militia, ill-armed and untaught in the ways of war; so no one
thought of resisting the change of masters. The people simply
waited to see what would happen. Along in May a company of one
hundred and twenty men with four guns landed, and took possession
of Castle Hammershus, on the north shore, the only stronghold on
the island, in the name of the Swedish king. Colonel Printzensköld,
who had command, summoned the islanders to a meeting, and told them
that he had come to be their governor. They were to obey him, and
that was all. The people listened and said nothing.
Perhaps if the new rulers had been wise, things might have kept
on so. The people would have tilled their farms, and paid their
taxes, and Jens Kofoed, with all his hot hatred of the enemy he
had fought, might never have been heard of outside his own island.
But the Swedish soldiers had been through the Thirty Years’ War
and plunder had become their profession. They rioted in the towns,
doubled the taxes, put an embargo on trade and export, crushed the
industries; worse, they took the young men and sent them away to
Karl Gustav’s wars in foreign lands. They left only the old men and
the boys, and these last they kept a watchful eye on for drafts in
days to come. When the conscripts hid in the woods, so as not to
be torn from their wives and sweethearts, they organized regular
man-hunts as if the quarry were wild beasts, and, indeed, the poor
fellows were not treated much better when caught.
All summer they did as they pleased; then came word that Karl
Gustav had broken the peace he made, and of the siege of
Copenhagen. The news made the people sit up and take notice. Their
rightful sovereign had ceded the island to the Swedish king, that
was one thing. But now that they were at war again, these strangers
who persecuted them were the public enemy. It was time something
were done. In Hasle there was a young parson with his heart in the
right place, Poul Anker by name. Jens Kofoed sat in his church; he
had been to the wars, and was fit to take command. Also, the two
were friends. Presently a web of conspiracy spread quietly through
the island, gripping priest and peasant, skipper and trader,
alike. Its purpose was to rout out the Swedes. The Hasle trooper
and parson were the leaders; but their secret was well kept. With
the tidings that the Dutch fleet had forced its way through to
Copenhagen with aid for the besieged, and had bottled the Swedish
ships up in Landskrona, came a letter purporting to be from King
Frederik himself, encouraging the people to rise. It was passed
secretly from hand to hand by the underground route, and found the
island ready for rebellion.
Governor Printzensköld had seen something brewing, but he was a
fearless man, and despised the “peasant mob.” However, he sent to
Sweden for a troop of horsemen, the better to patrol the island
and watch the people. Early in December, 1658, just a year after
Jens Kofoed, the trooper, had set out for his home on furlough, the
governor went to Rönne, the chief city in the island, to start off
a ship for the reënforcements. The conspirators sought to waylay
him at Hasle, where he stopped to give warning that all who had not
paid the heavy war-tax would be sold out forthwith; but they were
too late. Master Poul and Jens Kofoed rode after him, expecting
to meet a band of their fellows on the way, but missed them. The
parson stayed behind then to lay the fuse to the mine, while Kofoed
kept on to town. By the time he got there he had been joined by
four others, Aage Svendsön, Klavs Nielsen, Jens Laurssön, and Niels
Gummelöse. The last two were town officers. As soon as the report
went around Rönne that they had come, Burgomaster Klaus Kam went to
them openly.
The governor had ridden to the house of the other burgomaster, Per
Larssön, who was not in the plot. His horse was tied outside and he
just sitting down to supper when Jens Kofoed and his band crowded
into the room, and took him prisoner. They would have killed him
there, but his host pleaded for his life. However, when they took
him out in the street, Printzensköld thought he saw a chance to
escape in the crowd and the darkness, and sprang for his horse. But
his great size made him an easy mark. He was shot through the head
as he ran. The man who shot him had loaded his pistol with a silver
button torn from his vest. That was sure death to any goblin on
whom neither lead nor steel would bite, and it killed the governor
all right. The place is marked to this day in the pavement of the
main street as the spot where fell the only tyrant who ever ruled
the island against the people’s will.
The die was cast now, and there was need of haste. Under cover of
the night the little band rode through the island with the news,
ringing the church bells far and near to call the people to arms.
Many were up and waiting; Master Poul had roused them already. At
Hammershus the Swedish garrison heard the clamor, and wondered
what it meant. They found out when at sunrise an army of half
the population thundered on the castle gates summoning them to
surrender. Burgomaster Kam sat among them on the governor’s horse,
wearing his uniform, and shouted to the officers in command that
unless they surrendered, he, the governor, would be killed, and
his head sent in to his wife in the castle. The frightened woman’s
tears decided the day. The garrison surrendered, only to discover
that they had been tricked. Jens Kofoed took command in the castle.
The Swedish soldiers were set to doing chores for the farmers
they had so lately harassed. The ship that was to have fetched
reënforcements from Sweden was sent to Denmark instead, with the
heartening news. They needed that kind there just then.
But the ex-trooper, now Commandant, knew that a day of reckoning
was coming, and kept a sharp lookout. When the hostile ship _Spes_
was reported steering in from the sea, the flag of Sweden flew from
the peak of Hammershus, and nothing on land betrayed that there
had been a change. As soon as she anchored, a boat went out with
an invitation from the governor to any officers who might be on
board, to come ashore and arrange for the landing of the troops.
The captain of the ship and the major in charge came, and were made
prisoners as soon as they had them where they could not be seen
from the ship. It blew up to a storm, and the _Spes_ was obliged
to put to sea, but as soon as she returned boats were sent out to
land the soldiers. They sent only little skiffs that could hold
not over three or four, and as fast as they were landed they were
overpowered and bound. Half of the company had been thus disposed
of when the lieutenant on board grew suspicious, and sent word that
without the express orders of the major no more would come. But
Jens Kofoed’s wit was equal to the emergency. The next boat brought
an invitation to the lieutenant to come in and have breakfast
with the officers, who would give him his orders there. He walked
into the trap; but when he also failed to return, his men refused
to follow. He had arranged to send them a sign, they said, that
everything was all right. If it did not come, they would sail away
to Sweden for help.
It took some little persuasion to make the lieutenant tell about
the sign, but in the end Jens Kofoed got it. It turned out to be
his pocket-knife. When they saw that, the rest came, and were put
under lock and key with their fellows.
The ship was left. If that went back, all was lost. Happily
both captain and mate were prisoners ashore. Four boat-loads of
islanders, with arms carefully stowed under the seats, went out
with the mate of the _Spes_, who was given to understand that if he
as much as opened his mouth he would be a dead man. They boarded
the ship, taking the crew by surprise. By night the last enemy
was comfortably stowed, and the ship on her way to Rönne, where
the prisoners were locked in the court-house cellar, with shotted
guns guarding the door. Perhaps it was the cruelties practised by
Swedish troops in Denmark that preyed upon the mind of Jens Kofoed
when he sent the parson to prepare them for death then and there;
but better counsel prevailed. They were allowed to live. The whole
war cost only two lives, the governor’s and that of a sentinel at
the castle, who refused to surrender. The mate of the _Spes_ and
two of her crew contrived to escape after they had been taken to
Copenhagen, and from them Karl Gustav had the first tidings of how
he lost the island.
The captured ship sailed down to Copenhagen with greeting to King
Frederik that the people of Bornholm had chosen him and his heirs
forever to rule over them, on condition that their island was never
to be separated from the Danish Crown. The king in his delight
presented them with a fine silver cup, and made Jens Kofoed captain
of the island, beside giving him a handsome estate. He lived
thirty-three years after that, the patriarch of his people, and
raised a large family of children. Not a few of his descendants are
to-day living in the United States. In the home of one of them in
Brooklyn, New York, is treasured a silver drinking cup which King
Frederik gave to the ex-trooper; but it is not the one he sent back
with his deputation. That one is still in the island of Bornholm.
CARL LINNÉ, KING OF THE FLOWERS
Years ago there grew on the Jonsboda farm in Smaland, Sweden, a
linden tree that was known far and wide for its great age and
size. So beautiful and majestic was the tree, and so wide the
reach of its spreading branches, that all the countryside called
it sacred. Misfortune was sure to come if any one did it injury.
So thought the people. It was not strange, then, that the farmer’s
boys, when they grew to be learned men and chose a name, should
call themselves after the linden. The peasant folk had no family
names in those days. Sven Carlsson was Sven, the son of Carl; and
his son, if his given name were John, would be John Svensson. So
it had always been. But when a man could make a name for himself
out of the big dictionary, that was his right. The daughter of the
Jonsboda farmer married; and her son played in the shadow of the
old tree, and grew so fond of it that when he went out to preach
he also called himself after it. Nils Ingemarsson was the name he
received in baptism, and to that he added Linnæus, never dreaming
that in doing it he handed down the name and the fame of the friend
of his play hours to all coming days. But it was so; for Parson
Nils’ eldest son, Carl Linné, or Linnæus, became a great man who
brought renown to his country and his people by telling them and
all the world more than any one had ever known before about the
trees and the flowers. The King knighted him for his services to
science, and the people of every land united in acclaiming him the
father of botany and the king of the flowers.
They were the first things he learned to love in his baby world. If
he was cross, they had but to lay him on the grass in the garden
and put a daisy in his hand, and he would croon happily over it for
hours. He was four years old when his father took him to a wedding
in the neighborhood. The men guests took a tramp over the farm, and
in the twilight they sat and rested in the meadow, where the spring
flowers grew. The minister began telling them stories about them;
how they all had their own names and what powers for good or ill
the apothecary found in the leaves and root of some of them. Carl’s
father, though barely out of college, was a bright and gifted man.
One of his parishioners said once that they couldn’t afford a whole
parson, and so they took a young one; but if that was the way of
it, the men of Stenbrohult made a better bargain than they knew.
They sat about listening to his talk, but no one listened more
closely than little Carl. After that he had thought for nothing
else. In the corner of the garden he had a small plot of his own,
and into it he planted all the wild flowers from the fields, and he
asked many more questions about them than his father could answer.
One day he came back with one whose name he had forgotten. The
minister was busy with his sermon.
“If you don’t remember,” he said impatiently, “I will never tell
you the name of another flower.” The boy went away, his eyes wide
with terror at the threat; but after that he did not forget a
single name.
When he was big enough, they sent him to the Latin school at Wexiö,
where the other boys nicknamed him “the little botanist.” His
thoughts were outdoors when they should have been in the dry books,
and his teachers set him down as a dunce. They did not know that
his real study days were when, in vacation, he tramped the thirty
miles to his home. Every flower and every tree along the way was
an old friend, and he was glad to see them again. Once in a while
he found a book that told of plants, and then he was anything but
a dunce. But when his father, after Carl had been eight years in
the school, asked his teachers what they thought of him, they told
him flatly that he might make a good tailor or shoemaker, but a
minister—never; he was too stupid.
That was a blow, for the parson of Stenbrohult and his wife had set
their hearts on making a minister of Carl, and small wonder. His
mother was born in the parsonage, and her father and grandfather
had been shepherds of the parish all their lives. There were tears
in the good minister’s eyes as he told Carl to pack up and get
ready to go back home; he had an errand at Dr. Rothman’s, but would
return presently. The good doctor saw that his patient was heavy
of heart and asked him what was wrong. When he heard what Carl’s
teachers had said, he flashed out:
“What! he not amount to anything? There is not one in the whole
lot who will go as far as he. A minister he won’t be, that I’ll
allow, but I shall make a doctor of him such as none of them ever
saw. You leave him here with me.” And the parson did, comforted in
spite of himself. But Carl’s mother could not get over it. It was
that garden, she declared, and when his younger brother as much as
squinted that way, she flew at him with a “You dare to touch it!”
and shook him.
When Dr. Rothman thought his pupil ready for the university, he
sent him up to Lund, and the head-master of the Latin School gave
him the letter he must bring, to be admitted. “Boys at school,” he
wrote in it, “may be likened to young trees in orchard nurseries,
where it sometimes happens that here and there among the saplings
there are some that make little growth, or even appear as wild
seedlings, giving no promise; but when afterwards transplanted to
the orchard, make a start, branch out freely, and at last yield
satisfactory fruit.” By good luck, though, Carl ran across an old
teacher from Wexiö, one of the few who had believed in him and was
glad to see him. He took him to the Rector and introduced him with
warm words of commendation, and also found him lodgings under the
roof of Dr. Kilian Stobæus.
Dr. Stobæus was a physician of renown, but not good company. He was
one-eyed, sickly, lame in one foot, and a gloomy hypochondriac to
boot. Being unable to get around to his patients, he always had one
or two students to do the running for him and to learn as best they
might, in doing it. Carl found a young German installed there as
the doctor’s right hand. He also found a library full of books on
botany, a veritable heaven for him. But the gate was shut against
him; the doctor had the key, and he saw nothing in the country lad
but a needy student of no account. Perhaps the Rector had passed
the head-master’s letter along. However, love laughs at locksmiths,
and Carl Linnæus was hopelessly in love with his flowers. He got on
the right side of the German by helping him over some hard stiles
in the _materia medica_. In return, his fellow student brought him
books out of the library when the doctor had gone to bed, and Carl
sat up studying the big tomes till early cockcrow. Before the house
stirred, the books were back on their shelves, the door locked, and
no one was the wiser.
No one except the doctor’s old mother, whose room was across the
yard. She did not sleep well, and all night she saw the window
lighted in her neighbor’s room. She told the doctor that Carl
Linnæus fell asleep with the candle burning every single night, and
sometime he would upset it and they would all be burned in their
beds. The doctor nodded grimly; he knew the young scamps. No doubt
they both sat up playing cards till dawn; but he would teach them.
And the very next morning, at two o’clock, up he stumped on his
lame foot to Carl’s room, in which there was light, sure enough,
and went in without knocking.
Carl was so deep in his work that he did not hear him at all, and
the doctor stole up unperceived and looked over his shoulder. There
lay his precious books, which he thought safely locked in the
library, spread out before him, and his pupil was taking notes and
copying drawings as if his life depended upon it. He gave a great
start when Dr. Stobæus demanded what he was doing, but owned up
frankly, while the doctor frowned and turned over his notes, leaf
by leaf.
“Go to bed and sleep like other people,” he said gruffly, yet
kindly, when he had heard it all, “and hereafter study in the
daytime;” and he not only gave him a key to his library, but took
him to his own table after that. Up till then Carl had merely been
a lodger in the house.
When he was at last on the home stretch, as it seemed, an accident
came near upsetting it all. He was stung by an adder on one of his
botanizing excursions, so far from home and help that the bite
came near proving fatal. However, Dr. Stobæus’ skill pulled him
through, and in after years he got square by labelling the serpent
_furia infernalis_—hell-fury—in his natural history. It was his way
of fighting back. All through his life he never wasted an hour on
controversy. He had no time, he said. But once when a rival made
a particularly nasty attack upon him, he named a new plant after
him, adding the descriptive adjective _detestabilis_—the detestable
so-and-so. On the whole, he had the best of it; for the names he
gave stuck.
It was during his vacation after the year at Lund that Linnæus made
a catalogue of the plants in his father’s garden at Stenbrohult
that shows us the country parson as no mean botanist himself; for
in the list, which is preserved in the Academy of Sciences at
Stockholm, are no less than two hundred and twenty-four kinds of
plants. Among them are six American plants that had found their
way to Sweden. The poison ivy is there, though what they wanted
of that is hard to tell, and the four-o’clock, the pokeweed, the
milkweed, the pearly everlasting, and the potato, which was then
(1732) classed as a rare plant. Not until twenty years later did
they begin to grow it for food in Sweden.
When Carl Linnæus went up to Upsala University, his parents had so
far got over their disappointment at his deserting the ministry
that they gave him a little money to make a start with; but they
let him know that no more was coming—their pocket-book was empty.
And within the twelvemonth, for all his scrimping and saving,
he was on the point of starvation. He tells us himself that he
depended on chance for a meal and wore his fellow students’
cast-off clothes. His boots were without soles, and in his
cheerless attic room he patched them with birch bark and card board
as well as he could. He was now twenty-three years old, and it
seemed as if he would have to give up the study that gave him no
bread; but still he clung to his beloved flowers. They often made
him forget the pangs of hunger. And when the cloud was darkest the
sun broke through. He was sitting in the Botanical Garden sketching
a plant, when Dean Celsius, a great orientalist and theologian of
his day, passed by. The evident poverty of the young man, together
with his deep absorption in his work, arrested his attention; he
sat down and talked with him. In five minutes Carl had found a
friend and the Dean a helper. He had been commissioned to write a
book on the plants of the Holy Land and had collected a botanical
library for the purpose, but the work lagged. Here now was the one
who could help set it going. That day Linnæus left his attic room
and went to live in the Dean’s house. His days of starvation were
over.
In the Dean’s employ his organizing genius developed the marvellous
skill of the cataloguer that brought order out of the chaos of
groping and guessing and blundering in which the science of botany
had floundered up till then. Here and there in it all were flashes
of the truth, which Linnæus laid hold of and pinned down with his
own knowledge to system and order. Thus the Frenchman, Sebastian
Vaillant, who had died a dozen years before, had suggested a
classification of flowers by their seed-bearing organs, the stamens
and pistils, instead of by their fruits, the number of their
petals, or even by their color, as had been the vague practice of
the past. Linnæus seized upon this as the truer way and wrote a
brief treatise developing the idea, which so pleased Dr. Celsius
that he got his young friend a license to lecture publicly in the
Botanical Garden.
The students flocked to hear him. His message was one that put life
and soul into the dry bones of a science that had only wearied them
before. The professor of botany himself sat in the front row and
hammered the floor with his cane in approval. But his very success
was the lecturer’s undoing. Envy grew in place of the poverty he
had conquered. The instructor, Nils Rosén, was abroad taking his
doctor’s degree. He came home to find his lectures deserted for the
irresponsible teachings of a mere undergraduate. He made grievous
complaint, and Linnæus was silenced, to his great good luck. For
so his friend the professor, though he was unable to break the red
tape of the university, got him an appointment to go to Lapland on
a botanical mission. His enemies were only too glad to see him go.
Linnæus travelled more than three thousand miles that summer
through a largely unknown country, enduring, he tells us, more
hardships and dangers than in all his subsequent travels. Again
and again he nearly lost his life in swollen mountain streams, for
he would not wait until danger from the spring freshets was over.
Once he was shot at as he was gathering plants on a hillside,
but happily the Finn who did it was not a good marksman. Fish
and reindeer milk were his food, a pestilent plague of flies his
worst trouble. But, he says in his account of the trip, which is
as fascinating a report of a scientific expedition as was ever
penned, they were good for something, after all, for the migrating
birds fed on them. From his camps on lake or river bank he saw the
water covered far and near with swarms of ducks and geese. The
Laplander’s larder was easily stocked.
He came back from the dangers of the wild with a reputation that
was clinched by his book “The Flora of Lapland,” to find the dragon
of professional jealousy rampant still at Upsala. His enemy,
Rosén, persuaded the senate of the university to adopt a rule that
no un-degreed man should lecture there to the prejudice of the
regularly appointed instructors. Tradition has it that Linnæus flew
into a passion at that and drew upon Rosén, and there might have
been one regular less but for the interference of bystanders. It
may be true, though it is not like him. Men wore side-arms in those
days just as some people carry pistols in their hip-pockets to-day,
and with as little sense. At least they had the defence, such as it
was, that it was the fashion. However, it made an end of Linnæus
at Upsala for the time. He sought a professorship at Lund, but
another got it. Then he led an expedition of his former students
into the Dalecarlia mountains and so he got to Falun, where Baron
Reuterholm, one of Sweden’s copper magnates, was seeking a guide
for his two sons through the region where his mines were.
Linnæus was not merely a botanist, but an all around expert in
natural science. He took charge of the boys and, when the trip
was ended, started a school at Falun, where he taught mineralogy.
It had been hit or miss with the miners up till then. There was
neither science nor system in their work. What every day experience
or the test of fire had taught a prospector, in delving among the
rocks, was all there was of it. Linnæus was getting things upon a
scientific basis, when he met and fell in love with the handsome
daughter of Dr. Moræus. The young people would marry, but the
doctor, though he liked the mineralogist, would not hear of it till
he could support a wife. So he gave him three years in which to go
abroad and get a degree that would give him the right to practise
medicine anywhere in Sweden. The doctor’s daughter gave him a
hundred dollars she had saved, and her promise to wait for him.