Page - 176 - in Maximilian Hell (1720–92) - And the Ends of Jesuit Science in Enlightenment Europe

Chapter 4176 1760s represented these ambitions to a great extent. Prompted by the famous Göttingen biblical scholar Johann David Michaelis (1717–91) and usually asso- ciated with the name of its sole survivor, mathematician and cartographer Carsten Niebuhr (1733–1815), this undertaking was built around cosmopolitan figures and took place against a background of international scientific com- munication, but it also enjoyed the enthusiastic sponsorship of Christian vii’s predecessor Frederick V (1723–66, r.1746–66). It aimed at charting the natural history, geography, and history of the territory by collecting documents and specimens for the greater enlightenment of the world and the greater glory of the Danish crown.11 An aura of internationalism and stately self-promotion smoothly reinforced each other: the expedition, mobilizing Danish scholars as well as Swedes born in Finland and educated in Göttingen, and Germans who studied in Copenhagen, was to receive a research agenda—questions—from learned institutions across Europe, such as the Académie des Inscriptions et des belles Lettres of Paris. However, the answers to these research questions, together with the objectifiable results—sketches, drawings, charts, manu- scripts, natural specimens—and thus the sum of the knowledge culled by the expedition—was then to be sent to and deposited in Copenhagen (the royal library in particular). Altogether, these were unmistakably the building blocks of a coherent project organized around the recognition that science possesses the capacity to confer status on the international scene.12 For a Scandinavian 11 On the trials and accomplishments of the expedition, see Thorkild Hansen, Arabia Felix: The Danish Expedition of 1761–1767 (London: St. James, 1964); more recently, Stig T. Ras- mussen, ed., Den Arabiske Rejse 1761–1767: En dansk ekspedition set i videnskabshistorisk perspektiv ([Copenhagen]: Munksgaard, 1990); Lawrence J. Baack, Undoing Curiosity: Carsten Niebuhr and the Royal Danish Expedition to Arabia 1761–1767 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2014). Baack’s important book makes no mention of Niebuhr’s engagement with Hell during the latter’s time in Copenhagen, although as we shall see they were quite close. Baack claims that the Niebuhr expedition was “the only major scientific expedition emanating from Northern Europe in the 18th century age of exploration” and also that it “was the only major European expedition of the 18th century that was scientific and mul- tidisciplinary, and at the same time harboured no geopolitical or commercial aims.” Baack, Undoing Curiosity, 369, 399. We believe that the Hell expedition answers each of these criteria. See also the interesting comparative analysis in Han F. Vermeulen, “Anthro- pology in Colonial Contexts: The Second Kamchatka Expedition (1733–1743) and the Danish–German Arabia Expedition (1761–1767),” in Anthropology and Colonialism in Asia and Oceania, ed. Jan van Bremen and Akitoshi Shimizu (Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press, 1999), 13–39. For the Danish context in particular, see Allan Sortkær, “Hvilken fortræffelig gave fra den danske nation til videnskaben! Fremkomsten af internationale videnskabeli- ge ekspeditioner i 1700-tallet,” Den Jyske Historiker 119 (2008): 5–25. 12 Sörlin, “Ordering the World.”