. Occasionally he thought their answers were preposterous. Anthropologists have observed that sometimes local people, bored by endless questioning, have fun making up outrageous stories to tell wide-eyed visiting scholars. That might have been the case in one village where locals tried to fool him with an old folktale. They explained to Linnaeus that “malignant beings of gigantic size” had hurled rocks to try to knock down their church. Nearby, a boulder held their evidence: imprints of four enormous fingers and a thumb. In his journal, he wrote down their story and described these villagers as naive peasants. But in another village, Linnaeus sympathized with a woman whose stomach was making croaking noises. She was convinced that she had swallowed water containing frog eggs and could feel three grown frogs jumping inside her. He’d heard of this complaint before and suggested ingesting tar to induce vomiting, but she had already tried that without success. Elsewhere, people told him about an old woman who stole an apple from a tree and angered the owner. The old woman cursed the tree and it never grew apples again. Linnaeus was suspicious and the next morning went to inspect the tree. It was an elm. Since the locals did not recognize the elm, he concluded that this was the edge of that species’ range. Linnaeus’s observation showed that determining what is “not” an apple tree can be as valuable to science as learning what “is” an elm.
Traveling north toward the Arctic was like time-traveling. The seasonal clock ticked backward from spring into winter. Snow replaced spring flowers. Days lengthened, and the midnight sun lit his way. He rarely saw stars. One night, awakened by bright light streaming in the window, he jumped out of bed, worried there was a fire. The sky was ablaze with a natural light show—the aurora borealis.
Travelers along this road could stop at an inn every twelve miles or so for a drink or a meal, to hire a fresh horse or to leave a letter to be picked up by a post-rider. Linnaeus sent home a heavy package of rocks that he had collected. In the evenings, he transferred his day’s notes with a quill pen and ink into his permanent trip journal and added details as he remembered them. Overnight guests bunked together, several to a bed where hungry fleas hopped from guest to guest. The post-houses, he complained, were “dreadfully bad.”
However, when Linnaeus left the coast road for the wilderness, he missed those inns—their beds, their bread, their fresh horses. He also missed people who could speak his language. Since Linnaeus spoke only Swedish and Latin, he hired interpreters and guides. Some nights in the back country he slept outside, and others he spent at the homes of local officials or clergymen.
Fallen trees crisscrossed the path like a game of giant pick-up-sticks. Storm-soaked birch branches drenched him. His horse, spooked by two reindeer, tried to buck him off. Farther along, the horse stumbled over roots and rocks. It fell through a rotten bridge into a creek. Its owner could afford to equip it only with a rope tied around its jaw and an unstuffed saddle. Riding it left Linnaeus
saddle-sore and exhausted.
To make matters worse, at the village where he thought he’d meet Sami people trading with coastal settlers, the annual spring market had already ended. To interview the Sami, he would have to find their summer fishing camps. There was only one way to get through that deep wilderness. By water.
A man agreed to take him partway up the Ume River. His “sewn boat” was constructed in the traditional Sami way with spruce planks overlapped and stitched together using cord “as thick as a goosequill,” according to Linnaeus’s description. The hull’s ribs were made from spruce roots, and two boards cut from branches of the same tree spanned the boat crosswise for seats.
As they moved upriver, the calm water soon turned white as it rushed toward the sea from its source in the Scandinavian Mountains. Linnaeus and his guide portaged around rapids. Linnaeus carried the gear, while the guide stowed the oars and hefted the twelve-foot-long wooden boat, bottom up, onto his shoulders. Linnaeus followed the man who “scampered away over hills and valleys, so that the devil himself could not have [kept] up with him.” In other unnavigable stretches, they trudged through the frigid water, towing the heavy boat.
A page from Linnaeus’s Arctic journal, showing a Sami “sewn boat.” It measured twelve feet long, five feet wide, and two feet deep. Linnaeus’s drawing of his guide portaging the boat is not to scale.
One morning, after traveling all night, they rested at a dismal place called Lucky Marsh. They dumped icy water from their boots, built a fire, and hung their clothes on bushes to dry. The guide hiked ahead to look for someone familiar with the area who could replace him. Meanwhile, Linnaeus tried to sleep. The north wind chilled him on one side, the fire scorched the other, and gnats bit without mercy.
The next afternoon, the guide returned with an elderly Sami woman. Her skin was stained and leathery. When she spoke, the woman surprised him by speaking in an old, formal Swedish. She explained that there was no one available to guide him further and advised him to turn back. She had little to give but offered a fish. Its mouth was crawling with maggots. Instead of accepting the fish, Linnaeus talked her into selling him one of the three reindeer cheeses she had stored in a hut a mile away. Heading back downriver with his guide, he grumbled that the place should be renamed Unlucky Marsh.
It was early June. Frost and snow still clung to the riverbanks. Jagged rocks lurked beneath the water’s surface. Maneuvering around rocks and downed trees, the guide struggled to control the boat in the forceful current. It was a rough ride.
Linnaeus’s field notebook from his Sápmi expedition.
Despite the guide’s skill, the boat crashed into a boulder and collapsed, flipping the men into frigid, waist-deep water. As they fought their way to shore, they scrambled to save their belongings. Lost to the river were the man’s shattered boat, hatchet, and several pike he’d caught. Linnaeus lost two birds—a large black heron and a red-colored jay—that he had carefully preserved for his collection. Amazingly, his journal survived the plunge.
After the two hiked from the crash site back down the river, Linnaeus continued walking along the coast alone. When he reached the Lule River, he hired another boat and guide in a second attempt to strike deeper into the wilderness. Finally, five weeks after leaving Uppsala, he crossed the Arctic Circle near the village of Jokkmokk.
Seeing the Scandinavian Mountains for the first time left Linnaeus awestruck. This was epic beauty. Having grown up in the flatlands, he thought they looked like “a range of white clouds rising from the horizon.” He estimated that these rugged, snow-covered “alps” were, in places, more than a Swedish mile high (equivalent to more than six modern miles or about 10 kilometers), which would have made them taller than Mount Everest. Linnaeus carried no equipment to measure heights or even distances, and his estimates were extreme. In fact, Kebnakaise, the tallest mountain in Sweden, is only 6,909 feet.
While the peaks were far lower than Linnaeus guessed, they were still too steep and hazardous to climb in icy conditions. So he never saw the high alpine plants that grew there. However even at lower elevations and in the valleys, he found so many new plants that he wondered how he would deal with them all.
When I reached this mountain, I seemed entering on a new world; and when I had ascended it, I scarcely knew whether I was in Asia or Africa, the soil, situation, and every one of the plants, being equally strange to me . . . All the rare plants . . . were here as in miniature.
He discovered one hundred plants in Sápmi that had never been described before.
Crossing fields of packed snow in the Scandinavian Mountains, Linnaeus’s footing became unsure. Sometimes the snow held firm, sometimes it crumbled like loose sand. Rivers of meltwater flowed below, undermining the snowpack. At one place, he took a step onto deep snow and the surface crust of ice suddenly gave way. He sank in, trapped. His guides, an old Sami father and son, quickly rigged rescue ropes and hauled the soggy young scientist to safety. The next day, Linnaeus and his guides rose early and hiked to a “lofty icy mountain . . . of a very great elevation, and covered with perpetual snow.” There they crossed a glacier, a river of ice hundreds of feet deep. Crevasses in the glacier revealed strata which had formed as each new snowy layer rested on the layer from the year before and compressed the snow below into ice.
Linnaeus’s sketch of the rounded tops of the Scandinavian Mountains. “The lofty mountains, piled one upon another, showed no signs of volcanic fire.”
Rain chased by a cold east wind froze their clothes to an icy crust. The wind blew them along, knocking them off their feet. Linnaeus rolled downhill to a stop—at the edge of a crevasse.
The mountain chain they crossed curved like a backbone down the Scandinavian peninsula. After hiking for miles across ice, snow, and bald, stony mountains, they reached a place where the watersheds divided. Linnaeus observed that the surface waters now flowed westward. Eventually the party caught a view of the Norwegian Sea. Ahead lay Norway’s coast with forests, fjords, islands, meadows of wild clover, and a few small cottages. Linnaeus looked forward to drinking cow’s milk again and sitting in a chair. On a warm hillside, he slumped down, exhausted, by a patch of his favorite food—wild strawberries—and ate.
Meanwhile, his guides, seventy and fifty years old, who had carried all of his gear, were full of energy, sprinting up and down the slope. A friend of Linnaeus’s, Dr. Nils Rosén, had asked him to try to find out why the Sami were such fast runners. Did they position their feet differently when running? How did they have such stamina?
Linnaeus credited several reasons. Unlike the high, heavy-heeled shoes worn by European men, the Samis’ shoes had no heels. This natural foot position allowed them to run as easily as though they were barefoot. They developed stamina from lifelong daily exercise chasing reindeer.
Another factor contributing to the Samis’ agility and their good health, he thought, was their diet. He noted that “In spring they eat fish, in winter nothing but meat, in summer milk and its various preparations.” He believed their habit of eating food cold was healthy too. “They always let their boiled meat cool before they taste it, and do not seize it . . . as soon as it comes out of the pot.” They ate small amounts of food at a time, unlike Finlanders who “cram themselves with . . . turnips” and Swedes who gobbled flummery, a sweet dessert.
Linnaeus ate foods prepared by his guides and hosts. In addition to reindeer, the Sami people ate wild birds, fish, squirrel, marten, bear, and beaver. During the winter months, when the fish they’d preserved was no longer edible, a family of four ate at least one reindeer a week until they could start fishing again in the spring. The Sami men prepared all the meat, fish, and birds. Linnaeus praised their rare consumption of alcoholic beverages. As a high-energy treat in that cold climate, they offered guests a spoon of grease.
The women milked reindeer and made cheese. Sometimes the Samis traded with the Swedish and Finnish settlers who grew grains. Linnaeus was fascinated to discover that when flour was scarce
during times of famine, the Samis ground the less edible parts of grains, called chaff, and the inner bark of pine trees which they baked into loaves, like bread.
At times, local customs took him by surprise. For instance, when visiting a guide’s relative, the guide and his family member touched noses, a greeting he had never seen before. At another Sami cottage, the family’s dishwashing procedure robbed him of his appetite. The host spat into Linnaeus’s spoon and dried it with his hand, while his wife cleaned the bowl, licking her fingers after every swipe.
Outside his hosts’ huts, Linnaeus slept between reindeer skins, sometimes sheltered by an overturned boat. The Samis cut their beds out of mattress-sized pieces of moss. These soft beds could be rolled up and carried. When the mattress dried out and flattened, a sprinkle of water puffed it back up like a sponge.
A wooden Sami hut, sketched by Linnaeus. This permanent dwelling of the Forest Sami was typically 11 feet high by 12 feet wide. A hole at the top vented the open fire pit directly below.
Linnaeus’s diagram of a six-foot-long wooden ski. Skis did not exist in southern Sweden at the time. Partly covered in reindeer skin to prevent the wearer’s foot from slipping, the ski was tied to the ankle with a twist of fir root. The Samis used only one ski pole. At the base of the pole, a six-inch loop of reindeer leather kept it from sinking in the snow. The iron spear on its upward end was used to attack bears or wolves in deep snow.
Overall, Linnaeus considered the Samis’ self-sufficient lifestyle, free of coffee, sugar, and salt, as the ideal, and contrasted it with what he considered the pampered ways of his fellow Swedes. He attributed the Samis’ good health to their diet and the pure mountain air and water. Their hardiness, he concluded, was due to the constant exposure to cold temperatures that their herding lifestyle required.
