Page - 197 - in Maximilian Hell (1720–92) - And the Ends of Jesuit Science in Enlightenment Europe

197The North Beckons Caribbean.80 Jesuits traversing the northern wilderness under Protestant con- trol needed to be more circumspect about revealing their true character. It is also noteworthy how vaguely Hell described the duration and expanse of his expedition. The extraordinary invitation may have stirred up the imagi- nation of the otherwise sober and even-tempered servant of God. He may even have been tempted to envision himself in the persona of the scientific field- worker-celebrity steadily emerging as the eighteenth-century European public was exposed to reports about men of learning who heroically defied hostile climates in order to expand the stock of knowledge and share new discoveries. Hell’s letter to the pope reveals a desire to obtain license for temporarily aban- doning his character as an ordinary member of the Society of Jesus, with the goal of carrying out research “for several years” and then disseminating its re- sults throughout virtually the whole of Western Europe. The detour on the re- turn journey “through Holland, Belgium, England, France, and the entire [Holy Roman] Empire” could have had no other envisaged purpose than further con- solidating his already considerable fame and expanding the network built via the Ephemerides. Hell must have been dreaming of lecture halls packed with members of the learned and the curious part of the public; reports in the local press for the information of those who missed the presentations; audiences with royalty; intimate personal conversations with correspondents in the Republic of Letters. The publicity earned for Catholic knowledge by resort- ing to such means of advertisement—stock-in-trade for eighteenth-century savants—seemed to be well worth the compromises on externalities solicited from the supreme pontiff.81 Answer from the Holy See reached Father Hell when he was already in Dan- ish-ruled Traventhal (not far from Lübeck) on May 31, 1768. The reply itself is not known to have survived. However, Hell’s assistant noted the following sar- casm in the travel diary: [The secretary of the foreign minister] Mr. Temler delivered to us letters, which he had brought with him from Vienna to Denmark, from Denmark to Holstein, and then hither [to Traventhal]. One letter was from Father Antonius Pilgram, another from the Roman court. Our Holiness Clement xiii bestowed upon us the right to minister at a portable table, provided 80 Klemun and Hühnel, Nikolaus Joseph Jacquin, 83–87. 81 One would assume that a European grand tour such as this would also have required the assent of Hell’s employer, the empress, but there is no surviving document in which he voiced such a request.