Linnaeus Canadensis

Certain contradictions in Linnaeus’s character are revealed in his relationship with Pehr Kalm. If Kalm did not rush to his mentor’s side upon returning to Sweden, this is entirely understandable, for Kalm had left his Canadian mission unfulfilled.

Not surprisingly, Linnaeus had high expectations for his disciple. He wanted Kalm to bring back unknown New World plants so they could be named and entered into Species Plantarum, Linnaeus’s ambitious global plant encyclopedia. (Although Linnaeus encouraged his apostles to collect both plants and animals, Kalm, as a botanist, focused mainly on the vegetable kingdom.) Linnaeus wanted seeds from those plants for his own botanical garden.

He also wanted Kalm to find plants that would boost the economy of Sweden, particularly a cold hardy mulberry that could feed Swedish silkworms. Further, he wanted Kalm to ignore all peril and travel deep into Canada, as far north as Hudson Bay.

Kalm left Uppsala on October 16, 1747, “in the name of the Lord right after dinner.” Then in his early thirties, Kalm was described, according to Paula Robbins’s new biography, The Travels of Peter Kalm, as “tall and towering and with a manly and agreeable countenance.” From England, he sailed on to Philadelphia, where he met John Bartram, the foremost naturalist in the colonies, and Benjamin Franklin. But his true destination was “New Sweden,” the remnant of a Swedish colony in New Jersey, where he established his base and preached occasionally in the local church.

Kalm may have been content there, but Linnaeus and members of the Royal Academy were getting restless. They had urged Kalm to head up to Canada, where the climate more closely matched that of Sweden, to find plants capable of surviving Nordic winters. In May 1749, Kalm dutifully embarked on his journey north, taking advantage of a lull in the long-running war between the British and French.

Accompanied by his manservant, Kalm travelled up the Hudson River, crossing into what was then New France at Fort St. Frédéric in a borrowed birchbark canoe, with hired men to do the paddling. Near the border, he narrowly escaped an encounter with six “Indians” of an unspecified tribe, seeking revenge against the English for the death of a brother. Kalm, telling the tale in his book Travels into North America, knew he could all too easily have been mistaken for an Englishman. Hearing a “bloodcurdling outcry,” he saw the Indians’ boat pass by, “with a long pole at the front, at the extremity of which they had put a bloody human scalp.”

Yet Canada, for all its terrors, had a sophisticated side. Not long after his brush with death, Kalm found himself in polite Montreal society, where he bought two pairs of silk stockings. In the city of Quebec, he was much impressed with the colonial governor general, the Marquis de La Galissonière, a man so well versed in natural history that Kalm compared him to Linnaeus himself.

Continuing down the St. Lawrence, in early September Kalm reached Baie-Saint-Paul, some eighty kilometres past Quebec City, before deciding to turn back. Although far south of Hudson Bay, which Linnaeus had set as a goal, Kalm was tired of playing voyageur. He went to great lengths to justify his decision to Linnaeus, explaining in a long letter that a trip farther north would be impossible or dangerous, as the region was inhabited by “Esquimaux” who, according to French fishermen, “without mercy kill all.” Besides, “nothing useful grows in the northern part of Canada,” he wrote, the diet being only meat and berries, and the land barren — “five times worse” than the way Linnaeus had described Lapland.

On his way back to New York, Kalm had planned to return via Niagara Falls, but the French barred his passage by that route, evidently fearing he might be a spy. When Kalm finally reached the Falls a year later, he wrote a detailed account that Benjamin Franklin rushed into print as the first description of Niagara Falls by a trained scientist. In a letter to a Stockholm librarian, Kalm measured the waterfall’s drop in French feet, Swedish feet, and fathoms, and noted that the force at its ledge was enough “to make the hair stand on end.”

Before sailing back to Europe, Kalm returned to the comforts of New Sweden, where he married the minister’s widow. Full of hope for the future, he then made his way home to Åbo, Finland (at the time part of Sweden), where he had a professorship. He brought dozens of plants and seeds that, once established in Swedish soil, were certain to bring him fame and revolutionize the country’s agriculture. Or at least that was the picture Linnaeus had painted.