Andrea Barrett - Ship Fever

Kahler lashed himself to the mast of his boat, where he remained two days and two nights without food.

Hasselquist died in the village of Bagda.

Pehr Kalm crossed the Great Lakes and walked into Canada.

In Denmark, someone stole Rolander’s gray seeds, almost as if they’d been truly pearls.

Generic names, he had taught these pupils, must be clear and stable and expressive. They should not be vague or confusing; neither should they be primitive, barbarous, lengthy, or difficult to pronounce. They should have significant metaphorical or historical associations with the character of the genus. Another botanist had named the thyme-leaved bell-flower after him: Linnaea borealis. One June, in Lappland, he had seen it flourishing. His apostles had died in this order: Ternström, Hasselquist, Lofling, Forskal, Falck, and then finally Kahler, at home. His second son, Johannes, had died at the age of two, between Hasselquist and Lofling; but that was also the year of Sophia’s birth. Once, when Sophia had dropped a tray full of dishes, he had secretly bought a new set to replace them, to spare her from her mother’s wrath.

His apostles had taken wing like swallows, but they had failed to return. Swallows wintered beneath the lakes, or so he had always believed. During the autumn, he had written, they gather in large groups in the weeds and then dive, resting beneath the ice until spring. An English friend—Collinson, Peter in his own tongue but truly Pehr, and also dead—had argued with him over this and begged him to hold some swallows under water to see if they could live there. Was it so strange to think they might sleep beneath the water above which they hovered in summer? Was it not stranger to think they flew for thousands of miles? He knew another naturalist who believed that swallows wintered on the moon. But always there had been people, like his wife, who criticized his every word.

He had fought off all of them. The Queen had ennobled him: he was Carl von Linné now. But the pupils he’d sent out as his eyes and ears were dead. During his years in Uppsala he had written and lectured about the mud iguana of Carolina and Siberian buckwheat and bearberries; about lemmings and ants and a phosphorescent Chinese grasshopper. Fossils, crystals, the causes of leprosy and intermittent fever—all these things he had known about because of his pupils’ travels. Over his bedroom door he’d inscribed this motto: “Live blamelessly; God is present.”

A group of men had appeared to the left of the fire. Lofling, Forskal, Falck he saw, and also Ternström and Hasselquist. And another, whom he’d forgotten about: Carl Thunberg, his fellow Smalander.

Thunberg was back, then? Thunberg, the last he had heard, was still alive. From Paris Thunberg had gone to Holland. From Holland he had gone to the Cape of Good Hope, and then to Java and finally to Japan. In Japan he had been confined to the tiny island of Deshima, isolated like all the foreigners. So desperate had he been to learn about the Japanese flora that he had picked daily through the fodder the servants brought to feed the swine and cattle. He had begged the Japanese servants to bring him samples from their gardens.

Of all his pupils, Thunberg had been the most faithful about sending letters and herbarium specimens home. He had been scrupulous about spreading his teacher’s methods. “I have met some Japanese doctors,” he’d written. “I have been teaching them botany and Linnaean taxonomy. They welcome your method and sing your praises.” He had also, Linnaeus remembered, introduced into Japan the treatment of syphilis by quicksilver. He had left Japan with crates of specimens; he’d been headed for Ceylon. But here he was, sharp-featured and elegant, leaning on the mantelpiece and trading tales with his predecessors.

“The people are small and dark and suspicious of us,” he was saying. “They find us coarse. But their gardens are magnificent, and they have ways of stunting trees that I have never seen before.”

“In Palestine,” Hasselquist replied; “the land is so dry that the smallest plants send roots down for many feet, searching for buried water.”

“The tropics cannot be described,” Lofling said. “The astonishing fertility, the way the vegetation is layered from the ground to the sky, the epiphytes clumped in the highest branches like lace…”

“Alexandria,” Forskal said. “Everything there is so ancient, so layered with history.”

“My health is broken,” Falck said; and Kahler said, “I walked from Rome almost all the way to Sweden.”

In Lappland, Linnaeus said silently, a gray gnat with striated wings and black legs cruelly tormented me and my most miserable horse. His apostles did not seem to hear him. A very bright and calm day, he said. The great Myrgiolingen was flying in the marshes.

“We’ll go home now, Papa,” the tall woman said. “We’ll put you to bed. Won’t you like that?”

Her face was as radiant as a star. What was her name? Beside her, his apostles held leaves and twigs and scraps of blossoms, all new and named by them with their teacher’s advice. They were trading these among themselves. A leaf from a new succulent for a spray from a never-seen orchid. Two fronds of a miniature fern for a twig from a dwarf evergreen. They were so excited that their voices were rising; they might have been playing cards, laying down plants for bets instead of gold. But the woman and the other pupil didn’t seem to notice them. The woman and the other pupil were wholly focused on helping Pehr the coachman push the sleigh back outside.

The woman opened the doors and held them. Pehr and the pupil pushed and pulled. The crisp, winy air of the afternoon had turned dank and raw, and a light rain was turning the snow to slush. Linnaeus said nothing, but he turned and gazed over his shoulder. The group gathered by the fireplace stepped back, displeased, when Pehr returned and doused the fire. Thunberg looked at Linnaeus and raised an eyebrow. Linnaeus nodded.

In the hands of his lost ones were the plants he had named for them: Artedia, an umbelliferous plant, and Osbeckia, tall and handsome; Loeflingia, a small plant from Spain; Thunbergia with its black eye centered in yellow petals, and the tropical Ternstroemia. There were more, he couldn’t remember them all. He’d named thousands of plants in his life.

Outside, the woman and the pupil separated. Sophia? Sophia, my favorite. Sophia bundled herself into the borrowed sleigh in which she’d arrived; the pupil wedged himself into Pehr’s sleigh, next to Linnaeus. In the dark damp air they formed a line that could hardly be seen: Pehr’s sleigh, and then Sophia’s, and behind them, following the cunning signal Linnaeus had given, the last sleigh filled with his apostles. Pehr huddled into his coat and gave the signal to depart. It was late and he was weary. To their left, the rain and melting snow had turned the low field into a lake. Linnaeus looked up at his pupil— Rotheram? Of course it was him: the English pupil, the last one, the one who would survive him —and tried to say, “The death of many whom I have induced to travel has turned my hair gray, and what have I gained? A few dried plants, accompanied by great anxiety, unrest, and care.”

Rotheram said, “Rest your head on my arm. We will be home before you know it.”

When they met, fifteen years ago, Jonathan had a job teaching botany at a small college near Albany, and Ruby was teaching invertebrate zoology at a college in the Berkshires. Both of them, along with an ornithologist, an ichthyologist, and an oceanographer, had agreed to spend three weeks of their summer break at a marine biology research station on an island off the New Hampshire coast. They had spouses, children, mortgages, bills; they went, they later told each other, because the pay was too good to refuse. Two-thirds of the way through the course, they agreed that the pay was not enough.