Linné och Sydamerika: Utgåva av Diarium Surinamicum, Linnélärjungen Daniel Rolanders rapport från Surinam med kultur- och naturhistoriska kommentarer
En vetenskapligt betydande skatt ligger nästan bortglömd i Danmarks Botaniska Centralbibliotek. Det är en drygt 700 sidor lång latinsk handskrift med titeln Diarium Surinamicum (DS), skriven av en av Linnés mest lovande lärjungar, Daniel Rolander (1725-1793), som 1754 skickades på en forsknings- och insamlingsresa till den holländska kolonin Surinam. DS är en kulturgeografisk beskrivning av Surinam 1755-1756 och en syntes av observationer av floran, faunan, befolkningen, landskapet, handeln, arkitekturen o.s.v. Det finns t ex intressanta etnografiska upplysningar om såväl de infödda som de importerade slavarna och de europeiska kolonisatörerna, och Rolander berättar ingående om hur slavarna lever, hur de revolterar, hur de överlever i djungeln, hur de håller sin musik och sina ritualer vid liv, vad de har för språk, och kanske mest spektakulärt, hur de utforskade och tillvaratog de medicinska egenskaperna hos växterna i Surinams djungel. Publiceringen av DS blir således både ett unikt bidrag till Linnéhistorien och en viktig källa till Sydamerikas kultur- och naturhistoria. Projektet syftar till 1. en vetenskaplig edition av handskriften, 2. en inventering av Rolanders samling i Botaniska Centralbiblioteket och identifiering av bevarade delar av herbariet och insektsamlingen, 3. digitalisering av manuskriptet till DS och relaterade föremål och 4. bearbetning av materialet för utarbetande av realkommentar och register över flora, fauna, platser och personer i DS samt över fynd påträffade vid inventeringen.
Slutredovisning
LINNÉ OCH SYDAMERIKA: UTGÅVA AV DIARIUM SURINAMICUM, LINNÉLÄRJUNGEN DANIEL ROLANDERS RAPPORT FRÅN SURINAM MED KULTUR- OCH NATURHISTORISKA KOMMENTARER
Projektet har syftat till utgivande av en vetenskaplig kommenterad utgåva av Daniel Rolanders vetenskapliga rapport från hans resa till Surinam 1754-1756. Rapporten (på 699 handskriftssidor) är uppgjord enligt Linnés principer och innehåller en kulturgeografisk beskrivning av Sverige, Tyskland och Holland men framför allt en helt unik kultur- och naturgeografisk beskrivning av Surinam med detaljerade tematiska observationer av floran, faunan, landskapet, befolkningen, handeln och arkitekturen. Rolanders resa inbragte rika samlingar som tidigare förmodades ha gått förlorade men som nu återupptäckts inom projektets ramar.
Projektet har öppnat nya vägar för forskningen och glädjande nog även omfattats med stort intresse av nutida botanister och zoologer, varom publikationslistan och vårt Rolandernätverk vittnar.
Materialet har visat sig betydligt rikare än vi tänkt oss vid koncipierandet av projektet, och vi kommer att inkomma med en ansökan om medel för färdigställandet och tryckandet av utgåvan.
Rolanders expedition har visat sig fascinera vida kretsar av forskare och lekmän. Se t ex artikeln i New Scientist och det kan nämnas att det planeras en praktvolym om Rolanders resa (med svensk översättning i urval av Arne Jönsson av James Dobreffs nyetablerade text).
LINNAEUS AND SOUTH AMERICA: AN EDITION OF THE DIARIUM SURINAMICUM, LINNAEUS APOSTLE DANIEL ROLANDER'S REPORT FROM SURINAME WITH CULTURE- AND NATUREHISTORICAL COMMENTARIES
PRIMARY AIMS
To produce a historical critical edition of Diarium Surinamicum (DS), which Linnaeus apostle Daniel Rolander composed during his natural history expedition from Sweden to Suriname and back (1754-1756). The two volume manuscript totals 699 pages of text in quarto.
To explore archives in Sweden and abroad to gather as much primary evidence as possible related to Rolander
To produce a complementary volume of historical commentary, essays by experts in scientific and literary fields, illustrations and photographic illustrations
STATUS OF CRITICAL EDITION
James Dobreff has transcribed the ms of DS from a black-and-white paper copy based on a microfilm copy of DS, designed the basic layout of the critical edition, and applied the LaTeX mark-up language. After mark-up, Dr. Diane Warne Anderson proofed the edition against the same paper copy of DS, and Dobreff thereafter reviewed her comments against the manuscript and incorporated the best readings. The result is a 430 page edition on A4 paper with a critical apparatus that documents over three-thousand changes made to the ms of DS by Rolander. Thus, the edition provides a layered or sequential presentation of Rolander's changes, while also differentiating stylistic and linguistic changes from those changes that alter the material content of the text.
In the Spring of 2010 the Danish Botanical Museum in Copenhagen provided Dobreff with a new copy of DS in high-resolution color digital images; the museum had in fact promised such a copy in late 2006. Dobreff compared one month of our current edition against these new digital images, finding that in fourteen instances he now provide a reading where the text had been illegible in the black-and-white copy. These instances all involved deleted text that we had documented in the critical apparatus. There were also four instances were he was able to improve the punctuation.
As part of this report, we would like to request funding for a two-month period to enable Dobreff and Warne Anderson to review our edition against the new digital images and complete a final proofing of the edition.
Prof. Dirk Sacré from Katholieke Universiteit Leuven and editor of Supplementa Humanistica Lovaniensia, the leading publication series of Neo-Latin texts, requested that we publish DS in the Supplementa series – we have agreed, since this is both an honor and it will enable DS to reach a wide circle of scholars. Leuven will cover a portion of the costs of publication.
STATUS OF ARCHIVAL RESEARCH
Dobreff's archival research has produced results far beyond what could have been foreseen at the conception of the project. Dobreff and Dr. Pedro de Moraes with the help of curators at the Botanical Museum in Copenhagen and the Bergius Botanic Garden in Stockholm have located and documented over 350 herbarium sheets containing the specimens Rolander collected in Suriname. Other scholars had reported that few of Rolander's specimens survived or that most had been stolen in Denmark during Rolander's visit to Copenhagen in 1741, all of which has no been shown to be incorrect.
By conducting a study of changes documented in his critical apparatus, Dobreff was able to identify over seventy insect specimens in the Charles De Geer Collection (Swedish Museum of Natural History) as in fact being specimens from Rolander's Suriname collection. He also used this information to bring to light a fact that several generations of intellectual historians and scientists have missed, namely that Rolander's Suriname insect specimens form the bases for nearly all of the New-World insects documented by Linnaeus in the tenth edition of Systema naturae (1758-59). Based primarily on Dobreff's findings, entomologists in Suriname have been able to identify scientifically most of the modern names of the insects documented in DS.
While conducting research at Hagströmer Library (Karolinska Institute), Dobreff was able to identify an 1,100-page manuscript containing a Swedish translation of an important French entomological work as having been made and written by Rolander. This discovery has added a new dimension to Rolander and provided Sweden not only with its first substantial entomological text in Swedish but also a new Swedish author – albeit from the 18th century!
Research conducted in Denmark has enabled Dobreff to document several important events, specifically
1. that Rolander had been in Denmark from 1761 to 1765,
2. that he had been employed there for about sixteen months and thereafter been the guest of the famous German-Danish scientist Christian Gottlieb Kratzenstein, whose support and encouragement enabled Rolander to finish the last draft of DS,
3. that a set of fourty-one copperplates and drawings from the 1870's in the collections of the Botanical Museum had been based on herbarium specimens from Rolander's Suriname Herbarium.
STATUS OF COMLEMENTARY VOLUME
Dobreff, Tinde van Anden and Warne Anderson will be contributing articles to this volume, while a curator at the Swedish Museum of Natural History has decided to publish a doctoral dissertation separately on Rolander's insect collections. Dobreff's contributions will be biographical and historical, focusing on putting Rolander in a wider international context in the latter stages of the Age of Exploration and narrower Swedish and Scandinavian context of the Linnaeus period. Van Anden has contributed a article exploring which medicinal plants described by Rolander are still being used in Suriname today and how they are being used, and Warne Anderson will discuss what conclusion can be drawn from the linguistic changes made by Rolander to DS.
Dobreff has collected a wide range of images including scientific illustrations (copperplates) based on Rolander's specimens or relevant to DS, modern photographs from Suriname and photographs of both Rolander's insect collection and his herbarium. In total the project has gathered over 500 images related to DS.
De Moraes has completed a scientific identification of all of the some 1,200 plants mentioned in DS, which will be published in full in this volume. A second list, containing only the current names and Rolander's names will be published with the critical edition.
Due to great success of the project's archival research, this volume will require more time and funding to bring to publication. We are, however, of the opinion that all efforts should be first be directed to completing the final review of the critical edition and submitting it for publication as soon as possible.
COOPERATORS
Dr. Diane Warne Andersson, Manuscript expert;
Dr. Pedro Luís Rodrigues de Moraes, Plant expert;
Dr. Peter Wagner, Bibliography and Natural History expert;
Dr. Tinde van Ande, Medicinal Plant Expert;
Pieter Tuenissen, Suriname and Natural History Expert
DISCOVERIES
In addition to the list of publications we wish to mention
2007 The positive identification of Rottbll's copperplates and drawings as depictions of specimens of Rolander's herbarium
2007 Identified a previously unknown manuscript of 1,040 pages by Linnaeus apostle Daniel Rolander in 2007.
2008 By comparing a number of 18th-century sources against the apparatus criticus of his coming edition of Diarium Surinamicum James Dobreff identified over eighty insects in the collections of the Swedish Museum of Natural History as coming directly from Daniel Rolander's collection, and thus in a single stroke he established Rolander as one of the most influential entomologists of the 18th century.
GUEST LECTURES HELD BY JAMES DOBREFF
1. 2007: Royal Geographical Society, London, England
2. 2007: University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
3. 2007: Botanical Gardens of Naples, Italy.
4. 2008: Botanical Gardens of Paris, France.
5. 2008: Lund University, The Linnaeus Celebration Committee for Southern Sweden
6. 2009: The tenth anniversary of the Hagströmer Library, Carolinska Institute
7. 2010: The National Herbarium of the Netherlands, Leiden
8. 2010: Catholic University, Leuven
(9. 2011: McGraw lecture at Davidson College, North Carolina; this lecture has been rescheduled from 2010 to 2011, since the ash clouds from the Iceland volcano led to the cancelation of the flight to the USA.)
SCHOLARLY CONFERENCES WITH PAPER PRESENTATIONS
Colloquium Balticum, Tartu, Estonia, 2008
Colloquium Balticum, Vilnius, Lithuania, 2009
Congress of the International Association for Neo-Latin Studies, Uppsala, 2009
The Swedish Philological Congress 2009.
MEDIA COVERAGE
2007, June 11: "Linnés okände lärjunge,'' a three-page feature, including the entire front page of the "Kultur'' section of the major Swedish daily Svenska Dagbladet by Eva Bäckstedt (on line at http://www.svd.se/kulturnoje/nyheter/artikel\_236515.svd).
2007, August 1: "The man who crossed Carl Linnaeus", a five-page feature in the international magazine New Scientist based on Dobreff's London talk and three days of interviews in Stockholm (4 Aug. 2007), by Stephanie Pain.
2007, September 16: Eva Vlcková's feature in the major Czech daily Lidové noviny (16 September 2007).