Process: Pehr Kalm

Reading a book by Yvon Desloges (À table en Nouvelle-France, Les éditions du Septentrion, 2009) on the diet and culinary traditions of First Nations people and French and English colonists in the Laurentian valley from 1608-1791. It is a fascinating read: with ties to religion, social mores, economic circumstances and geography, food can tell us much about the métissage of cultures. I was at first surprised to come across the name of the Swedish-Finnish botanist and explorer, Pehr Kalm in several texts.

 

Born in Ångermanland, Sweden (1716 –1779), Pehr Kalm was a student of Carl Linnaeus (1707 – 1778), the Swedish botanist, physician, and zoologist who invented a new system for naming species — binomial nomenclature. 

“He could not believe his good fortune in becoming one of Linnaeus’s disciples. He had lost his father [the pastor Gabriel Kalm] before he was born, but God has given him Linnaeus and Bielke instead.” Pehr Kalm to Carl Linnaeus, 24 January 1744, The Linnaean correspondence, linnaeus.c18.net, letter L0528 (consulted 13 February 2010).

Sten Carl Bielke (1709-1753) was a Swedish Baron and one of the founders of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. He financially supported Kalm’s voyage to America. While it was Bielke who first had the idea of collecting specimens from other northern climates like Iceland and Siberia, it was Linnaeus who suggested an expedition to North America, as the continent was little known at the time. Nancy Pick writes of their hope to start a silk industry in Scandinavia, describing how Linnaeus urged Kalm to expedite plant and seed specimens from the New World so they could be classified into his Species Plantarum, a plant encyclopedia. Of particular interest was the red mulberry, Morus rubra, a plant that was speculated to be able to survive harsh winters. (“Linnaeus Canadensis”, The Walrus Magazine, 2007). There is presently a move to preserve what remains of Kalm’s experimental botanical garden in Sipsalo, near Turku (Åbo), Finland.

Kalm is also remembered today for his journal, En Resa til Norra America. His daily writings reveal a richly detailed account of fauna and flora, colonial life, religion, politics, and architecture. Voyage de Pehr Kalm au Canada en 1749 is also of interest for the sociological accounts of settlers during the final years of the French Regime. I wasn’t able to find the French translation online, as it is out of print. Decided to take a walk to the Maison Saint-Gabriel in Pointe-Saint Charles to visit their boutique. The woman in charge informed me that they were sold out. She had received two calls that very week about the same book. She was kind enough to let me leave my contact info in case they found second hand copies. I had found a PDF version online, but it’s not the same. I wanted the object. In fact, she told me it was the perfect “livre de chevet”, as one could read his daily logs more than two hundred and fifty years after his passage.

I did find two amazing on-line resources. The Linnaean Correspondence by The centre international d’étude du XVIIIe siècle is a database with all the surviving letters written to and by Linnaeus. An avid letter writer, there were 40 letters from Kalm to Linnaeus alone. Thankfully, some of them have summaries for those who do not read Swedish. The Linnean Society of London’s Linnean Collections also has an extensive database with a zoomable image of the actual letter written to Linnaeus by Kalm in 1749 from Quebec.

I transcribed the letter and tried to translate it from the Swedish using GoogleTranslate and my Engelsk-Svensk dictionary. I could only surmise it was about plants, with a curious line about wanting to “order and plant my trees, herbs and children [!]”. An amusing exercise until I find the French translation.

P.S. I have been 12 Swedish miles N. of Quebec (…) Thuya, together with several spruce, pine and Larix vulgar. I find it nor needful, at becoming a year more in America, for PEHR KALM could well be more an observer, but on several relatively new tree for answers, and useful herbs, know PEHR KALM; new and curious PEHR KALM could well be.

In the preface to the English translation by John Reinhold Forster (Travels into North America, 1773), Forster describes Kalm's writing style:

“He gives you his observations as they occurred day after day, which makes him a faithful relater, notwithstanding it takes away all elegance of style, and often occasions him to make very sudden transitions from subjects very foreign to one another.”

It will be interesting to think of the blog structure and how it affects how one writes when reading Kalm's journal. In fact, if I think of the Tongue Rug as a writing project, the blog structures itself does accentuate "very sudden transitions from subjects very foreign to one another" by way of hyperlinks and cloud tags. Each tongue has a narrative (lake, placename) in a larger narrative (tongue rug).