ABSTRACT
The wooden plaque with its engravings in Latin, which recall the inscription on Virgil’s tomb, is still visible today in the church at Jukkasjarvi. This chapter argues that the series of inscriptions in Jukkasjarvi make it possible to trace a lineage of French voyagers to the North. The objective is to investigate this lineage in order to reflect on temporal dimensions in travel by looking at the relationships between travelogues and other forms of writing that travellers left behind, in this case engravings. The chapter also examines the specific form of such travel inscriptions. French travellers to the North had other ambitions than Portuguese explorers in Africa and the New World. As historical remainders, the plaques celebrating and commemorating Regnard, La Motraye, and Maupertuis were not signposts for political and commercial spaces of conquest. Maupertuis was a pioneer of Newton’s theories in France, who travelled on a scientific mission to Lapland supported by the French Academy of Sciences in 1735.
