THE REVEREND PETER OSBECK HDT WHAT? INDEX

REVEREND PETER OSBECK PEHR OSBECK

1723

May 9, Thursday (Old Style): Peter Osbeck was born to a poor family in the parish of Hålanda in Västergötland in . His father was a crofter, Hans Andersson, and his mother was Rangela (Ragnhild) Andersdotter. His father would die while he was 8 years of age. HDT WHAT? INDEX

REVEREND PETER OSBECK PEHR OSBECK

1745

September 20, Friday (Old Style): Peter Osbeck, who had enrolled at the school in 1733 and the Gothenburg gymnasium in 1740, matriculated at University as a student for the priesthood. He would also study natural history under Carolus Linnaeus. HDT WHAT? INDEX

REVEREND PETER OSBECK PEHR OSBECK

1747

Peter Osbeck began to tutor the children of district judge Ekskiöld in Örmanäs (into 1749).

Dr. Cadwallader Colden provided a carefully cataloged and described collection of plants and Professor Carolus Linnaeus published it in “Plantae Coldenghamiae” in ACTA UPSALIENSIS. In FLORA ZEYLANICA, Linné designated a plant the Coldenia. BOTANIZING HDT WHAT? INDEX

REVEREND PETER OSBECK PEHR OSBECK

1750

Carolus Linnaeus sent out the Reverend Peter Osbeck.

Peter Kalm made another northern trip, following the Mohawk River to the country of the Iroquois and visiting Lake Ontario and the Niagara Falls. BOTANIZING

October 12, Friday (Old Style): Peter Osbeck was ordained. Not only could he become the chaplain aboard a sailing ship, but also, in his old age he would be able to neatly wrap up the loose ends as the parish priest of Våxtorp and Hasslöv in Halland, Sweden.

November 18, Sunday (Old Style): The Prins Carl sailed from Cádiz, Spain for Whampoa near Canton. Pastor Peter Osbeck had been selected by the Swedish East India Company to serve as the ship’s chaplain. The ship would come to anchor at Java and at Ascension Island during its voyage. In the year 1750, I was chosen by the Swedish East India Company, to perform the functions of a chaplain to a ship going to the East Indies; that is, to read prayers in the morning and evening, to confess the people, to administer the Lord’s supper, to catechise, to visit the sick, to bury the dead, and to preach on Sundays and holidays. HDT WHAT? INDEX

REVEREND PETER OSBECK PEHR OSBECK

1751

August 25, Wednesday (Old Style): The Prins Carl anchored at Whampoa, near Canton, after having been at sea 5 months and 4 days out of Cádiz, Spain. HDT WHAT? INDEX

REVEREND PETER OSBECK PEHR OSBECK

1752

June 26, Monday: Pastor Peter Osbeck had as ship’s chaplain on the Prins Carl spent 4 months in the Canton region of China observing the local flora, the local fauna, and the local human beings. On this day he arrived back at his home in Sweden. In the following year he would provide more than 600 species for Carolus Linnaeus’s . PLANTS HDT WHAT? INDEX

REVEREND PETER OSBECK PEHR OSBECK

1753

Carolus Linnaeus issued MUSEUM TESSINIANUM, and in SPECIES PLANTARUM he named the plant genus of tobacco, Nicotiana, and described two species of this genus, Nicotiana rustica and Nicotiana tabacum.

Pastor Peter Osbeck had during 1750, 1751, and 1752 traveled as chaplain on the ship Prins Carl to Asia and had spent 4 months in the Canton region of China studying the local flora, the local fauna, and the local human beings. Upon his return he became household chaplain, botanicus, and tutor for the family of count Carl Gustaf Tessin in Åkerö (until 1758). He was able to provide more than 600 species of plant to Linnaeus’s SPECIES PLANTARUM. BOTANIZING

SPECIES PLANTARUM would establish a new standard for plant classification as well as nomenclature. This treatise eventually would be recognized as the beginning-point for today’s .

From 1748 to 1751 Peter Kalm had collected plant specimens in northeastern North America. His botanical collections were at this point extensively accessed by this Swedish botanist Linné as nomenclatural types for many of our northeastern US and southeastern Canadian species.

Linné also classified cannabis sativa. PLANTS HDT WHAT? INDEX

REVEREND PETER OSBECK PEHR OSBECK

1757

Sir William Chambers reported on his travels in China in DESIGNS OF CHINESE BUILDINGS, FURNITURE, DRESSES, MACHINES, AND UTENSILS: TO WHICH IS ANNEXED A DESCRIPTION OF THEIR TEMPLES, HOUSES, GARDENS, &C, printed in London in English and in French.

Gamblers and grifters living in Fukien and Kwangtung Province created the crime syndicates known to outsiders as Triads, after the three dots that members used as gang signs, and to insiders as the Tian-ti Hui, or Heaven-and-Earth Societies. Regional bosses, who were usually wealthy older men, were known as sinseh (“ritual specialist”) or shifu (“teacher”). Bosses were assisted by an Elder Brother who supervised operations, a Second Brother who kept the books, and a Third Brother who led the hung-kun, or “Red Poles.” The latter were organizational fighters, the youths average age was in the late teens — that foreigners called boo how doy, a phrase meaning “bad boys” but usually translated as “hatchet men.” These youths were rarely orthodox (cheng) boxers. Instead, in the words of the nineteenth century Malay triad leader Ho Ah-kay, they were simply gangs in the employ of brothel owners and gamblers. They amused themselves by looting, fighting, and attending violent stage and puppet plays. This wasn’t merely a Chinese problem. Comparable organizations did exist in Europe. According to an English book of 1658 called The Devil’s Cabinet Broke Open, London gangs were commanded by captains, novices were tested and trained, and robbers, cheats, and cutpurses all carried different signs. Like the Chinese, the English criminals fought with the authorities whenever they attempted to invade an established sanctuary such as Whitefriars, Smithfield, or the Bankside. Barring such unifying invasions, the criminals acted independently. On both sides of the globe, criminals were youthful, were organized in gangs of 20-30 members, and preyed mostly on prostitutes, shop-owners, and drunks.

The Reverend Peter Osbeck, a Swedish ship chaplain formed at the Linnæan school of natural history, published the journal of his adventure to the opposite side of the earth, to the Canton region of China, DAGBOK ÖFWER EN OSTINDISK RESA ÅREN, which would be translated from Swedish into German in 1762 and from German into English in 1771. He would also publish A VOYAGE AUX INDES ORIENTALES FA IT DANS LES ANNÉES 1750, 51, 52, AVEC DES OBSERVATIONS SUR L’HISTOIRE NATURELLE, LA LANGUE, LES MOEURS, L’ÉCONOMIE DOMESTIQUE DES PEUPLES ÉTRANGERS (), and as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Sciences in Uppsala would author several dissertations and memoirs of natural history that would appear in the Transactions of the Swedish Academy. HDT WHAT? INDEX

REVEREND PETER OSBECK PEHR OSBECK

1758

In this year Carl von Linné purchased a small country estate at Hammarby near Uppsala, Sweden as a summer refuge for his family.

Peter Osbeck was elected a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

May 3, Wednesday: The British East India Company trading town of Gondelour, India surrendered to the French.

Prospero Lambertini, Pope Benedict XIV, died in Rome.

Peter Osbeck became parson in the parishes of Hasslöv and Våxtorp, Sweden.

August 29, Tuesday: Peter Osbeck got married with Susanna Dahlberg in Hasslöv, Sweden. The couple would produce 8 children. HDT WHAT? INDEX

REVEREND PETER OSBECK PEHR OSBECK

1760

August 11, Monday: Peter Osbeck became vicar in the parishes of Hasslöv and Våxtorp, Sweden. HDT WHAT? INDEX

REVEREND PETER OSBECK PEHR OSBECK

1771

Publication of Marie Arouet de Voltaire’s 1756 ESSAIS SUR LES MOEURS ET L’ESPRIT DES NATIONS, praising China for its “natural” deism. His history of the world began in China. At some point, maybe not in this precise year, Benjamin Franklin contemplated sending off some commissioners to China to obtain information as to aged laws and extensive experience, for the profit of this “young people” of the new American nation.

The Reverend Peter Osbeck’s A VOYAGE TO CHINA AND THE EAST INDIES ... TOGETHER WITH A VOYAGE TO SURATTE, BY OLOF TORREN... AND AN ACCOUNT OF CHINESE HUSBANDRY BY CAPTAIN CHARLES GUSTAVUS ECKEBERG. TRANSLATED FROM THE GERMAN, BY JOHN REINHOLD FORSTER. TO WHICH ARE ADDED, A FAUNA AND FLORA SINENSIS (London: Benjamin White) First English Edition, 8vo, 2 vols, pp xx, 396; (ii), 367, (1) blank, (31) index, (1) errata; 13 engraved plates. This had been 1st published in Swedish in 1757. In Eckeberg’s account there is a detailed description of the island of Fernand de Noronha. The translation of these important voyages by students of Linnaeus would lead to John Reinhold Forster’s appointment as principal naturalist on Captain James Cook’s 2d voyage. HDT WHAT? INDEX

REVEREND PETER OSBECK PEHR OSBECK

1773

Erik Acharius studied medicine in Uppsala, Sweden, under Professor Carolus Linnaeus.

Peter Osbeck became rural dean in part of Laholm’s diocese, Sweden. HDT WHAT? INDEX

REVEREND PETER OSBECK PEHR OSBECK

1779

June 6, Sunday: Peter Osbeck was awarded the advanced degree of Theological Doctor at Uppsala University. HDT WHAT? INDEX

REVEREND PETER OSBECK PEHR OSBECK

1805

December 23, Monday: Peter Osbeck died at Hasslöv in Halland, Sweden. The stone in the churchyard is believed to have been carved by he himself in the final year of his life, and is inscribed “P.O. 1761” (I can offer no explanation for this “1761” except that perhaps it was not intended to be a year date; eventually the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences would add another memorial stone with further details).

Joseph Smith, Jr. was born at 6PM in Sharon, Vermont, 5th child of Lucy Mack and Joseph Smith, Sr. He would grow up to be a religious influence, like another newborn baby of that year, Frederic Henry Hedge of Cambridge, Massachusetts, but unlike Hedge would not be a seer on the model of Maimonides. He would be six feet tall and would work in the mode of Elijah or Moses, or perhaps Geller, and would marry at least 49 women.

Harold Bloom, in his 1992 treatise on the American Religion and on the emergence of the US as a post- Christian nation THE AMERICAN RELIGION: THE EMERGENCE OF THE POST-CHRISTIAN NATION (NY: Simon & Schuster), refers to Waldo Emerson’s sharing with Joseph in the creation of our unholy, fatuous faith in our American selves:

Ralph Waldo Emerson, visiting Mormon country in Salt Lake City in 1871, dismissed the Latter-day Saints as “an after-clap of Puritanism.” Born just two years before the Mormon prophet Joseph Smith, Emerson survived his fellow New Englander by some thirty-eight years. As contemporaries, they possessed nothing in common, and scarcely could have been further apart in moral character, personality, social class, education, intellectual sophistication, indeed in intellect itself. Their largest difference is an immemorial one: between sage and prophet. Emerson, sage of Concord, remains our national oracle of cultural wisdom. Smith, prophet of Kirtland and Nauvoo, remains the religion- making founder of what began as a scandalous heresy and now is an eminently respectable established church, wealthy, vaguely Christian, and mostly right-wing Republican. Had they met in their lifetimes, the Transcendental sage and the Mormon prophet could not have talked to one another. Smith’s visions and prophecies were remarkably literal; the subtle Emerson, master of figurative language, knew that all visions are metaphors, and that all prophecies are rhetorical. And yet Emerson and Joseph Smith alike pioneered in creating the American Religion, the faith of and in the American self.

The Mormon prophet was just as influential as Emerson in the shaping of our new American Religion of self- HDT WHAT? INDEX

REVEREND PETER OSBECK PEHR OSBECK worship — although, Bloom suggests, in an entirely different manner.1

The largest paradox concerning the American Religion is that it is truly a biblical religion, whereas Judaism and Christianity never were that, despite all their passionate protestations.... If there is already in place any authentic version of the American Religion then, as Tolstoy surmised, it must be Mormonism, whose future as yet may prove decisive for the nation, and for more than this nation alone.

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 23 of 12 M 1805 2nd day [sic] / Since the last date I have experienced a want of exercion to raise the inward life to keep away the enemy, but it has sometimes seemed as if there was never more real Zeale in my heart against the Babylonish forms of religion, never more earnest breathings to the Lord for my own firm establishment on the everlasting foundation, & many times has all that was alive & quick within me been engaged in supplication that Sons may be brought from far, & daughters from the ends of the earth. to acknowledge ther Goodness, & Glory of our God. I am often concerned that the precious youth of my acquaintance may not follow after cunningly devised fables, by going to hear the false teachers of the present Age; many of whom it is often sealed on my spirit are up & down in this country who are raising sparks of their own kindling, and warming others by them which will do them no good, but rather tend to blend them to that pure inward principal which of its self well work for them, all that is necessary; without the help of Man. ——————————————————————————————————— RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS

1. The worship-of-a-book of the Southern Baptists, Bloom comments, consists largely of attention to the writings by and about “Saint” Paul, whereas the worship-of-a-book of the Mormons consists largely of attention to “an American set of replacement Scriptures.” (Along the way he indites American psychoanalysis, as being a worship-of-a-book of the authorized edition of the works of Saint Sigmund.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

REVEREND PETER OSBECK PEHR OSBECK COPYRIGHT NOTICE: In addition to the property of others, such as extensive quotations and reproductions of images, this “read-only” computer file contains a great deal of special work product of Austin Meredith, copyright 2017. Access to these interim materials will eventually be offered for a fee in order to recoup some of the costs of preparation. My hypercontext button invention which, instead of creating a hypertext leap through hyperspace —resulting in navigation problems— allows for an utter alteration of the context within which one is experiencing a specific content already being viewed, is claimed as proprietary to Austin Meredith — and therefore freely available for use by all. Limited permission to copy such files, or any material from such files, must be obtained in advance in writing from the “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project, 20 Miles Avenue, Providence RI 02906. Please contact the project at .

“It’s all now you see. Yesterday won’t be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago.” – Remark by character “Garin Stevens” in William Faulkner’s INTRUDER IN THE DUST

Prepared: June 21, 2017 HDT WHAT? INDEX

REVEREND PETER OSBECK PEHR OSBECK ARRGH AUTOMATED RESEARCH REPORT

GENERATION HOTLINE

This stuff presumably looks to you as if it were generated by a human. Such is not the case. Instead, someone has requested that we pull it out of the hat of a pirate who has grown out of the shoulder of our pet parrot “Laura” (as above). What these chronological lists are: they are research reports compiled by ARRGH algorithms out of a database of modules which we term the Kouroo Contexture (this is data mining). To respond to such a request for information we merely push a button.

Commonly, the first output of the algorithm has obvious deficiencies and we need to go back into the modules stored in HDT WHAT? INDEX

REVEREND PETER OSBECK PEHR OSBECK the contexture and do a minor amount of tweaking, and then we need to punch that button again and recompile the chronology — but there is nothing here that remotely resembles the ordinary “writerly” process you know and love. As the contents of this originating contexture improve, and as the programming improves, and as funding becomes available (to date no funding whatever has been needed in the creation of this facility, the entire operation being run out of pocket change) we expect a diminished need to do such tweaking and recompiling, and we fully expect to achieve a simulation of a generous and untiring robotic research librarian. Onward and upward in this brave new world.

First come first serve. There is no charge. Place requests with . Arrgh.