Different ways of seeing ‘savagery’: Two Nordic travellers in 18th-century North America

Introduction

What do strangers see when they travel? What do they perceive? Sensory impressions bombard visitors in foreign environments; they come from all directions. Unfamiliar smells and tastes tantalize the olfactory organs and taste buds, causing pleasure or discomfort. Sounds and noises frighten and delight; unknown languages confuse. Eyes turn frenziedly in all directions, attempting to take in as much as possible of the alien vistas. Fingers run across unknown materials, touch the skin of an exotic fruit, or caress a lustrous piece of fabric. All the time, the newcomer makes more or less conscious comparisons with previous experiences and more familiar environments. Some things appear common, while others do not resemble anything previously encountered. The interplay between sensory perceptions and previous experiences produces sensations and elicits reactions that influence the cognitive conclusions the traveller draws from the encounter (Nyman, 2013: 28–9; Rotter, 2011).

For much of the history of European colonial expansion, descriptions of encounters with worlds new to travellers took shape in the writing of diaries, travelogues, scientific tracts, and letters. In these various travel accounts, not all senses were given equal prominence. Visual impressions gained primary status, while aural, olfactory, and tactile experiences received less attention (Hacke and Musselwhite, 2018: 3). The formalization of scholarly methodologies in early modern European universities also emphasized visual information, identifying a distance between the observer and the observed object as foundational for modern knowledge production and claims to objective truth. In contrast to classical thinkers, who based their knowledge claims primarily on deduction and imagination, 16th-century travellers to America argued that they gained greater knowledge through descriptions based on first-hand experience (Kupperman, 1995). French cosmographer François de Belleforest (1530–83) described the eye as witness to what the pen put forth, while his contemporary André Thevet (c. 1517–92) argued that direct experience was the only route to understanding the diverse peoples of the world (Dickason, 1996: 8–9). However, in the translation from experience to report and narrative, the diverse sensory experiences of travellers were often reduced to sight and text.

In this article, I am interested in exploring how the methodologies employed by European travellers to order their experiences in America gave rise to different kinds of knowledge of the peoples and lands they encountered. Intellectual historians have insightfully suggested that an epistemological fracture took place as Europeans were establishing colonies in the New World, with knowledge based on deduction from philosophical premises or presuppositions gradually giving way to claims based on direct experience (Bleichmar, 2012: 46–7; Cooper, 2007: 87–8). Among the gamut of sensations elicited by experience, knowledge based on observation, which prioritized vision above the other senses, came to be regarded as the most reliable form of information. ¹ For that which was seen to be made into knowledge, however, an order or system of classification would need to be imposed that enabled sensory impression to be recorded as knowledge. Each of the articles in this issue – by Romano, Buchan and Andersson Burnett, Sebastiani, Van Gent, and Hodacs and Persson – all deal with the European translation of vision into knowledge in early modern global circuits of information and colonial travel. My focus here is on two Swedish travellers to a specific region of North America between 1712 and 1751. Though engaged in different pursuits and professions, Andreas Hesselius (1677–1733) and Pehr Kalm (1716–79) each left detailed records of their travels and encounters that reflect an epistemological transition from deduction to observation, yet they and their writings remain difficult to classify. Whereas Kalm’s work seems to embody Michel Foucault’s (1970: 131) description of modern natural history as consisting of ‘undertaking a meticulous examination of things themselves…and then of transcribing what it has gathered in smooth, neutralized, and faithful words’, Hesselius produced a journal replete with direct, personal sensory engagements that he describes in an effort to enhance knowledge and understanding. This difference aside, their writings represent a modern observational episteme, privileging a type of visual, observational knowledge in the compilation of natural history. In this article, I trace the little-known concurrences and divergences in Hesselius’s and Kalm’s natural histories of America. Though each presented similar descriptions of plants and other aspects of the natural world, their methodologies led to markedly different impressions of the indigenous peoples they encountered. The difference was that Hesselius wrote the peoples he met and engaged with into history, whereas Kalm wrote only of ‘peoples without histories’ (Foucault, 1970: 376; Wolf, 1997).

Scholarship on early modern travel narratives has demonstrated convincingly that despite their emphasis on description based on experience and observation, travel accounts did not simply produce unbiased textual representations. In the Swedish context, Åsa Karlsson and Hanna Hodacs have noted that ‘although the travel narrative cannot tell us exactly how it was, this genre mirrors contemporary imaginings in a highly transparent manner.…That travellers often carried along preconceptions and with their aid interpreted what they saw is abundantly clear’ (Hodacs and Karlsson, 2000: 9). Focusing on visual impressions, writes Ingrid Kuczynski, ‘allowed the traveler to perceive and describe another country in its presumed entirety’ (Kuczynski, 2003: 26). Emphasizing vision supported a hierarchical relationship between the observer and the observed, placing the former in a position of power. It was the observer who appeared to sort among their impressions, arranging and classifying them. Through their descriptions, travellers, be they adventurers, natural history travellers, colonial officers, or missionaries, recorded their observations of worlds they frequently deemed inferior to their own. These travelogues and the impressions noted in them formed the idea of Europe as an enlightened centre and the colonies as a ‘savage’ periphery.

These are overarching conclusions substantiated in narratives from all regions of the globe, but what were the mechanisms by which notions of savagery were produced in and through travel accounts? Indeed, how is natural history itself implicated in colonizing images of savagery? The two Nordic accounts I focus on here, each from eastern North America during the first half of the 18th century, illustrate the need to grapple with these questions. Hesselius and Kalm both spent several years in eastern North America, when this region was undergoing huge changes as a consequence of European colonial settlement policies, which placed enormous pressure on indigenous societies and political configurations. Both men arrived with an ardent desire to observe the natural environment and learn about the indigenous inhabitants. They both produced writings in the form of journals that have proved immensely useful to subsequent scholars. Kalm’s well-known work, an early product of the global intellectual ambitions of the Linnaean project, has largely overshadowed the understudied writings of Hesselius. For this reason, the case is made here for a more thorough investigation of the lesser-known Hesselius, in order to deepen our understanding of the diversity of European natural history writing in the early 18th century.

Research on the development of European traditions of natural history has identified a decisive shift in the early modern period. Whereas earlier natural histories had involved the compilation of vast catalogues of specific animals or plants, from the 16th century onward natural historians began to amass natural histories whose purpose was to explain nature as a whole (Anstey, 2012: 11–31). Francis Bacon (1561–1626), who has been identified as a key figure in this transition, began to refer to natural history as the careful description of the phenomena of nature, and their meticulous organization in inventories of knowledge (Yeo, 2007: 7–8). By the 18th century, natural history had embraced this ambition to classify nature in its totality based on rigorous empirical observation, but combined it with a wide variety of methods for classifying the different kinds of knowledge needed to produce natural histories of specific locales or territories (Cooper, 2007: 128–39). Natural historical knowledge was not simply a means of ordering nature – that which was observed – but of ordering knowledge itself – that is, how observations were made. Natural history was not a single body of work, but encompassed a variety of methods of observation and classification. Importantly, natural historical knowledge was considered fully consistent with the acceptance of the divine creation of nature, and of humanity’s pre-eminence within it.

Inventories of humanity were a mainstay of early natural historical writings, which sought to name a wide variety of human types, including mythical and monstrous forms (Davies, 2016: 14, 34–7). In the wake of Europe’s deepening colonial and commercial engagement across the globe, natural histories began to emerge that aimed not only to classify human communities, but to place them in a civilizational hierarchy that included barbarians, slaves, and savages, along with peoples deemed more advanced (Wheeler, 2000: 92–4). In this context, natural historians sought to account for and explain the evident differences between human communities, as well as their similarities. In the 18th century, natural historical explanations tended in a very specific direction, toward the idea that differences and similarities among human communities were not simply spontaneous, but developmental – brought about by causes whose consequences unfolded over time (Gascoigne, 2014: 287–90). In this complex intellectual milieu, natural histories were woven together from multiple skeins: direct observation and unquestioned faith; empirical rigour and epistemological presumption; human diversity and inherent hierarchy. These multiple threads run throughout the natural historical writings of both Hesselius and Kalm.

Andreas Hesselius arrived in Pennsylvania in 1712, together with his brother Gustav, to take up a post as pastor to the scattered Swedish Lutheran congregations in the Delaware Valley between Philadelphia and Wilmington. He found himself forced to rely on his surroundings in order to feed and clothe his family and himself. He travelled vast distances on horseback to visit dispersed settlements; he hiked through forests and meadows, ambled along rivers and brooks, tirelessly collecting impressions and knowledge of the flora, fauna, and peoples of the area. His diary offers an impressive and compelling description of a world entirely new to its author, including the voices of its indigenous inhabitants. As a result, Hesselius has been described by ethnologist Nils Jacobsson as a precursor to Swedish naturalist and former colonial travel writer from indigenous Sami land in northern Scandinavia Carl Linnaeus (1707–78) (Jacobsson, 1938a: 239). Some two decades later, Pehr Kalm stepped onto land at the docks of Philadelphia. In 1741, Kalm had become one of the first students of Linnaeus at the university of Uppsala in Sweden. Between the years 1748 and 1751, Kalm travelled in North America, sent out by Linnaeus to study its flora, fauna, and human inhabitants. Kalm also wrote a diary, demonstrating a very different approach to learning, experience, and observation. Steeped in the Swedish cameralist discourse of service to the state, and the utility of knowledge of natural resources, Kalm applied the Linnaean system of taxonomic classification, but also drew on a network of connections to authorities – scholarly and societal – set in train by Linnaeus himself. Kalm’s methods appear in keeping with contemporary academic practices, but left little room for indigenous knowledge to enter his writings (Bewell, 2016; Schildt, 1960: 11–14; see also Albritton Jonsson, 2015).

Natural histories

By the early 18th century, the region bisected by the Delaware River and stretching from today’s Trenton, New Jersey, to south of Wilmington, Delaware, had become home to a thousand or so Swedes and Finns. The oldest among them had arrived in the mid-17th century to settle New Sweden, a colony operated by the Swedish Crown from 1638–55 before it was taken over by, in succession, Dutch and English forces (Fur, 2006). These Swedish-speaking Lutheran settlers sent a joint letter to the Swedish king in the 1690s, asking him to dispatch a pastor to serve their congregations, and from that point until the outbreak of the American War of Independence, Lutheran ministers of the Swedish Church maintained the two Swedish congregations of Wicacoa in Philadelphia and Christina in Wilmington. Over time, the ties connecting these congregations to their Swedish homeland weakened, and while they were more populous by the end of this period, fewer parishioners spoke the Swedish language and services were generally held in English (Lindmark, 2005).

This region had long been the home of the Lenape people, who prided themselves on being the first in the region to welcome Europeans onto American soil. They soon found themselves increasingly displaced and forced to move westward away from villages, corn fields, fishing sites, and hunting areas along the Delaware River and its tributaries. Early Swedish descriptions mention large villages, surrounded by maize plantations and fertile parkland along the waterways (Fur, 2009). During its brief existence, the Swedish colony was dependent on amicable relations with the Lenape, and their allies the Susquehannock, for subsistence and trading opportunities. The Lenape and Susquehannock dominated the trade networks of which the small colony was a part, but they suffered from repeated European incursions and diseases. Eric Björk, one of the first ministers sent out to the colony, wrote in 1691 that ‘the wild people have disappeared in just a few years; where there were formerly thousands, there are now barely ten, ruined by strong drink, contagious diseases, civil war, etc’. ² Björk correctly identified a disastrous drop in population, but failed to connect this with the large influx of European settlers who had been pouring into the country, enticed by the promise of the new Quaker colony founded by William Penn in 1682. In the face of this decline, many Lenape villages removed further inland, where they continued to influence politics and engage in confrontations and negotiations with settlers (Soderlund, 2015).

It was into this context of colonial expansion, cross-cultural engagement, and continuing conflict that both Hesselius and Kalm travelled. Their extensive diaries provide unique windows into the complexity of colonial society, but also into the translation of European intellectual frameworks of interpretation and analysis to unfamiliar environments and peoples. At the outset, it is important to note the different genres in which they wrote (Terrall, 2017: 51–64). Hesselius was a Lutheran minister whose primary points of reference were biblical and spiritual. Kalm was a trained natural historian whose outlook reflected the growing confidence of Enlightened European presumptions. Despite these differences, however, the abiding impression from both journals is of a shared interest in recording what was ‘new’ to them in terms of authoritative knowledge. What lent authority to the knowledge they each compiled was the veracity of their observations. Here is the crucial connection between the two authors. Observation was their primary data source, but each translated their observations into knowledge in different ways. Those differences were a reflection of the diversity of natural history writing, and an indication that a shift was underway toward the pre-eminence of Linnaean taxonomy.

Hesselius’s primary contribution as a natural history writer lies in his diary, which was not printed until 1938. ³ It is likely that he wrote intending to publish, but never did so for unknown reasons. The existing manuscript is a copy from his original journal (now lost) made in 1758, possibly by his son Andreas, and then further edited and arranged. Upon his return to Sweden, he did publish a report on conditions in the Swedish Churches in America, which included information from his diary (Hesselius, 1725). Nils Jacobsson, who edited and published Hesselius’s diary, describes him as ‘the most extraordinary of these clerical travel writers and nature enthusiasts’, who preceded Linnaeus as an empirical student of nature by several decades (Jacobsson, 1938b). His diary simmers with lively descriptions of people he met, animals he observed, hunted, and ate, and the natural environment in which he moved. Descriptions are often detailed and precise. There are no generalized chapters, otherwise common in travel literature, but elaborations and asides expand upon his recounting of specific experiences, such as an incident in which two young servants, a boy and a girl, were poisoned. The boy, he explained, touched poisoned oak, and immediately his face swelled up. Hesselius used this occasion to describe the poisonous plant, its preponderance and manner of growth, and how to treat the symptoms of the poison using ‘the inner bark of the Fisher tree (so called because of its odour like that of raw fish); let it boil in fresh water and give him to drink’. He noted that he had long been curious about the specifics of the poison oak, but that he had been ‘advised against it by both Wild people and Christians, not only against touching it, but even getting close to it to look at it’ (Hesselius, 1938b: 123–4 see Sayre, 1997: 98–123). ⁴ Jacobsson, who organized the diary’s publication, finds him an eager scholar of nature and a competent hunter with a keen sense of observation. He describes his style as light and flowing, and considers him quite on a par with Linnaeus as a travel writer (Jacobsson, 1922: 204; 1938a: 241).

The first of many of Linnaeus’s students to undertake global natural history journeys (Hodacs and Nyberg, 2007; Sörlin and Fagerstedt, 2004), Pehr Kalm travelled to North America in 1748. His trip was financed by the Royal Academy, reflecting Sweden’s cameralist orientation toward the import of foreign cash crops to aid Swedish commerce and the state (Albritton Jonsson, 2013: ch. 5). He eventually returned to Sweden in 1751 loaded down with seeds, potted plants, numerous collections of objects, and his travel journal (Jacobsson, 1938a: 276–82; Schildt, 1960: 11–14). Descriptions of Kalm identify him as a radical utilitarian, focused on the usefulness of science for societal and economic improvement. Metaphysics did not interest him, nor did the contemporary penchant for descriptions of the marvels of nature. ‘For my part’, he wrote upon seeing Niagara Falls, ‘who am not so fond of the Marvellous, I like to see things just as they are, and so to relate them’ (quoted in Sayre, 1997: 112). His quotidian notes followed the style Linnaeus taught his students, filled with myriad observations on animals and plants and their uses; rocks and springs; the layout of towns and roads in the English colony; fences and cottages; clothing and modes of transportation; and cooking and medical treatments; as well as folk tales, dialects, and place names – all of it described with a view to its usefulness and possible transplantation to a Nordic environment (Jacobowsky, 1937: 298).

The manner in which the two travellers framed their first impressions upon arriving in America demonstrates their respective approaches to this novel environment. Unfortunately, neither Hesselius’s nor Kalm’s original notations have survived. Both manuscripts, however, were prepared for publication, and it is therefore unlikely that impressions were penned sequentially without later revision. Nevertheless, these introductory comments set the tone for each author’s approach to what they encountered. Hesselius’s first impression in April 1712 was one of delight, and he freely expressed the sentiments evoked by the ‘lovely country’ he ‘saw with amazement’. He contrasted American floral richness with Nordic paucity, admiring the variety of ‘lovely plants and trees’ that ‘gave off such fragrance’ that he supposed he had ‘come to a Paradise’. Jacobsson identifies ‘a certain poetic flight of fancy’ in Hesselius’s otherwise purely botanical descriptions, such as ‘four kinds of Oak, white, black, red, and Spanish, also Cedars, Dogwoods, Apple, Cherry, Mulberry, Sycamore trees’ (Jacobsson, 1938a: 241). This ‘poetical’ style was entirely lacking in Kalm’s Linnaean methodology, which became the predominant mode of natural history writing in the decades after Hesselius landed in America.

Upon disembarking in September 1748, he noted dryly in his journal, Kalm took dinner at the docks before proceeding with a letter of recommendation in his hand to the house of Benjamin Franklin. This was entirely in line with his mentor’s advice, as Linnaeus urged travellers to visit men of learning wherever they went (Hodacs and Nyberg, 2007: 201). That same day he was introduced to two other men, both seasoned Swedish colonists, and one of them coincidentally the brother of Andreas Hesselius, who had never returned to Sweden. Kalm also walked around and noted unfamiliar plants, but they did not elicit exclamations of pleasure, nor apparently did they make an impression on any of his senses other than sight. It would be erroneous, however, to assume that the trip to America did not hold any romance for Kalm. On the contrary, it was the experience of a lifetime, and after Kalm and his wife, whom he had met and wed in America, returned to Sweden-Finland, they made serious attempts to obtain permission to emigrate (Schildt, 1960: 13). What is of essence here is an analysis not of these authors’ psyches, but of the epistemological tools they employed to accrue and disseminate knowledge. Beyond differences of personal disposition and training, the writings of Hesselius and Kalm reveal consistent patterns from their very first steps on American soil reflecting the growing predominance of natural history taxonomies (Huxley, 2003: 70–9). Hesselius used specific experiences as focal points for gathering various observations into a coherent description, while Kalm observed, listed, and consulted authorities.

Kalm fits well the characterization Mary Pratt gives of the quintessential European traveller. In Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, she identifies specific links between travel writing and European colonialism, suggesting that a European discourse about the world as a totality emerged out of the publication (in multiple editions between 1735 and 1758) of Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae and Charles de la Condamine’s (1701–74) first scientific trip in 1735, which she jointly describes as the Linnaean watershed leading to a new, European planetary consciousness (Pratt, 1992: 25–30, 39). These scientific travels served to develop an understanding of societies graded along a scale from stone age cultures to Christian civilization. Pratt notes that travel writers frequently used the present tense to describe both human beings and nature in the regions they visited, thus establishing a temporal distance from people and places construed as existing in a timeless present, in which there was only now, no before or after. Descriptions often presented a natural world devoid of human presence; Pratt evokes an image of Adam strolling around in Eden, naming animals and plants (ibid.: 51–3, 64–5). This is echoed in Kalm’s writings: ‘the entire day I was occupied with mounting the plants I had gathered and writing their names on notecards beside them’ (Kalm, 1985: 72).

How does Kalm’s manner of describing the New World compare to that of Hesselius? Both men commented on the natural environment they encountered; both described the region’s indigenous peoples; and both were trained in an austere Lutheran milieu, which began to be challenged by pietistic influences and political innovation. A substantial number of similar phenomena received mention in their diary notations, such as poison oak, skunks, rattlesnakes, peaches, turtles, and various avian species. However, the travelogues also display striking differences, among which the following description of a hummingbird is an exemplary case. On 29 July 1714, Hesselius wrote the following:

I caught a Kinglet in my garden: This bird is the most beautiful and the tiniest, I believe, to exist among all flying animals.…[The bird] has a golden colour on its back, but underneath the beak, which is long and pointed, the He bird has an indescribably lovely red spot, which glistens, like a glowing Ember, and is of such a lively and glittering crimson, that I am certain that it cannot be rendered better by any Painter.…He lives exclusively from the sweet juices that he sucks from lilies and flowers, within which he laps with his long beak and tongue, constantly beating his wings, so that one rarely will find this bird sitting still. (Hesselius, 1938b: 120)

In contrast, Kalm’s descriptions do not appear to have been directly inspired by encounters and experiences. Rather, he combined his own observations with information derived from various authorities he encountered, heard, or read. In a manner familiar to most contemporary scholars, he supported his knowledge claims with references to previous authoritative works. Mark Catesby’s (1683–1749) Natural History of Carolina, Florida, and the Bahama Islands (published between 1729 and 1747) was the first illustrated natural history depicting the natural wonders of North America. The publication of Catesby’s book constitutes a demarcation line between Hesselius and Kalm. When Hesselius encountered poison oak, humming birds, and peaches, there existed no written natural history for him to verify his observations, and he was forced to rely on his own notes and reflections. Kalm, however, could navigate between his own observations and those of previous and contemporary scholars. The methodological differences between the two were even more significant in their description of North America’s indigenous peoples.

‘The wild people’: Natural histories of savagery

Hesselius and Kalm both arrived with a similar set of presumptions shaping the way they saw, interacted with, and described indigenous people. Accounts from New Sweden from the mid-17th century that had circled back to Sweden identified the inhabitants of the region with the generic terms ‘wild people’ (vildar) or ‘heathens’ (hedningar) (Fur, 1993: 289-306). Soon, however, colonists learned specific names. ‘Our wild people’ along the Delaware River introduced themselves to the Swedes as the ‘Renappi’, while their western neighbours named themselves the ‘Susquehannoer’. Accounts from the New Sweden colony, at least two of which were most likely accessible to both Hesselius and Kalm during their preparations for travelling to America, vacillated between imagining a noble and unadulterated natural man and describing an abominable barbarian. Peter Lindeström, who spent two years in the colony in the 1650s, summarized his extensive description of Lenape society as follows: ‘In short, these Indians are people of various qualities and more inclined toward bad than toward good’ (Lindeström, 1962; see also Fur, 2006: 27–39.)

Both men inherited an understanding of indigenous Americans as separate from civilization, encapsulated in the designations ‘wild’ and ‘heathen’. A poem written in honour of Bishop Jesper Swedberg, Hesselius’s uncle who spearheaded the America mission, illustrated this perception of the savage and barbarian life: ‘It was a land where Barbarians lived/A heathen people, believing in the abyss, who worshiped in their own way, with words and bended knees/And who lived with each other like wild animals and cattle’ (Jacobsson, 1922: 196; see also Gren, 1938: 398). Such representations permeated Hesselius’s early letters to his benefactor in Sweden, Count Cronhjelm. In 1712, he complained that the minds of the Swedish and Finnish colonists had so deteriorated that they lived more like cattle than human beings. He had visited the Indians in one of their towns and found them without reason and unyielding in the face of change. ‘From association with the Indians and the Quakers I believe that our Swedes in this country have become exceedingly vulgar’, he concluded (Hesselius, 1938a: 144).

In comparison to the writings of most contemporary European observers, Hesselius’s diary stands out in his descriptions of interactions with indigenous people. He encountered the Lenape people in the course of his daily duties; they taught him about the flora and fauna of the region, and he was invited to participate in ceremonies. He noted their presence also in times and places where other colonists omit such information. On one occasion, in 1721, he was in Philadelphia and became a witness to the arrival of two indigenous delegations to a diplomatic conference with the English colonial administration. Alone among contemporary European chroniclers, he noted that the Lenape delegation consisted of men and women who entered separately, representing both sexes as interested parties in land negotiations:

A while thereafter the Queen came walking with her Wild women one after the other, but she was distinguished from the others only by a black cloak, which she carried across one shoulder, [and] was otherwise of a somewhat whiter facial complexion; perhaps the black cloth set her off like that. (Hesselius, 1938b: 130)

This pattern indicates a difference in methodologies of observation that is immediately noticeable in Hesselius’s and Kalm’s descriptions of indigenous people. Hesselius’s descriptions were frequently structured around accounts of actual encounters. In this context he wrote about men and women, mentioning seven individuals by one or more of their own names whom he had met in specific situations. Kalm, by contrast, named no single indigenous person at all. Even when Hesselius offered generalized observations, he was careful to note that these did not indicate immutable or universal characteristics.

In his letter of 1712 to Cronhjelm, Hesselius revealed how conscious his methodological approach was, honed during his years in America rather than stemming from his original training. In the letter, he described his and brother Gustav’s first glimpse of American Indians:

The first people we met in the country were Indians, who walked around almost completely naked, having only an ugly piece of cloth over one shoulder. Otherwise the body is entirely bare and brown in colour. We did not stay long at the meeting before the Colonel who lives there in the woods, Sir Francis Holland, sent his servants to us and invited us to his house. (Hesselius, 1938a: 142)

Hesselius’s notes from his first day in America emphasized that this was still indigenous territory. On 23 April 1712, when the two brothers disembarked at Herring Bay in Maryland, they came upon ‘a pleasing land [as they were] strolling about 1 English mile away from the water, and with awe observed the abundance of this country, which our Nordic countries do not, or only to a small degree, possess’. After the brothers had walked on alone for a time, they encountered

two Indians, almost entirely naked, having only an ugly piece of cloth over their shoulders, and the rest of the body bare and brown in colour, large and well-built in stature: At the first glimpse of these wild People, we were somewhat surprised, yet they did not stop upon seeing us, but only said to us, Haita, that is a word of greeting, resembling our Good Day, thus demonstrating that they are accustomed to European people. (Hesselius, 1938b: 111)

Kalm had to wait some three quarters of a year for his first encounter with indigenous Americans, until a trip from Albany to Saratoga in the north of the New York colony on his way to Canada. In fact, Kalm does not appear to have met any indigenous people while in the Delaware Valley, which may be due to the almost complete dispossession of the Lenape in the forty-year period between Hesselius’s arrival in 1712 and that of Kalm in 1748. However, Kalm’s very first reference to them suggests otherwise. On 22 September 1748, only days after his arrival, he wrote that ‘it was said by everyone about the Indians who live in this country that they are rather decent people when one lives in peace with them; no one can keep promises better than they do’. He then related a story told to him by one of the old Swedish settlers, Peter Kock (Kalm, 1970: 153). He continued to share stories ‘old Swedes’ had told him, and throughout his first months in Pennsylvania and New Jersey he repeatedly referred to information he had gained from other colonists, in particular Benjamin Franklin and his son John.

On the surface, Hesselius and Kalm reported on similar topics related to indigenous peoples. They commented on their physical characteristics, ornaments, eating habits, medicines, and burial practices. Hesselius, for instance, wrote that turtles were both intriguing animals and a viable food source. His account of finding in the woods a turtle as large as a closed fist, which immediately withdrew into its shell, led directly into a description of how to cook the animal. Both ‘Indians and Christians’ ate them, he explained, but ‘in accordance with the Indian preparation it tastes the best when it is fried in the hot ashes’ (Hesselius, 1938b: 113). Kalm also saw turtles on a visit to Racoon on the east bank of the Delaware River, and also noted that the Indians used them for food, but his information came from Swedish settlers and he does not appear to have tasted the animal for himself (Kalm, 1970: 326).

Colonists were profoundly concerned with indigenous knowledge of medical treatments and medicinal herbs. In September 1716, Hesselius’s two-year-old son suffered a severe case of intestinal worms. ‘An honourable Indian woman named Chicalicka Nanni Kettelev’ treated the boy with an infusion made from grass roots. Chicalicka Nanni Kettelev firmly refused Hesselius and his household permission to accompany her into the woods in order to gather herbs for the medicine, but following her treatment the boy recovered completely (Hesselius, 1938b: 124). Kalm wrote that all of the Swedish colonists he met assured him that the Indians possessed advanced, even superior, knowledge of how to cure various diseases and ailments. They also told him that the Indians did all they could to thwart the Swedes’ attempts to discover which herbs and plants they used. Colonists would attempt to spy on the Indians or ply them with alcohol in order to uncover their secrets (Kalm, 1970: 237). The two authors’ discussions of indigenous medicinal knowledge highlights a pivotal difference between them. Hesselius placed himself entirely into the hands of the Lenape woman, and while he commented on the secrecy surrounding her remedy, he respected it. He had already been in the country for four years by that point, and had learned to trust Lenape knowledge and respect their customs. This allowed him to place his son’s fate in Chicalicka Nanni Kettelev’s hands. Kalm, meanwhile, had no such experience to shape his perception of the country’s indigenous inhabitants. ⁵

Europeans frequently commented on indigenous practices of body ornamentation and painting. Again, the pattern identified above is evident in the two authors’ accounts. Hesselius’s brother Gustav was a painter and only a few months into his sojourn in America Hesselius received a visit:

[There] came a messenger from the Indian sachem Captain Pockhaels, requesting that I recommend him to my brother, who is a painter, that he would give him some paints, in particular Cinober, with which he wished to paint his face. At this time I must mention something about the Indians or the proper indigenous people’s manner of adorning their bodies. (Hesselius, 1938b: 115)

Descriptions of burial practices offer further examples of the differences between Hesselius and Kalm. In February 1716, Hesselius observed an Indian funeral, at which a man named Cottehe was interred in a Christian cemetery. Hesselius was already aware that this ceremony differed from customary practices among the Lenape people, ‘because here the dead man was laid in a Coffin like any other corpse, but wore both stockings and entirely new shoes made in a Christian manner’ (Hesselius, 1938b: 123). Six years later, he again noted that he had been present at an Indian funeral. Tillis had been buried ‘with all the customary Savage ceremonies’ (ibid.: 133). For his part, Kalm described indigenous burials after one of his most influential contacts, the American naturalist John Bartram (1699–1777), had shown him a letter detailing how a group of men digging a cellar in east Jersey had found a large headstone, under which lay human remains, along with a piece of corn bread that was so well preserved that the men tasted it. They believed the buried person had been an Indian ‘notable’, as it was the practice of the Indians to place in a grave food and other objects that the deceased had been fond of. Bartram had offered Kalm a small piece of the corn bread, which had been included in the letter, and Kalm drew a picture of it in the margin of his manuscript (Kalm, 1970: 172).

Travellers in the American colonies frequently remarked on the devastating impact of alcohol among the indigenous inhabitants. In a sense, their inability to cope with the effects of alcoholic beverages marked indigenous peoples as savage (Mancall, 1995: 11–28). Kalm discussed the matter with Benjamin Franklin and noted that Indians in general were good people, but became dangerous company if they got hold of alcoholic drinks. As soon as they saw a colonist with alcohol, he wrote, it was impossible to keep it from them. If they were not served voluntarily, they would take the drink by force, and any colonist who tried to stop them would be risking his life (Kalm, 1970: 208–9). Kalm’s descriptions did not offer any information on the role alcohol played in indigenous societies. Hesselius, on the other hand, contextualized his references to alcohol use. In his account of his attendance at the Indian funeral in 1722, he remarked that the women had drunk until they had become heavily intoxicated, all the while weeping and mourning the dead man. ‘When one of our Swedes asked them how they could drink while in such great sorrow, the Wild woman answered him in her own tongue: How could we cry, if we don’t have anything to drink?’ (Hesselius, 1938b: 133). This illustration of the indigenous attitude toward alcohol is vital for an understanding of how, despite its negative impact overall, it could fulfil important functions in certain situations.

Kalm’s lack of direct interaction with indigenous Americans is an indication of the pace and the extent of the dispossession and dislocation experienced by the Lenape people and their neighbours and allies in the initial decades of the 18th century. That is not the only explanation, however. Kalm’s epistemology placed greater emphasis on scholarly authorities than on eyewitness accounts. Kalm associated freely with the most prominent members of the colonial elite in Philadelphia, and even participated in one of Benjamin Franklin’s experiments with electricity. While his diary made no reference to any named indigenous Americans, it contained frequent mentions of the names and titles of his colonial American contacts (Kalm, 1985: 102–3). Kalm’s reliance on them for information was explicit. Following a conversation with Bartram, he wrote that ‘colonel Beverley, in his description of Virginia, best describes the manner of life, customs, and economy of the Indians, so that next to nothing can be added to that, and one can trust completely what he reports about them’ (Kalm, 1970: 168). As a consequence of this approach, Kalm generally offered only static descriptions of indigenous exterior characteristics, and rarely differentiated between nations or tribal affiliations; nor were individuals ever named. When he eventually encountered American Indians in person during his journey to Canada, his descriptions were vivid and lively, but still failed to present the Indians as individuals. On the day Kalm’s company crossed over into Canada, he reported a frightening near-encounter. ‘Wild Americans who belong to the French’ were traversing the region seeking revenge on the British for a recent killing, and had preceded them on the path only hours before. Kalm thanked God that his group had been spared certain death.

Throughout his travels, Kalm inserted information regarding the indigenous peoples of Canada, almost always second-hand accounts emphasizing what the narrator viewed as their strangeness and brutal nature. His first actual encounter with Canada’s indigenous people occurred in the vicinity of Fort St. Frederique, this with a man described by Kalm as having a face painted half black and half red, with silver earrings and a shaved head. As Kalm’s group camped along Lake Champlain, they occasionally observed Abenaki Indians fishing from their birch bark canoes. Kalm remarked that the Abenaki subsisted seasonally on the harvest from corn, bean, and squash plantations; from fishing; and from meat from deer that they hunted. They ‘live long, have good health, can withstand more difficulties and fatigue than others…and have no wish to change their way of living to that of [even] the most comfortable European’. In general, Kalm regarded European settlers in America with interest, and often interacted with them, but kept his distance, both physically and intellectually, from its indigenous inhabitants. He primarily relayed ethnographic observations of Canada’s indigenous peoples, but did not relate directly to any of them. His journals recounted no conversations with named members of the First Nations, in sharp contrast to his interactions with Europeans, whom he frequently identified by both name and position. Language barriers hindered him from making direct contact with indigenous Canadians, but these were less influential than his fear and that of his white guides. ‘Wild Americans’ appeared hostile and threatening. In his letters, Linnaeus urged Kalm to go further north and west, but Kalm declined out of fear for his own safety should he venture so far into indigenous country. ⁶

Conclusion

Kalm’s detailed, meticulous account ensures him a place among the most useful sources on Northeastern Woodlands indigenous culture during the 18th century. As concerns his contribution to knowledge of non-European societies in North America, the descriptive method he brought from Europe shows both strengths and weaknesses. He produced a wealth of detail regarding clothes, adornments, dances, and trade items, but rarely afforded any glimpses of indigenous people’s lives and thoughts, or gave reasons for their actions. His notes conveyed a great deal of information on material objects, but not on the meanings they carried. Kalm described and organized categories, but did not identify individuals. He based his descriptions on his own observations in combination with references to European authorities in the American colonies. In this way, indigenous people appear as ethnographic objects, but not as part of history or participants in contemporary society.

His obvious delight in the abundance and splendour of the New World makes it tempting to interpret Hesselius as a romantic whose descriptions of indigenous Americans drew on the trope of the noble savage existing in tune with nature and predating civilization. However, the people who emerged from his accounts were neither noble nor abominable, but for the most part simply people he interacted with. Two aspects set his descriptions apart from those of Kalm, and indeed a host of other travellers: namely, their contextualization and their emotive quality. Hesselius situated his descriptions in historic time and in a specific place, and this patterned his emotional responses to his experiences. He opined that ‘in accordance with the Indian preparation it tastes the best’; he expressed joy at his child’s recovery; he described two different kinds of funerals, noting his curiosity and his discomfort. Kalm, on the other hand, contextualized knowledge as detemporalized, general, and containable, underscored by his comment that ‘next to nothing can be added’ to his fellow scholar’s work. Next to Hesselius’s spontaneity, Kalm’s emotional reactions appear to have been shaped by previous tropes: he feared the Indians; he was disgusted and uncomfortable. The information he imparted was not necessarily flawed, but it lacked specificity, amounting to little more than a tome of facts spelling out the savagery of American Indians.

I struggle with how to fit these two men and their methodologies into the patterns discerned in the development of European epistemologies. Snait Gissis (2011: 41–103) has argued that one of the defining characteristics of the development of natural history in the 18th century was the authoritative classification of nature, in which the encounter with the new or exotic was increasingly subjected to a rigorous taxonomic ordering. One key effect of this development was that it gave rise to a trend toward producing ethnographic knowledge of other peoples solely within the terms of taxonomies of the natural world. Over the course of the 18th century, Gissis (ibid.: 42) writes, ‘the social frame collapsed into the discourse on nature. Humans became classified and visually represented along the same lines as flora, according to similar assumptions about visible features’. The writings of Hesselius and Kalm explored in this article exemplify this trend toward the predominance of taxonomic principles, and toward the representation of indigenous peoples as natural ‘savages’. The consequences of this trend in European intellectual and colonial history cannot be understated, as it helped to cement a view of indigenous communities as ‘peoples without histories’ (Wolf, 1997).

Yet for all that, the story of Hesselius and Kalm and their natural histories of America should remind us of the productive tensions and fruitful concurrences in intellectual and colonial history. Different methodologies produced diverse kinds of knowledge. At first glance, Hesselius and Kalm seem to fall squarely onto opposite sides of the divide between Renaissance and classical epistemologies, as formulated by Michel Foucault. Kalm’s disembodied and decontextualized representations match Foucault’s description of natural history in the classical age, while Hesselius appeared to engage all of his senses – taste, smell, sight, hearing, and touch – with the aim of enhancing knowledge and understanding (Foucault, 1970: 376). Even so, Hesselius took a clear stance against the scholastic model in his rejection of previous canonical texts as the primary source of knowledge, and in this respect he would seem to have been working within the new episteme. For both him and Kalm, observation laid the foundation for truth claims. What is striking is that Hesselius and Kalm arrived at similar descriptions of plants and other-than-human beings by employing different methodologies, but when it came to depicting indigenous peoples the consequence of their differing methodologies was a radical divergence. Kalm’s methodology produced the collapse of the social frame of which Gissis writes, while Hesselius’s embodied encounters revealed indigenous American agency and complexity, thereby challenging and complicating the colonial history of North America.