A group of polite but nervous men have gathered in the room. Through the door we catch a glimpse of an opulent ballroom, but more important is this study, the mahogany desk and the maps laid out upon it. Hanging from the ceiling are the star-spangled banner of the United States and the two-headed eagle of Russia, and at the left-hand side of the painting a worried-looking man proffers a piece of paper to a self-assured gentleman. The worried-looking man is one Frederick Seward. He has just offered to buy Alaska, and listening to his offer is the Russian diplomat Eduard Andreevich Stoeckl. Stoeckl is about to place his hand on a great atlas, his hand casts a shadow over the north, and the men reach a deal. Russia sells Alaska and the Aleutian Islands to the United States for a total price of $7.2 million, four cents per hectare. After reaching this deal, Stoeckl receives Tzar Alexander II’s personal thanks, a significant reward and a pension, and after this he moves to Paris, where he lives a most pleasant life. Seward, however, is the butt of much derision. The deal is nicknamed “Seward’s folly” – and what a folly indeed, to buy but snow and ice, a land devoid of furs.
Professor Alexander von Nordmann picks up his letter opener and slices open the envelope. The letter is dated in December, but in Helsinki it is already July, the swallows are nesting in the eaves, swooping down from their nests and flying past his windows. The letter has taken a long time to arrive, but it was well worth the wait. The Governor of Alaska has granted the professor’s wish: he has acquired a full skeleton of a Steller’s Sea Cow. The governor has sent it to the professor together with some other specimens, reserving space for them aboard the ship of Capt. Lars Krogius, due to arrive in Helsinki in August. The professor reads the letter, closes his eyes for a moment, then instructs his assistant to fetch a bottle of the finest champagne.
List of specimens bequeathed to the Imperial Alexander University in Finland by Johan Hampus Furuhjelm:
Two skeletons of the white-tailed deer, one male, one female; female removed from the collection on 3rdJuly 1960, male leathered and stuffed in 1955
Two North American porcupines, one stuffed, one skeleton (sex unknown)
One Steller’s Sea Lion, stuffed (sex unknown)
One Dall sheep, stuffed ram, declared missing in 2016
One mountain goat, stuffed (sex unknown)
One American marten, male, stuffed, upon arrival erroneously listed as a sable
One Steller’s Sea Cow, skeleton (sex undetermined)
III
Hic locus est ubi mors gaudet succurrere vitae
This is a place where death rejoices in serving life
Inscription on the door of the anatomy hall, University of Helsinki
In recent years, fascination for the natural world has grown, particularly among the younger generations.[…]Many enthusiasts in this field have developed a strong desire to keep and preserve the objects they find in nature[…]How many wanderers, upon snaring a beautiful bird or a small, smooth-coated mammal, wished they had the skills to immortalise this beautiful piece of nature for posterity?
Aarne Hellemaa,Taxidermy as Hobby and Art, 1950
60°10’31”N, 24°57’13”E
IMPERIAL ALEXANDER UNIVERSITY
DEPARTMENT OF ANATOMY
PROFESSOR BONSDORFF’S SKELETON COLLECTION
HELSINKI, 1861
Hilda Olson is concentrating on a vertebra. She can feel the gazes on her neck, but shuts them out and focuses on examining the bone. This will be different from her earlier work. She is used to making the small larger, to increasing the size of her subject, until a spider reveals itself in all its beauty, but with this creature there is no need for a microscope. No, now she has to reduce the size of her subject so much that the vertebra will fit onto a single sheet of paper, and she makes the appropriate calculations, searching for just the right scale. The university’s drawing master leans over her work, and Olson nods politely, though the situation is distinctly odd. She is used to drawing her subjects in the wild, in forests and meadows, first sketching the landscape before gently sliding the arthropods under the lenses of her microscope. Today, however, she is not in the wetlands of Opukskii but in her anatomy professor’s study, surrounded by statues of Antiquity, renowned academics, and dark wood –and even if she can hear the rapid beating of her heart in her ears, she does not let her nerves show, but lowers her pencil to the paper and begins to draw.
The drawing master Magnus von Wright leans over her,carefully scrutinising the lines she sketches. When Prof. von Nordmann started looking for an illustrator, he asked if he might find himself an assistant among the students at the drawing school, but to his disappointment von Wright could not recommend any of them. They are students, future scientists that he is instructing in the art of seeing, but in the boys’ home schooling not enough attention is paid to the artistry of the hand. As artists, they are hapless, unskilled, they step into the drawing hall without knowing how to prepare a canvas or make a stitch in leather, he has to teach them everything, even the most rudimentary skills. If it were anyone else, he might have suggested one of the younger boys, still wet behind the ears, but not for von Nordmann, for he has seen the sketches this great man produced in his youth.
In the past, von Nordmann used to illustrate his own research, and his skill and precision were equal to that of even the deftest nature illustrators. His paintings of fish garnered praise from all those who saw them, but the print run was small because the professor only used the most valuable paints in his illustrations. The volume became so expensive that universities could not afford to acquire it for their libraries, but those who had seen the images lauded the professor’s skill. His works were made all the more special by the fact that he painted the fish while they were alive. A dead fish lies on the researcher’s slab,flat and lifeless, its fins retracted, though the very word animal means a creature that is animated! It is a living, breathing thing, and he documented his fish as they moved and lived, though this entailed taking an aquarium everywhere he went. In arduous terrain, the glass vessel had to be carried by his assistants, so that vibrations felt as the carriage’s wheels drove over stones and roots did not cause its fragile glass walls to crack. Maintaining an aquarium in the wilderness required care, but when a fish plopped into its waters, von Nordmann forgot all the trouble involved.
Von Nordmann was the foremost nature illustrator of his day, but time has dimmed the lenses in his eyes. Initially, he noticed that he needed a little more light while drawing and scheduled his work for the brightest hours of the day. Whose eyes do not grow tired from time to time, staring at fish scales in the dusk? But gradually the details began to evade him even in the brightest of lights, and his illustrations became sloppy. One scale becomes smudged into the next, and before long he must admit the truth: he needs another pair of eyes to help him.
But where can he possibly find such an artist, someone with a mastery of observation who can also withstand the discomfort of research expeditions? This is a problem indeed, and he asks his colleagues to spread the word: the professor of zoology and botany is looking for an assistant with excellent illustration skills. He interviews a number of young men recommended to him, but none of them meets his requirements. He cannot imagine spending weeks travelling with anyone who waxes lyrical about Darwin’s madcap theories or whoout of sheer carelessness draws the wrong number of eyes on a lynx spider.
None of them is good enough, for none of them is Arthur.
His son was a promising illustrator. Arthur had a good eye for nature, its little idiosyncrasies and the minute differences between species, and though his greatest passion was for birds, he was an avid illustrator of beetles and harvestmen too. With a little practice, he would have developed into an artist every bit as skilled as his father, perhaps even more so. The professor looks at the canvas above his desk, Arthur’s painting of the Eurasian nuthatch. He refuses to take it down, though every time he looks at it, it feels as though the world were about to run out of air.
Arthur had travelled to Siberia to conduct an investigation into the local birds. Von Nordmann was waiting for a parcel containing his son’s drawings, perhaps revealing fascinating new discoveries, but instead a courier brought the most dreadful news to his door. A silly, drunken argument over a gambling debt, and now his son is gone, murdered in a Siberian tavern. He inspects the boys turning up at his study and cannot imagine any of them taking Arthur’s place.
He was about to give up, but then his luck took a turn for the better. He was invited to dinner – a most tedious, inconsequential affair – and he’d even considered staying at home, spending the evening cataloguing the specimens that had found their way into the corners of his study, but his daughter forced him to attend. It would do her dear father a world of good tospend time not just with insects and mosses but with members of his own species too. He agreed, reluctantly, but Matilda’s commands proved fortuitous indeed, as at dinner he was seated next to none other than Zacharias Topelius, general secretary of the Finnish Art Society. The professor bemoaned his situation to Topelius, complained of how difficult it was to find an assistant who knew how to hold a pencil and whose head had not been filled with nonsense. To his great surprise, Topelius breaks into a smile: he knows just the right illustrator.
