Chapter 4 The North Beckons: “A desperate voyage by desperate persons” In September 1767, Maximilian Hell was invited by the court of Copenhagen to lead an expedition for the observation of the 1769 transit of Venus to the Island of Vardø, the site of a fortress and a small garrison in the remote northeastern corner of the Danish–Norwegian realm. He set forth in April 1768 along with his assistant Sajnovics, the servant Sebastian Kohl, and a dog1—not to speak of a massive array of scientific equipment that was to be substantially supple- mented in Copenhagen, Christiania (Oslo), and Nidaros (Trondheim) as the group progressed northward. The resources offered to Hell for his expedition indicate the prestige of the project: he was given the best wagons and ships available; he got all the personnel and material he needed to construct his ob- servatory in Vardø; he was provided with his own cook and sufficient supplies for a whole year for his period north of Trondheim; and he got natural histori- an Jens Finne Borchgrevink (1737–1819) attached to the expedition as a scien- tific assistant, translator, and “guide” in northernmost Norway.2 A hibernation in Vardø in 1768–69 was followed by another long rest in Copenhagen in 1769–70. Not until August 1770 did the group return to Vienna. In the mean- time, Hell and Sajnovics had successfully observed the transit of Venus from Vardøhus (as the fortress at Vardø was called), carried out a significant amount of field ­research in other areas of knowledge, and been elected full members of the Royal Societies of Sciences in both Copenhagen and Trondheim. They had interacted with leading characters in Danish–Norwegian civil, ecclesiastical, and military administration, and with professionals as well as amateurs of 1 Studies in the history of science have emphasized the role of the nameless and faceless par- ticipants in the shaping of canonized scientific knowledge, usually obliterated in the stan- dard accounts based on the perspective of the project leader. See, e.g., Neil Safier, Measuring the New World: Enlightenment Science and South America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), especially 57–92; Klemun and Hühnel, Nikolaus Joseph Jacquin, 88–90. Unfortu- nately, we know nothing about Kohl except the name—and not even the name of the dog. 2 Nils Voje Johansen, “Vitenskap som springbrett: Jens Finne Borchgrevink satset og vant,” Fjell- folk: Årbok for Rørosmuseet 29 (2004): 20–29; Per Pippin Aspaas, “Maximilian Hell og Jo- hannes Sajnovics om folkeliv og natur i Øst-Finnmark anno 1769,” in Forpost mot øst: Fra Vardø og Finnmarks historie 1307–2007, Rapport fra det xxxii nordnorske historieseminar Vardø 21.–23. september 2007, ed. Randi Rønning Balsvik and Jens Petter Nielsen (Stamsund: Orkana forlag, 2008), 61–72. © PER PIPPIN ASPAAS AND LÁSZLÓ KONTLER, ���� | doi:10.1163/9789004416833_006Per Pippin Aspaas and László Kontler - 9789004416833 This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC-BY-NC-NDDownloaded 4.0 License. from Brill.com10/06/2021 01:03:45PM via free access The North Beckons 173 ­science. All travel costs had been covered by the king’s treasury, and several scientific treatises pertaining to the expedition had been published by the Roy- al Society of Sciences in Copenhagen. The Hell expedition of 1768–70, considering the multiplicity of the motives of the diverse agents who participated in its instigation and realization, the complexity of its endeavors, and the range of the responses to it, is an espe- cially suitable means for highlighting the contingencies that shaped the nature of knowledge production in the Age of Enlightenment. As such, its study un- derscores the now widespread concern with the history of science not merely as the evolution of bodies of specialized disciplinary knowledge but as a set of social and cultural practices embedded in contexts that lay outside the domain of “science” itself.3 The recognition that the loyalties and agendas of the prac- titioners of science depend on such contexts, and that their goals and achieve- ments have implications beyond the augmentation of scientific knowledge, leads to a more sophisticated understanding of what actually happens in their cultivation of the ethos of pursuing knowledge. Such contexts of the Hell expe- dition were manifold, and while they powerfully delineated certain paths to tread for the protagonists, they operated in a way that retained for them a fair scope of active engagement and agency. These contexts include stately self- assertion on the part of a Scandinavian kingdom; a peculiar type of transna- tional collaboration in eighteenth-century field science; trans-confessional exchange; broader processes of European expansion and exploration both in distant territories and in internal borderlands; self-fashioning by savants from a nodal place of astronomical research in the geographic margins of learned Europe, and their forging of identities on personal–professional, national as well as global scales; in its repercussions—to be discussed chiefly in ­Chapter 8—even political conflict in a Central European composite monarchy. Besides a consideration of the material practices and the actual results of the expedition, the task of this chapter is to establish this pivotal episode in Hell’s career firmly in the intersection of these contexts.4 3 Most famously and perhaps pioneeringly, see Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987); also Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century Eng- land (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). For an earlier attempt to analyze Hell’s ex- pedition in this perspective, see László Kontler, “Distances Celestial and Terrestrial: Maximil- ian Hell’s Arctic Expedition, 1768–1769; Contexts and Responses,” in The Practice of Knowledge and the Figure of the Savant in the Eighteenth Century, ed. André Holenstein, Hubert Steinke, and Martin Stuber (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 721–50. 4 The nature of the sources unfortunately does not allow any meaningful engagement in the case of the Hell expedition with the equally important question of the “native voices” that Per Pippin Aspaas and László Kontler - 9789004416833 Downloaded from Brill.com10/06/2021 01:03:45PM via free access 174 Chapter 4 1 Scandinavian Self-Assertions For reasons intrinsic to the substance of Venus transit observations, the role of Scandinavia ought in principle to be eminent in any of them.5 This is not only because of the basic requirement of obtaining data from stations located as far apart as possible; in the case especially of the 1769 transit, which was predicted to take place during the European night, it was necessary to dispatch observers to the regions of the midnight Sun in order to catch the entire duration of the phenomenon. As a result, these parts received considerable attention from the international astronomical community. Even apart from this, it has been forcefully argued and colorfully illustrated in a now sizeable body of scholarship that an outstanding contribution to the expansion of natural knowledge was understood and pursued in the eigh- teenth century by the Scandinavian kingdoms with increasing vigor as a sub- stitute for expansion in a different sense, namely territorial aggrandizement at the expense of immediate neighbors, let alone meaningful participation in the European project of building colonial empires in the overseas world (despite several important outposts under both Danish–Norwegian and Swedish con- trol). “Linnean empire”—the symbolic ordering of the world through the elab- orate taxonomic system developed by the famous botanist Carl von Linné (Carolus Linnaeus [1717–78]), capable of embracing the whole of creation, and the attempt of the practical application of this system to the domestication of crops and species within the confined boundaries of Sweden—was an endeav- or to create a “local modernity” and an enlightened counterpart to the erst- while military might of Gustavus Adolphus (1594–1632, r.1611–32) and Charles xii (1682–1718, r.1697–1718).6 Von Linné’s 1732 Lapland expedition was moti- vated by “the utility of scientific journeys within the fatherland”—sponsored may be detected in its record. Such aspects of scientific travel are now rightly becoming a preoccupation for scholars; see, e.g., Safier, Measuring the New World, 59–92. 5 For a comprehensive discussion of the contribution of northern Europe (following eigh- teenth-century notions, including not only Denmark–Norway and Sweden–Finland but also Russia) to the Venus transit enterprise of the 1760s, see Aspaas, “Maximilianus Hell,” 219–78. Only the presentation of the immediately relevant Danish antecedents there has been re- vised for the purposes of this book. 6 Lisbet Koerner, “Purposes of Linnean Travel: A Preliminary Research Report,” in Miller and Reill, Visions of Empire, 117–52; Koerner, “Linnaeus’ Floral Transplants,” Representations 47, special issue, “National Cultures before Nationalism” (1994): 144–69; and, more comprehen- sively, Koerner, Linnaeus: Nature and Nation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). Let us note a close resemblance to the rationale behind the Habsburg government’s sponsorship of the von Jacquin expedition to the West Indies in 1755–59. See Klemun and Hühnel, Joseph Nikolaus Jacquin, 52–53. Per Pippin Aspaas and László Kontler - 9789004416833 Downloaded from Brill.com10/06/2021 01:03:45PM