Lachesis Lapponica, or a Tour in Lapland

May 12, 1732. A medical student from Uppsala, half a day short of his twenty-fifth birthday, sets off alone for the north. In his small leather satchel: a shirt, a microscope, a spyglass, his journal and a sheaf of paper for drying plants. The Royal Society of Sciences of Uppsala has sent him to explore the three kingdoms of nature in Lapland. His name is Carl Linnaeus; the world will know him as Linné.

For five months he follows the coast of the Gulf of Bothnia, then plunges into marshes he likens to the Styx, where a frightened Lapp woman assures him she has never seen a stranger. He reaches the Lapland Alps, shares the life of the Sami reindeer herders and notes down everything: the milking, the dairy products, the remedies, the games, the weddings. He crosses a glacier in a storm all the way to the Norwegian coast, drifts at night on a raft in the fog, passes through a forest set ablaze by lightning, and presses on to Torneå, where no one speaks his language any more.

This journal is not only a botanist's. It is the gaze of a young man curious about everything, sometimes funny, indignant at the injustice done to the Sami, dazzled by the mountains. It remained in manuscript and was first published in London in 1811, in an English translation, opening up a country and a people that Europe barely knew.

What will be left, on his return, of the student who set out from Uppsala one spring day?