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Fig. 23 Maupertuis used a reindeer sledge to travel over the snow. It was shaped like a boat
and he used a stick to stop it toppling over as the reindeer bounded along. He also traveled by
skis like the person on the side of the mountain in the distance. Outhier (1744)
to shelter himself from its kicks. Outhier (1744) says, “Some travelers have pretended
that, on being told in its ear the place to which you were disposed to go, the reindeer
understood you; this is a mere tale.”
When Maupertuis returned to Tornio, the town showed “a most frightful aspect”
with its little houses buried to the tops in snow, so that if there had been any day-
light it would have been completely shut out. It was so cold that if the scientists
opened the door of a warm room to the outside, the cold air rushed in and caused it
to snow from the humid air inside the room. The expedition members rested up at
Tornio until March 1737 before continuing on.
Tornio was composed of three streets with about 70 wooden houses. The town
was small, but the people were clean, persistent, skilful, educated, and hospitable.
The young men in the expedition got on well together, and the party had an atmos-
phere of youthful exuberance, the subject of gossip back in Paris but welcomed in
Tornio. The Frenchmen were unimpressed by the food: dried fish, oatcakes, salmon,
mutton seasoned with sugar, saffron, ginger and lemon, and orange-peel. They
sometimes declined to eat what they were given. They drank water, sour milk, ale,
and occasionally local wines; white wines were common but red wines were scarcely
known, and the locals thought that the Frenchmen were drinking “sheep's blood.”
The saunas, with their accompanying rituals of whipping (while naked) with twigs
and walking in the snow, were a source of breathless amazement. Maupertuis tried
a sauna at a temperature scientifically recorded of 44° Réamur (about 55°C).
The Abbé Outhier records the religious orthodoxy of the townspeople with
approval, noting that it was the duty of a verger in the church to prod slumbering
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