Page - 214 - in Maximilian Hell (1720–92) - And the Ends of Jesuit Science in Enlightenment Europe

Chapter 5214 by means of barometers (in Kjelvik);14 to catch and make sketches of species of jellyfish (at Havøysund);15 to collect specimens of hermit-crabs on the shore and cook them for long-term preservation (at Selsøya);16 and so on. When they finally reached Trondheim on August 30, another two weeks were spent in the company of Gunnerus and other notables, including General von der Osten and his Catholic soldiers, who were again offered a string of “church” services at Kristiansten fortress. Prominent among the persons who greeted Hell was the city mayor and littérateur Niels Krog Bredal (1733–78), whose slightly mock-heroic poem on the occasion contains reference to the Keeper of the Winds in Greco-Roman mythology (Aeolus), the gods of the Sun and the sea (in the guise of Phoebus and Neptune, respectively), as well as an allusion to the conquests of Julius Caesar by the immortal phrase veni, vidi, vici (I came, I saw, I conquered): What truth there is in the declarations of prophets, you now know, My sweet friend! You return, having achieved what you prayed for. Narrow straits do not scare you, nor shipwrecking reefs; Neither the ice-covered sea, nor the polar winter nights. The Alps dressed in fog, the long-lasting winter with its eternal masses of snow; None of that is capable of preventing your voyage. You come [venis], you see [vides] everything that is worthy of being observed; You conquer [vincis] the Gods that are up against you from either side. The heroic endeavor was favored by Phoebus, Venus, and Aeolus, As well as by all the spirits that Neptune has under his sway. I congratulate you! Now safely return to visit the Penates of your own: May the Gods hear my prayers this time as well!17 Many years later, the heroic explorer, who “sees everything that is worthy of being observed,” included Bredal’s poem in an article in the Ephemerides. Some 14 Hell’s manuscript “Methodus observandi,” as reproduced in Lynne Hansen and Aspaas, Maximilian Hell’s Geomagnetic Observations, entry on July 7, 1769. 15 Hell’s manuscript “Methodus observandi,” as reproduced in Lynne Hansen and Aspaas, Maximilian Hell’s Geomagnetic Observations, on July 19, 1769. 16 Sajnovics’s travel diary, draft version (wus), on August 17, 1769. 17 Latin poem in Bredal’s own hand, dated September 1, 1769 (wus); edited with translation in Per Pippin Aspaas, “Astronomy, Latinity, Enlightenment: Niels Krog Bredal’s Poems Commemorating the Transits of Venus, 1761 and 1769,” Symbolae Osloenses 90 (2016): 205–34, here 224.