Uncovering Daniel Solander 1733–1782

Uncovering Daniel Solander 1733–1782 Edward Duyker want to do is tell you something about the Discovery Centre, Kurnell, process of uncovering this story of the first Wednesday, 26 March 2008 Swede to circle the globe who was also It is ten years since one of the pioneers of the natural sciences Nature’s Argonaut, my in the Pacific. In doing so, you will see that biography of Danel while manuscripts and published sources Solander was are crucial to an published. Indeed it historian, so too was launched here in is actually visiting the Sutherland Shire the places he or in 1998. At the time I she writes about. thanked the Björklunda Sutherland Shire Daniel Solander Library service for all the help they had was born in 1733, in Piteå, just south of given me and for all the inter-library loans the Arctic circle on the Gulf of Bothnia. He they had organized for me. I also reflected was not baptised Daniel Carl Solander (as on the fact that the Endeavour was a one so often sees in reference works), remarkable floating library when she rather he later adopted the middle name arrived here at Botany Bay, and that a ‘Carlsson’ to distinguish himself from his great many of the books that we know uncle, also named Daniel. Solander's were aboard her were still available in our father, Carl, like his grandfather, was the local library, but, of course, in modern local vicar. His mother Magdalena editions. Bostadia was the daughter of a provincial Chief Justice. Although the house in which One could add that the Daniel was born has been demolished, the books written aboard house in which he grew up, 'Björklunda', the Endeavour in the still stands. It was built shortly after the form of journals by town was burnt to the ground by Russian Cook, Banks and raiders during the Great Northern War. Parkinson are also The Solanders were one of the few held in our library. educated families of this sparsely Daniel Solander And, now, so too is my populated frontier Arctic region. It is not biography of Solander. surprising that, in the year before Daniel Indeed, I am well aware that many of you was born, his parents hosted Carl will have read it; so today I don’t want to Linnaeus during his famous Lapland simply repeat Solander’s story. What I journey. Solander’s father was also an 8 amateur scientist. He provided Jurisprudence and intermittently rector of astronomical observations for the Royal the university, but spent most of his free Society of Sciences in Uppsala and was time with Linnaeus' family. He even fell in visited by members of Pierre de love with Linnaeus' eldest daughter, Lisa Maupertuis' important geophysical Stina, and was heartbroken when he was expedition–including Anders Celsius (of prevented from marrying her–but more of centigrade fame)–seeking to prove this later. Newtonian theory that the earth was an oblate spheroid during observations in Like many biographers, I relied very 1736 and 1737. (There is frequently an heavily on my subject’s personal element of serendipity in historical correspondence. Indeed, between 1992 discoveries, I chanced upon this detail and 1995, I worked with my very dear quite by accident, in 1992, while reading a friend Per Tingbrand co-editing surviving rare work by another member of letters Solander wrote or received. These Maupertuis’s expedition, the naturalist were located in repositories all over the Abbé Reginald Outhier, during a visit to the world, including Australia, and published in Lapponica Collection in the Rovaniemi City 1995 by MUP in Melbourne and Library in northern Finland!) Scandinavian University Press in Oslo. Solander's earliest correspondence, We do not know how early young Daniel preserved by the Royal Swedish Academy developed an interest in natural history, of Sciences, dates from February 1753 but it seems likely that it was nurtured by and is written to the physician Johan his father, although he, himself, would later Gustaf Hallman, apparently when he credit his physician friend Johan Gustaf [Hallman] was still in Padua. It may seem Hallman, author of a thesis on passionfruit. like a contradiction in terms to state that Given Carl Solander’s (and Hallman’s) one needs to know what a text is about personal friendship with Carl Linnaeus, it is before one can fully translate it, but this is perhaps not surprising that in 1750, Daniel so often the case. For weeks Per and I began to study natural history under the were unable to transcribe, let alone great master himself. Solander lived in translate, one particular phrase in the Uppsala for nine years with his uncle, letter. Over a two week period I looked at Daniel, who was Professor of the two words with a magnifying glass over 9 and over again without recognition. Then consulted my facsimile of the first edition of suddenly, as if a veil was lifted, I read the Linnaeus’s Species plantarum (1753), that words acarus subcutaneous and the code was broken. Solander was immediately realized that here was a discussing orchids whose specific epithets reference to the itch mite Sarcoptes often allude to spidery and insect-like scabei, the cause of the skin disease flowers. Some English coherence was scabies which I had often seen (and now possible with square bracketed feared) in India. inclusions and footnotes. A whole chunk of the letter suddenly made Around the time that Solander wrote his sense. Given the publication, albeit in letter of 1753 to Johan Gustaf Hallman, he 1777, of Solander’s paper 'Furia infernalis’, assisted Linnaeus in cataloguing the royal largely based on his studies of the 1750s, collections at Ulriksdal and Drottningholm. it is possible that his doctoral dissertation In the summer of the same year he (had he completed one) would have dealt returned to Piteå and followed the Piteå with the insect origins of skin diseases River upstream, before crossing the such as scabies. I should point out that mountains into Norway. Historians often until Solander was given an honorary work with unusual clues (aside from doctorate by Oxford University in manuscripts and printed works) and it is November 1771, his title ‘Dr’ Solander was from botanical specimens in the Natural even more honorific. History Museum in Stockholm, that we For virtually all of know that Solander reached Rørstad (as Solander’s Linnaeus had done two decades before) correspondence on the North Atlantic coast. And in 1755 (in English, he also made a pioneering botanical Swedish, Danish, expedition up the Torne River to Lake Latin and Torneträsk. Retracing these travels with German), I took my family in 1992 I realized that Solander on the task of could not have been the effete dilettante deciphering the that some have painted him. Nor was he embedded names unfamiliar with the sea, for several times of authors, books C. Linnaeus he must have sailed the length and and plant and breadth of the unpredictable Gulf of animal species. Without knowing if a Bothnia during these years. writer is referring to a person, a book, a plant or an animal it is often impossible for Although requests had been made of, by a translator to make sense of a text. British naturalists such as Peter Collinson, Another letter of Solander that I found in and John Ellis, to send someone who the Uppsala University Library was written could give instruction in Linnean methods, in Latin to the great Swiss polymath there is little doubt that Solander was Albrecht von Haller in December 1760. I despatched (with a stipend) so that he had only studied Latin for two years in high could provide useful information and plants school, but even with the help of more to Sweden. In 1759 he travelled south to experienced classical scholars (including the province of Skåne with the intention of Gough Whitlam’s sister Freda) the letter sailing from Helsingor in Denmark. stubbornly resisted clear translation. Aside Crossing the North Sea was fraught with from the fact that eighteenth-century letters the usual dangers of the sea, but this was are rarely in uncorrupted classical Latin, also wartime. Unfortunately, he was the introductory first page was missing and forced to spend the winter with relatives the remaining sheets were full of after he contracted malaria. He did not abbreviations, page numbers and a reach England until July 1760. Ironically, puzzling mélange of botanical and the vessel he originally intended to sail on, seemingly entomological terms like sank with heavy loss of life. insectifera, arachnoideas, muscas, As Linnaeus did a quarter of a century araneas, scarabaeus. It was only when I before, Solander went immediately to the 10 Swedish Church in London. When I Desperate to offer our readers a followed his trail there, I was surprised by comprehensive collection of Solander’s the frosty reception I received. It was only correspondence, I sent an urgent fax to after I insisted that my interest was in Philadelphia explaining our project and our eighteenth-century rather than nineteenth- looming deadline, but was very century records, that the mood changed. disappointed to learn that the letter could The parish secretary was convinced that I not be found. Then the librarian was working on Jack the Ripper! I was remembered that there was a photostat, stunned, until she explained that one of the dating from the 1950s, in the Franklin Ripper’s victims was a Swedish prostitute Collection at Yale University Library. It is named Elizabeth ‘Long Liz’ Stride and that hard for me to describe the surreal over the years she had been pestered by a pleasure and relief I felt on receiving that succession of amateur sleuths.

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