Page - 253 - in Maximilian Hell (1720–92) - And the Ends of Jesuit Science in Enlightenment Europe

253The Expeditio litteraria ad Polum Arcticum of his identity as a Hungarus patriot and public fashioning of himself in that role. Further manifestations of these efforts, as well as responses to them, will be discussed in Chapter 8. Here it should suffice to draw the balance as to the probable real division of labor between Hell and Sajnovics on the Sámi– Hungarian kinship and origins with reference to an earlier statement by Hell himself, which may also throw further light on the genealogy of this aspect of the expedition. This is how Hell wrote on the subject, while still in Vardø, to Pilgram, his substitute at the Imperial and Royal Observatory in Vienna: [You] must have had a prophetic spirit, when You in Your letter to Sajno- vics wrote: ‘I salute the dark pastorella a thousand times,’ and ‘I expect Lappish eclogues from him’; in fact, You, and the entire European world of learning may expect concerning the Lappish race a new discovery, which will be received with bewilderment by entire Europe. I, who formed this conjecture about the Lapps from the very beginning, gave him some rules and criteria, according to which he was to do this re- search, and now we have reached such clarity, that no human being will doubt this. Indeed, indeed, Sajnovics is in fact able to make “Lappish ec- logues”; I am quite satisfied to have chosen him as my travel companion, he who so readily and in such a brief span of time was able to learn the Lappish language. I have asked him to extract some memorable stories from our diary and send them to [You], so that You may share them with our friends in Vienna. […] I beg you, however, to please make sure this discovery arrives to the ears of Mr. van Swieten; he will find pleasure therein, since he was the one who bade me do this investigation [italics added]; but please give him only the general information that they [the Sámi] are no Americans, but real Orientals, as we will have the honor to inform him in detail upon our return.142 Writing privately to a colleague vis-à-vis whom there was certainly no need to promote Sajnovics in the ways Hell alleged doing it toward their Copenhagen audience, Sajnovics is effectively acknowledged to have mastered—to Hell’s own great satisfaction—the skills necessary for the research, and also to have pursued it, albeit building on a “conjecture” and following “rules and criteria” that Hell claims originated from himself. Or maybe not: interestingly, he effec- tively contradicts himself just a few sentences below, where the initiative is ultimately attributed to the man who stood behind virtually all the innovative 142 Hell to Pilgram, Vardø, April 5, 1769 (wus), printed in Pinzger, Hell Miksa, 2:67–68.