Ship Fever (4 page)

Because it was an answer, of sorts; in the months after he left I mailed him several letters. They were, on the surface, about Mendel and Tati, all I recalled of their friendship. But I'm sure Sebastian read them for what they were. In 1906, Sebastian wrote, after Mendel's work was finally recognized, a small museum was opened in the Augustinian monastery. Sebastian visited it, when he passed through Brno on a family holiday,

“I could find no trace of your Tati,” he wrote. “But the wall is still here, and you can see where the garden was. It's a lovely place. Perhaps you should visit someday.”

Outside Uppsala, on a late December afternoon in 1777, a figure tucked in a small sleigh ordered his coachman to keep driving.

“Hammarby,” he said. “Please.”

The words were cracked, almost unintelligible. The coachman was afraid. At home he had a wife, two daughters, and a mother-in-law, all dependent on him; his employers had strictly forbidden him to take the sleigh beyond the city limits, and he feared for his job. But his master was dying and these afternoon drives were his only remaining pleasure. He was weak and depressed and it had been months since he'd voiced even such a modest wish.

How could the coachman say no? He grumbled a bit and then drove the few miles across the plain without further complaint.

It was very cold. The air was crisp and dry. The sun, already low in the sky, made the fields glitter. Beneath the sleigh the snow was so smooth that the runners seemed to float. Carl Linnaeus, wrapped in sheepskins, watched the landscape speeding by and thought of Lappland, which he'd explored when he was young. Aspens and alders and birches budding, geese with their tiny yellow goslings. Gadflies longing to lay their eggs chased frantic herds of reindeer. In Jokkmokk, near the Gulf of Bothnia, the local pastor had tried to convince him that the clouds sweeping over the mountains carried off trees and animals.
He had learned how to trap ptarmigan, how to shoot wolves with a bow, how to make thread with reindeer tendons, and how to cure chilblains with the fat that exuded from toasted reindeer cheese. At night, under the polar star, the sheer beauty of the natural world had knocked him to the ground. He had been twenty-five then, and wildly energetic. Now he was seventy.

His once-famous memory was nearly gone, eroded by a series of strokes—he forgot where he was and what he was doing; he forgot the names of plants and animals; he forgot faces, places, dates. Sometimes he forgot his own name. His mind, which had once seemed to hold the whole world, had been occupied by a great dark lake that spread farther every day and around which he tiptoed gingerly. When he reached for facts they darted like minnows across the water and could only be captured by cunning and indirection. Pehr Artedi, the friend of his youth, had brought order to the study of fishes, the minnows included. In Amsterdam Artedi had fallen into a canal after a night of beer and conversation and had been found the next morning, drowned.

The sleigh flew through the snowy landscape. His legs were paralyzed, along with one arm and his bladder and part of his face; he could not dress or wash or feed himself. At home, when he tried to rise from his armchair unaided, he fell and lay helpless on the floor until his wife, Sara Lisa, retrieved him. Sara Lisa was busy with other tasks and often he lay there for some time.

But Sara Lisa was back at their house in Uppsala, and he was beyond her reach. The horses pulling him might have been reindeer; the coachman a Lapp dressed in fur and skins. Hammarby, the estate he'd bought as a country retreat years ago, at the height of his fame, was waiting for him. The door leading into the kitchen was wide and the sleigh was small. Linnaeus gestured for the coachman to push the sleigh inside.

The coachman was called Pehr; a common name. There had
been Artedi, of course, and then after him all the students named Pehr: Pehr Lofling, Pehr Forskal, Pehr Osbeck, Pehr Kalm. Half of them were dead. This Pehr, the coachman Pehr, lifted Linnaeus out of the sleigh and carried him carefully into the house. The kitchen was clean and almost bare: a rough table, a few straight chairs.

Pehr set Linnaeus on the floor, propped against the wall, and then he went back outside and unhitched the horses and shoved the sleigh through the door and in front of the stone fireplace. He was very worried and feared he had made a mistake. His master's face was white and drawn and his hand, gesturing from the sleigh to the door again and again, had been curled like a claw.

“Fire?” Linnaeus said, or thought he said. At certain moments, when the lake receded a bit and left a wider path around the shore, he was aware that the words coming out of his mouth bore little resemblance to the words he meant. Often he could only produce a syllable at a time. But he said something and gestured toward the fireplace, and Pehr had a good deal of sense. Pehr lifted Linnaeus back into the sleigh, tucked the sheepskins around his legs and his torso, and then built a fire. Soon the flames began to warm the room. The sky darkened outside; the room was dark except for the glow from the logs. Pehr went out to tend to the horses and Linnaeus, staring into the flames, felt his beloved place around him.

He'd rebuilt this house and added several wings; on the hill he'd built a small museum for his herbarium and his insect collection and his rocks and zoological specimens. In his study and bedroom the walls were papered from ceiling to floor with botanical etchings and prints, and outside, among the elms and beyond the Siberian garden, the glass bells he'd hung sang in the wind. In his youth he had heard the cries of ptarmigan, which had sounded like a kind of laughter. The fire was warm on his
face and his hands, and when Pehr returned from the horses Linnaeus gestured toward his tobacco and his pipe.

Pehr filled the pipe, lit it, and placed it in his master's mouth. “We should go back,” he said. “Your family will be worried.” Worried was a kind word, Pehr knew; his master's wife would be raging, possibly blaming him. They were an hour late already and the sun was gone.

Linnaeus puffed on his pipe and said nothing. He was very pleased with himself. The fire was warm, his pipe drew well, no one knew where he was but Pehr and Pehr had the rare gift of silence. A dog lying near the hearth would have completed his happiness. Across the dark lake in his mind he saw Pompey, the best of all his dogs, barking at the water. Pompey had walked with him each summer Sunday from here to the parish church and sat in the pew beside him. They'd stayed for an hour, ample time for a sermon; if the parson spoke longer they rose and left anyway. Pompey, so smart and funny, had learned the pattern if not the meaning. When Linnaeus was ill, Pompey left for church at the appropriate time, hopped into the appropriate bench, stayed for an hour and then scampered out. The neighbors had learned to watch for his antics. Now he was dead.

“Sir?” the coachman said.

His name was Pehr, Linnaeus remembered. Like Osbeck and Forskal, Lofling and Kalm. There had been others, too: those he had taught at the university in Uppsala and those he had taught privately here at Hammarby. Germans and Danes, Russians and Swiss, Finns and a few Norwegians; a Frenchman, who had not worked out, and an American, who had; one Englishman, still around. And then there were those he had hardly known, who had come by the hundreds to the great botanic excursions he'd organized around the city. Dressed in loose linen suits, their arms full of nets and jars, they had trailed him in a huge parade, gathering plants and insects and herding around
him at resting places to listen to him lecture on the treasures they'd found. They were young, and when he was young he had often kept them out for twelve or thirteen hours at a stretch. On their return to the Botanic Gardens they had sometimes been hailed by a kettledrum and French horns. Outside the garden the band had stopped and cheered:
Vivat scientia
!
Vivat Linnaeus
! Lately there were those who attacked his work.

The coachman was worried, Linnaeus could see. He crouched to the right of the sleigh, tapping a bit of kindling on the floor. “They will be looking for you,” he said.

And of course it was true; his family was always looking for him. Always looking, wanting, needing, demanding. He had written and taught and lectured and tutored, traveled and scrabbled and scrambled; and always Sara Lisa said there was not enough money, they needed more, she was worried about Carl Junior and the girls. Carl Junior was lazy, he needed more schooling. The girls needed frocks, the girls needed shoes. The girls needed earrings to wear to a dance where they might meet appropriate husbands.

The three oldest looked and acted like their mother: large-boned, coarse-featured, practical. Sophia seemed to belong to another genus entirely. He thought of her fine straight nose, her beautiful eyes. When she was small he used to take her with him to his lectures, where she would stand between his knees and listen. Now she was engaged. On his tour of Lappland, with the whole world still waiting to be named, he'd believed that he and everyone he loved would live forever.

Now he had named almost everything and everyone knew his name. How clear and simple was the system of his nomenclature! Two names, like human names: a generic name common to all the species of one genus; a specific name distinguishing differences. He liked names that clearly described a feature of the genus:
Potamogeton,
by the river;
Drosera,
like a dew. Names that honored botanists also pleased him. In England the
King had built a huge garden called Kew, in which wooden labels named each plant according to his system. The King of France had done the same thing at the Trianon. In Spain and Russia and South America plants bore names that he'd devised, and on his coat he wore the ribbon that named him a Knight of the Polar Star. But his monkey Grinn, a present from the Queen, was dead; and also Sjup the raccoon and the parrot who had sat on his shoulder at meals and the weasel who wore a bell on his neck and hunted rats among the rocks.

There was a noise outside. Pehr leapt up and a woman and a man walked through the door. Pehr was all apologies, blushing, shuffling, nervous. The woman touched his arm and said, “It wasn't your fault.” Then she said, “Papa?”

One of his daughters, Linnaeus thought. She was pretty, she was smiling; she was almost surely Sophia. The man by her side looked familiar, and from the way he held Sophia's elbow Linnaeus wondered if it might be her husband. Had she married? He remembered no wedding. Her fiancé? Her fiancé, then. Or not: the man bent low, bringing his face down to Linnaeus's like the moon falling from the sky.

“Sir?” he said. “Sir?”

One of those moments in which no words were possible was upon him. He gazed at the open, handsome face of the young man, aware that this was someone he knew. The man said, “It's Rotheram, sir.”

Rotheram. Rotheram. The sound was like the wind moving over the Lappland hills. Rotheram, one of his pupils, not a fiancé at all. Human beings had two names, like plants, by which they might be recalled. Nature was a cryptogram and the scientific method a key; nature was a labyrinth and this method the thread of Ariadne. Or the world was an alphabet written in God's hand, which he, Carl Linnaeus, had been called to decipher. One of his pupils had come to see him, one of the pupils he'd sent to all the corners of the world and called, half-jokingly, his apostles.
This one straightened now, a few feet away, most considerately not blocking the fire. What was his name? He was young, vigorous, strongly built. Was he Lofling, then? Or Ternström, Hasselquist, Falck?

The woman frowned. “Papa,” she said. “Can we just sit you up? We've been looking everywhere for you.”

Sophia. The man bent over again, sliding his hands beneath Linnaeus's armpits and gently raising him to a sitting position. He was Hasselquist or Ternström, Lofling or Forskal or Falck. Or he was none of them, because all of them were dead.

Linnaeus's mind left his body, rose and traveled along the paths his apostles had taken. He was young again, as they had been: twenty-five, thirty, thirty-five, the years he had done his best work. He was Christopher Ternström, that married pastor who'd been such a passionate botanist. Sailing to the East Indies in search of a tea plant and some living goldfish to give to the Queen, mailing letters back to his teacher from Cádiz. On a group of islands off Cambodia he had succumbed to a tropical fever. His wife had berated Linnaeus for luring her husband to his death.

But he was not Linnaeus. He was Fredrik Hasselquist, modest and poor, who had landed in Smyrna and traveled through Palestine and Syria and Cyprus and Rhodes, gathering plants and animals and keeping a diary so precise that it had broken Linnaeus's heart to edit it. Twice he had performed this task, once for Hasselquist, once for Artedi. After the drowning, he had edited Artedi's book on the fish. Hasselquist died in a village outside Smyrna, when he was thirty.

Of course there were those who had made it back: Pehr Osbeck, who had returned from China with a huge collection of new plants and a china tea-set decorated with Linnaeus's own flower; Marten Kahler, who'd returned with nothing. Kahler's health had been broken by the shipwreck in the North Sea, by the fever that followed the attack in Marseilles, by his endless,
grinding poverty. The chest containing his collections had been captured by pirates long before it reached Sweden. Then there was Rolander, Daniel Rolander—was that the man who was with him now?

But he had said Ro…, Ro…
Rotheram, that's who it was, the English pupil.
Nomenclature is a mnemonic art. In Surinam the heat had crumpled Rolander's body and melted his mind. All he brought home was a lone pot of Indian fig covered with cochineal insects, which Linnaeus's gardener had mistakenly washed away. Lost insects and a handful of gray seeds, which Rolander claimed to be pearls. When Linnaeus gently pointed out the error, Rolander had left in a huff for Denmark, where he was reportedly living on charity. The others were dead: Lofling, Forskal, and Falck.

Sophia said, “Papa, we looked all over—why didn't you come back?”

Pehr the coachman said, “I'm sorry, he begged me.”

The pupil—
Lofling?
—said, “How long has he been weeping like this?”

But Pehr wasn't weeping, Pehr was fine. Someone, not Pehr or Sophia, was laughing. Linnaeus remembered how Lofling had taken dictation from him when his hands were crippled by gout. Lofling was twenty-one, he was only a boy; he had tutored Carl Junior, the lazy son. In Spain Lofling had made a name for himself and had sent letters and plants to Linnaeus; then he'd gone to South America with a Spanish expedition. Venezuela; another place Linnaeus had never been. But he had seen it, through Lofling's letters and specimens. Birds so brightly colored they seemed to be jeweled and rivers that pulsed, foamy and brown, through ferns the height of a man. The letter from Spain announcing Lofling's death from fever had come only months after little Johannes had died.