by What Linnaeus Saw- A Scientist's Quest to Name Every Living Thing (retail) (epub)
Linnaeus criticized the treatment of the Samis by the Swedish state church, which required them to attend religious festivals and fined them if they failed to appear. No matter the season, they had to brave dangerous rivers and travel great distances, and often arrived, as he commented, “half dead with cold and fatigue.” In his trip journal, he also pointed out other injustices, such as heavy taxes imposed by the government even while foreign fishermen were allowed to encroach on the Samis’ traditional fishing grounds.
At times he showed great sympathy for the Samis. Yet at other times, his journal entries sound patronizing and condescending. For example, he recorded the names of some clergymen and government officials who offered him lodging and tours of their gardens, but he never identified by name any of the Sami people who helped him along the way. He wrote about them not as individuals with personalities and things to say, but by their functions—rower, porter, host, or guide.
What impressed Linnaeus most about the Samis was their understanding and careful use of their region’s natural resources. They sewed colorful, ornately embroidered clothing from reindeer hides. To make thread, Sami women used their teeth to separate the leg sinews from the fresh carcass of a reindeer into fine strings which they twisted together. He brought back a sample that he claimed was superior to the finest Swedish thread.
To clean the floor, a Sami woman tied a brush of spruce fir twigs to her right foot and swept her way around the room. To join wood for a hunting bow, Samis made glue by boiling down perch skins. From birch bark, they fashioned plates, boat bailers, shoes, baskets, and tubs in which they salted fish. They made birch-bark collars to keep rain from trickling down their necks.
If they needed to find their way in the woods, they turned to nature’s compasses. More branches grew on the south side of large pines than the north; bark was rough on the north side of aspen trees but smooth on the south; lichens grew on the north side of old, withered pines; and ants built their hills on the south side of whortleberry bushes.
As a future medical doctor, Linnaeus paid particular attention to how the Samis dealt with injuries and illnesses. To treat a blister, they applied a cushion of lichen. To treat a scrape or cut, they made a powder of white bog-moss to seal the wound. For a headache, toothache, or backache, they lit a pea-sized bit of fungus from a birch tree right on the place of pain. The flame, he observed, created an open sore that lasted for months and left scars. He did not mention whether it cured the original pain.
The long cold winters prevented bathing which, of course, led to body odor. Linnaeus noted that a Sami boy wanting to impress a girl would tuck a chunk of fragrant corky fungus from a willow tree into his pocket.
[I]n other regions [Love] must be treated with coffee and chocolate, preserves and sweetmeats, wines and dainties, jewels and pearls, gold and silver, silks and cosmetics, balls and assemblies, music and theatrical exhibitions: here [it is] satisfied with a little withered fungus!
Linnaeus also described the leisure-time activities and games of the Samis and their children. The children built small stone huts to play in. They used branches from dwarf birch trees as antlers while they pretended to be reindeer fighting one another. Adults carved wooden tokens to play a Sami version of an ancient Viking board game, Hnefatafl (nef-ah-tah-fel), also known as Tafl. Linnaeus called it “tablut,” which means table or board game. In this war strategy game with unequal opposing sides, the Swedish king and his eight defenders are surrounded and outnumbered as they try to fight off a force of sixteen Muscovite invaders. Linnaeus recorded the rules in his notebook while watching people play.
The game board was embroidered on a reindeer hide, easily rolled for storage and transport. Tokens (lower right) were carved from wood. Linnaeus’s notes have been used recently to resurrect this 1,600-year-old game.
When Linnaeus returned to the university in mid-October, he submitted his report to the Royal Society of Arts and Sciences. He had been traveling for five months. He had taken three trips inland by way of the rivers Ume, Lule, and Torne. His return trip took him along the Gulf of Bothnia and the Baltic Sea down the coast of Finland. Although he had traveled a long way—2,000 miles (3,200 kilometers)—he more than doubled that distance in his report, to 4,500 miles. Perhaps the inflated number was caused by an unintentional miscalculation, but he was expecting the Society to pay him by the mile.
He brought back an extensive collection of minerals, plants, and animals from the Arctic and, for years, he and his students would draw on them as study specimens, comparing them with similar species from other parts of the globe.
His journal provided material for papers and lectures on many Arctic subjects, including plants and animals, insects, mosses, reindeer, and—a subject very important to him—diet and the Sami lifestyle. Even though he stayed only a few nights with several Sami families in their camps and did not live among them for long periods, as modern anthropologists would, some consider his journal to be a valuable early study of an indigenous people. He wrote of the reindeer-herding life of the Mountain Samis and detailed the daily life of the Forest Samis, nomadic fishing families.
Today Samis lead modern lives with iPads and internet, electricity, cars, and snowmobiles. They live in rural areas as well as cities and towns throughout northern Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia. Half the population is bilingual and still speaks one of the Sami languages at home, passing this knowledge on to their children. Under their ancient claims, they continue to hunt and fish. While fishing is very important to the Samis, few make their entire living from it. The so-called Forest Samis herd reindeer in the lower areas; the Mountain Samis move with their reindeer herds in annual migrations to the mountains along the Norwegian border in summer and back to the coniferous forests in winter.
Linnaeus posed for a portrait in his Sami costume while living in Holland in 1737. In his right mitten he holds his favorite Arctic flower, named Linnaea in his honor by a friend. Linnaeus later gave the tiny twin-belled flower a two-word name, Linnaea borealis. He described it as “lowly, insignificant, disregarded, flowering but for a brief space—from Linnaeus who resembles it.” Painting by Martin Hoffman, 1737.
Linnaeus would use his experiences as a resource in teaching future scientific adventurers: how to collect specimens, how to study a group of people and their way of life, how to explore an unfamiliar land, and how to tell nature’s facts from folktales.
Around Uppsala, he also showed off his unusual Sami costume: reindeer-fur mittens, boots without heels, and, strangely, a woman’s red summer hat jauntily tipped. From his belt dangled a runic calendar, pouches, and a round snuffbox carved from reindeer horn. No Sami man would ever have worn those bizarrely mismatched items together. Later, a collector from England gave him a Sami ceremonial drum. Early missionaries had burned such drums, with their mystical, shamanic symbols; in the eighteenth century, Swedish law made it illegal for a Sami to own one. Linnaeus played the drum and performed an imitation of traditional Sami nature-based oral poetry called juoigat, by the North Samis, but jojk by the Swedes (pronounced “yoik”).*
In the fall of 1734, after six years at Uppsala University and his Arctic adventure, Linnaeus was ready to seek his medical degree. There is no evidence that he ever received an academic degree from Uppsala University. Since Sweden had no medical school, most who wanted a medical degree attended schools in Holland. Especially popular was the University of Harderwijk, known for its speedy diplomas.
Peter Artedi had left Uppsala in early September, planning to study natural history in London first, then to enroll in a Dutch medical school. In November, Linnaeus passed the examination on Swedish religious doctrine required for a passport.
Meanwhile, with Christmas approaching, he accepted an invitation, for the second year in a row, to enjoy the holidays with school friends in Falun, a mining village in the province of Dalarna. The season was a swirl of festivities, and at one party, he met and fell for Sara Lisa Moraea, the eighteen-year-old daughter of a w
ealthy doctor.
Knowing she had many eligible suitors, Linnaeus wasted no time in taking the next step and donning that amazing Sami outfit. On January 2, all dressed up in reindeer skin, fur mittens, and red hat, he called on Sara Lisa and her family for the first time. The next day he visited again and found Sara Lisa by herself. Without the customary presence of a chaperone, they had time to talk in private. He penciled into his almanac “absentibus parentibus,” Latin for “home alone.” Another day, he “called on S. L. M. and had a little fun.” On January 20, after frequent visits, he “explicitly solicited” Dr. Moraeus for his daughter’s hand in marriage.
Linnaeus had charmed Sara Lisa. She said yes. However, her parents weren’t so quick to agree. The reply came a week later. Linnaeus could marry their daughter, but there was a stipulation: he would have to get a medical degree and establish himself as a doctor first; he had three years to do it.
Before he left, Linnaeus gave Sara Lisa a ring and a poem he’d written for her:
A Lover’s Farewell
Oh mighty Lord God
a wailing sound
my soul cries
who must leave and say goodbye
to the one who is mine
who my whole heart has in mind
. . .
Moraea my friend
Linnaeus is your servant
who greets you good day
and wishes you pleasure and delight
until he again
may return and see his sweetest friend.
* Jojk is included in the opening song in the movie Frozen, “Eatnemen Vuelie” (Song of the earth), performed by a Norwegian musician of Sami descent.
4
DRAGON WITH SEVEN HEADS
Many people said it was the only one of its kind in the world and thanked God that it had not multiplied.
—THEODOR M. FRIES, 1923
The mayor of Hamburg, Germany, was thrilled to show off his prized possession, the famous Seven-Headed Hydra. The taxidermied dragon, looted by the Swedish army from a church altar during the 1648 Battle of Prague, was for sale and was expected to bring a handsome price. The mayor had already turned down a large offer from the King of Denmark.
When Carl Linnaeus arrived in Hamburg in April 1735, he was stunned by the splendor of the city, in sharp contrast with his poor rural homeland. This was his first trip abroad, and the first time he’d walked around a major foreign port. Most of all, he was excited by the opportunity to inspect the unique specimen. He had seen the hydra’s image in all its snarling viciousness in the first volume of a natural history thesaurus published the year before by Amsterdam’s renowned apothecary, Albertus Seba, a big-time collector of curiosities.
The famous seven-headed hydra of Hamburg, a flying lizard, and two American birds, pictured in Albertus Seba’s Thesaurus.
The editor of a respected journal, the Hamburg Reporter of New Things Learned, had been corresponding with Linnaeus. The enterprising young Swede, who was a genius at self-promotion and far from modest, had sent the editor several letters that glowingly described his scientific travels through Sweden, curiosities he had collected, and manuscripts he would be bringing to Germany and Holland in hopes of finding a publisher. Scholars believe he may have written these letters in the third person, like articles, similar to today’s press release style. “All this skilful man thinks and writes is methodical . . . His diligence, patience, and industriousness are extraordinary.” The editor now offered to escort Linnaeus to view the monster.
There it was: seven heads, seven gaping jaws, countless needle-sharp teeth. The seven heads seemed evidence enough to Linnaeus that the creature must be a fraud. Up close, he saw that the threatening teeth and two clawed feet had once belonged to weasels. The body was covered in snake skins carefully glued together.
Linnaeus figured that imaginative Catholic monks in Prague had created this semblance of the “dragon in the apocalypse” to frighten their parishioners into goodness. When Linnaeus told people he met of his unveiling of the hoax, word got out and the dragon was worthless. Claiming to be worried that the mayor would seek revenge on him for his part in devaluing the treasure, Linnaeus hopped on the next ship to Holland.
An important goal of science has always been to separate fact from fiction. As seventeenth- and eighteenth-century explorers brought back curiosities from their travels, people began to collect them. In England, their room-sized collections were called “cabinets of curiosities.” In Germany, they were called wunderkammer, or “wonder-rooms.”
While wealthy amateurs assembled these collections, scholars in various fields were collecting knowledge of all sorts into books—almanacs, encyclopedias, and word books. In Holland, Seba worked on his natural thesaurus and, in France, Linnaeus’s rival, Georges-Louis Leclerc, the comte de Buffon, was compiling an encyclopedia of natural history in forty-three volumes. But between nature and the supernatural, the lines were sometimes blurred. Scholars still tangled with persistent superstitions, talk of witches and black magic, old-fashioned medical theories, worrisome tales of dragons, and folk stories that often misinterpreted nature.
The Danish physician Ole Worm built this cabinet of curiosities in the 1600s. The word cabinet referred to a room, not a piece of furniture. Some collectors’ wonder-rooms contained sculptures and paintings. Others held fossils, bones, horns, and taxidermied animals, as well as spears and other human artifacts from various cultures.
For example, two years before Linnaeus stared down the seven-headed dragon, he faced another confused bit of folklore. During his 1732 expedition to the land of the Samis, he met a back-country preacher and a schoolmaster who told him that clouds were solid objects that struck the Arctic mountaintops and carried away rocks, trees, and animals including cattle, reindeer, and vole-like rodents called lemmings. Linnaeus argued that clouds could not lift anything; clouds, he explained, were “watery bubbles” that floated up into the air. The two men remained unconvinced. Too much knowledge, they scoffed, had muddled the young man’s brain.
To be fair to the preacher and schoolmaster, Linnaeus had some blind spots, too. He suggested that a wind had carried these things away, and later attributed the Sami cloud myth to men and animals stumbling and falling to their deaths down mountain crevasses. Today we know that a pair of lemmings can give birth to as many as one hundred young every six months and that overpopulation quickly results. When that happens, hordes of lemmings “mysteriously” disappear—in search of food elsewhere.
Despite many pioneering observations, Linnaeus was not thoroughly modern. For instance, he never stopped believing that swallows overwintered in the mud at the bottom of lakes. He was not alone in his naive ideas: one seventeenth-century naturalist believed swallows wintered on the moon.
In the eighteenth century, educated people struggled to separate nature’s facts from folktales and the wild accounts of travelers. Imagine what it was like to analyze vivid reports of ridiculous-looking things. A bird with rodent’s teeth and leathery wings that slept hanging from the roof of a cave. A fish that could fly. A plant that ate insects. An animal that hopped on two giant feet and kept its babies in a pocket. Or an ocean phenomenon called the Maelstrom—a giant whirlpool that swallowed ships.
The famous seven-headed hydra of Hamburg became Linnaeus’s test case for what to believe. As he worked on cataloging the natural world, he weighed what was possible and what was absurd, listing the animals that he knew to be real. Any that were suspicious he placed in a separate category called “Paradoxa,” meaning absurd or unbelievable. He described common explanations for these puzzling creatures. His intent was to debunk the fantasy creatures and demystify science.
At the top of the list of Paradoxa, of course, was the seven-headed hydra. Next came the South American “frog-fish,” a frog which supposedly transformed into a fish. Linnaeus dismissed this because frogs breathe through lungs, not gills, and fish have gills, not lungs. This creature was impossible according to the rules of nat
ure, he said.
Then he listed the monoceros, or unicorn. It had a horse’s body, the feet of a beast of prey, and a long, spiralling horn. “A painter’s invention,” he wrote, although the monodon, or narwhal, had a similar horn. Linnaeus’s friend Peter Artedi had seen a specimen of the tusklike tooth and confirmed the existence of this sea animal. Narwhal horns were mislabeled as unicorn horns in many curiosity cabinets.
Also on Linnaeus’s list of impossible creatures was the satyr. This one was said to have a beard, a tail, and a hairy, manlike body—“if ever one has been seen,” Linnaeus remarked. He determined that it must have been a species of monkey.
Another creature, pelecanus, was a bird with a preposterous neck pouch hanging from its gullet. Medieval authors claimed this bird pecked its own flesh for blood to feed its young. Linnaeus decided that this absurd-looking creature was another product of imaginations run amok. He later realized that he had guessed wrong, and that the pelican was indeed a real bird.
The Scythian lamb also made this list. In the Middle Ages, people said that this plant, also called the Vegetable Lamb of Tartary, contained blood and looked like a lamb, even attracting animals of prey. Linnaeus determined it was actually a tree fern with woolly horizontal roots that lay, like fuzzy lambs, on the ground.
Many authors had written about the phoenix. It was said to be the only bird of its species in existence. Linnaeus summarized its fantastic story: “After having been burned to death on the funeral pile, which it had itself constructed out of [aromatic plants], it revived in order to live the happy period of youth.” He figured this was not a bird but a date palm tree which, when burned to the ground, would rise up through the ashes and grow again.
