Page - 175 - in Maximilian Hell (1720–92) - And the Ends of Jesuit Science in Enlightenment Europe

175The North Beckons by the Uppsala Royal Society for Science, it was a patriotic venture to explore resources (all deemed “natural”) from minerals through plants and animals to local technologies and ethnography, with an eye to the “economical” and to classifying the finds as national secrets.7 Scientific travel in this guise, targeting less than fully explored corners of the kingdom, was a means of the cognitive— intentionally leading to real—appropriation of territories within the notional boundaries of the realm where the sovereignty of the monarchy was precari- ous because it was not properly anchored in “knowledge”: a tool of empire building in the ancient sense of imperium, plenitude of power and exclusive jurisdiction over a stretch of land irrespective of its size. At the same time, the regions of the Far North were subject to a scientific exoticism that in certain respects is reminiscent of the curiosity about distant continents. A case in point is the French–Swedish team headed by Maupertuis that traveled to northern Scandinavia (“Laponie” as they exoticized the Torne Valley where they carried out their triangulations) in 1736–37 for a geophysical survey, intent on determining the shape of the Earth.8 In yet a different perspective, Hell’s expedition was a reverse of the cases of “scientific hitch-hiking” by “Linnean apostles” that took several eighteenth-century Swedish scholars under British, Dutch, Russian, Spanish, and other sails to the waters of the Pacific and the forests of Amazonia.9 But the agenda and the yields were not different. In a similar fashion, the explorations sponsored by the Danish crown were intended to raise a stock of cultural capital that would place the country on the map of learning and thus enhance its national reputation.10 An expedition that traversed “Arabia Felix” (more or less modern-day Yemen) in the early 7 For the cameralist-style preoccupation of “Linnean travel” with an endeavour to explore and establish a frame for rationalistically governed autarchy, see, besides the work of Lis- bet Koerner (see above), Tore Frängsmyr, Linnaeus: The Man and His Work (Berkeley: Uni- versity of California Press, 1985); Sverker Sörlin, “Scientific Travel: The Linnean Tradition,” in Science in Sweden: The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences 1739–1989, ed. Tore Frängsmyr (Canton, MA: Science History Publications, 1989), 96–123. 8 Terrall, Man Who Flattened the Earth, 88–129. 9 The Swedish-language literature is voluminous. For English contributions, see, e.g., Ed- ward Duyker, Nature’s Argonaut: Daniel Solander 1733–1782; Naturalist and Voyager with Cook and Banks (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1998); Marie-Christine Skuncke, Carl Peter Thunberg: Botanist and Physician (Uppsala: Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study, 2014); and the eleven-volume book The Linnaeus Apostles: Global Science & Adven- ture, ed. Lars Hansen et al. (London: IK Foundation, 2007–12). 10 Sverker Sörlin, “Ordering the World for Europe: Science as Intelligence and Information as Seen from the Northern Periphery,” Osiris, special issue, “Nature and Empire: Science and the Colonial Enterprise,” ed. Roy MacLeod, 15 (2000): 51–69 (esp. 65–67); Sörlin, “Science, Enlightenment, and Empire: Geographies of Northern Field Science,” European Review of History/Revue d’histoire européenne 13, no. 3 (2006): 455–72.