Aim higher, reach further.

Brotherhood of the Butterfly Net

The worldliest natural historian of the 18th century was, oddly enough, never much of a traveler. Carl Linnaeus's farthest expedition was from Sweden to Lapland, in 1732, when he was 25 years old. Despite his all-consuming curiosity about exotic creatures and plants, Linnaeus preferred to have them brought his way. He turned down an offer to work as a physician in Suriname and never left his native country after 30.

As a young professor in Uppsala, Linnaeus led his students on plant-collecting hikes, scattering them into the fields to botanize and summoning them to lunch with a trumpet. But Linnaeus, inventor of the plant and animal classification systems still in use today, harbored bigger ambitions both for them and for his own emerging science. By the end of the century, 17 of his students had travelled to seven continents with the blessing and encouragement of their mentor. Only eight survived the rigors of their journeys: Malaria, mental illness and infections claimed the rest.

Linnaeus implored them to avoid drunkenness, gambling, talking about politics or insulting foreign kings. Instead they were to trust in God's mercy, climb mountains, draw and describe plants, shoot and preserve animals, study customs, and discover medicines, seeds, tools and farming techniques for the betterment of Sweden. At a time when swallows were believed to spend winters underwater and a whale's eye was said to be as big as a round table seating 100 men, Linnaeus admonished his students to observe not "in the way the simple horde does" but in the way he had trained them to in Uppsala: accurately, rationally, without the slightest taint of hearsay or conjecture.

Collecting trips in Sweden soon led Linnaeus's students to go abroad. ENLARGE
Collecting trips in Sweden soon led Linnaeus's students to go abroad. Courtesy of the IK Foundation

Importantly, they were never to go to bed without writing up what they'd seen that day, preferably in Swedish and in such a way that readers might feel "as though they had the objects in front of their eyes." In this task they excelled. Pehr Osbeck, who in 1750 voyaged to South China as a chaplain with the Swedish East India Co., flubbed his mentor's requests to bring back "goldfish for Her Majesty" and a live tea bush. Yet Linnaeus was delighted with Osbeck's journal, which described novel plants, harbor boats filled with hundreds of ducks trained to come and go on command, and a populace with the nasty habit of throwing rocks at him while he botanized. "I seem myself to have travelled with you," Linnaeus gushed upon reading it, and named a genus of flowering shrubs after Osbeck.

Subsequent travelogues by Linnaeus's protégés would prove finer still than Osbeck's. A few have been translated, over the centuries, into German, French or English. But others were never published. All are now available, in modern English, in the 11-book series "The Linnaeus Apostles"—which was how Linnaeus, who was both pious and grandiose, referred to the students toward the end of his life. Produced by the IK Foundation, a U.K. non-profit, the set costs about $1,000 altogether, though each volume can be purchased individually. These are big, heavy books best approached with the aim to spend time with them, over days or weeks, somewhere quiet with good light. What's inside them is an armchair adventure of the finest order.

The translations run to nearly 6,000 pages—printed on paper from a mill near Linnaeus's birthplace and accompanied by reproductions of the apostles' maps, transcripts of folk music, and drawings of everything from Russian rabbit traps to Tahitian chiefs. One volume even contains swatches of cloth from the South Pacific that its author, Anders Sparrman, included in his original edition as a marketing gimmick.

"There was nobody on board who did not watch with the greatest curiosity," wrote Sparrman, as a New Zealander roasted a piece of human flesh in embers aboard his docked ship, "in spite of the cook's protests" and the "general disgust of the on-lookers." It was 1773, early in Sparrman's long voyage, when he and his fellow shipmates witnessed this act of cannibalism. Four years later Sparrman had seen penguins in Antarctica, driven an oxcart into the interior of South Africa, and faced a hippo with only a knife and insect scissors for defense. Sparrman's drawings and writings comprise the most satisfying single volume in this series; he died forgotten and should be read.

In any travelogue the personality of the traveler will come through quickly. Sparrman is energetic, resourceful and good-humored company. The apostle Christopher Tärnström, by contrast, spends most of his modest journal, which he composed en route to Vietnam, indulging bodily complaints, fearing for his life and commending his soul to God, though it is awfully sad when the journal abruptly ends; Tärnström died not long after he had tasted his first hot pepper.

Apostle Johan Peter Falck's travels in Russia and Central Asia explore a startling number of local intoxication rituals, including the smoking of hemp flowers, "inebriation from fly-fungus," and a Kyrgyz practice of making "a vertical hole in urine-soaked ground," filling it with tobacco, topping it with a smoldering coal, then inhaling the smoke through hollow stalks while lying on one's belly. Falck became deeply depressed as his expedition wore on, plagued with hypochondria and feelings of worthlessness, and increasingly addicted to laudanum. His descriptions of wild and spirited tribes reveal, at times, a sort of longing. The Kyrgyz "are so fond of their beloved steppes that they would probably be content to roam around them until Judgment Day, and they regard death as utterly abhorrent," he writes, and the remark lingers poignantly in light of his eventual suicide.

The apostles were highly aware of the risks they took—the deaths of their fellows rattled them terribly—and most, like their mentor, tended to be pious. A few were ordained clerics. But they were also Lutherans, with a no-nonsense sensibility well suited to their practical missions. In Palestine, apostle Frederik Hasselquist answers "no" when his Catholic monk hosts ask him if he is on a religious pilgrimage. This, he soon realizes, was the wrong response in a residence where "every thing, even to the table on which we supped, was holy," but he botanizes Mount Zion with impunity and finds a new species of tick at the site of Christ's temptation. The Middle East in general could be very tough going: apostle Peter Forsskål is treated kindly by rabbis and Bedouins but is shaken by an encounter with marauding Arabs on horseback, although, he concedes, "it is through adventures of this kind that knowledge must be acquired." Forsskål died, many close shaves later, in Yemen.

Racist or anti-Semitic statements are notably scarce in these volumes. Particularly striking are the apostles' reactions to slavery and the slave trade, with which they frequently come into contact. Not one is impressed, and several bear prolonged and intimate witness to slavery's daily practice and cruelties.

Sparrman emerged from his Africa travels a committed abolitionist, and apostle Daniel Rolander's long-lost journal, rediscovered by the series' editor in a Copenhagen library, mocks the Dutch planters of Suriname, who, Rolander finds, spend their days lying in hammocks rocked by slaves, eating elaborate meals cooked by slaves, drinking rum poured by slaves, drunkenly forcing slaves to perform ribald musical acts and beating them for no reason. Apostle Adam Afzelius, who set up his specimen-collecting operations in the slave-trading port of Freetown, Sierra Leone, writes a damning, hypnotic account of a sociopathic young English trader who profits from the caprice of local chiefs. Nestled among the chilling scenes that Afzelius describes in Freetown—shackled children, women getting their teeth knocked out for crying, gratuitous genital exams—his botanical notes can feel a bit out of place.

Not all the apostles emerge from these pages as humanitarians or compelling writers. One, Olof Torén, comes off as boorish, content to sum up much of India and China as "idolators." Another, a favorite pupil of Linnaeus's named Pehr Löfling, has his nose so deep in plants that his Spain journal is nearly unreadable, though it is redeemed now and then by accounts of bullfights.

One apostle's record is heartbreakingly thin; only three letters survive of Andreas Berlin. "Great God!," writes the 27-year-old Berlin, newly arrived on the shores of Guinea. "What splendor and pulchritude, what symmetry in all things, what assets for the necessities of life have you not granted and assigned to this land and its inhabitants! Nature's appearance is as though transformed, I am like a blind person who, having just had his eyes opened, sees the sun for the first time; he falls down in wonder, but knows not why." Berlin died shortly after sending these words, and some plants, back to Linnaeus in Uppsala.

Show More Archives

Popular on WSJ

Editors’ Picks