Tag Archives: botanist

Explorers 18. Verreaux

Jules Pierre Verreaux (1807 – 1873) was a French botanist and ornithologist and a professional collector of, trader in, and sometimes thief of natural history specimens.

Verreaux worked for the family business, Maison Verreaux, established in 1803 by his father, Jacques Philippe Verreaux, at Place des Vosges in Paris, which was the earliest known company that dealt in objects of natural history. The company was later run by his older brother Édouard. It funded collection expeditions to various parts of the world. Maison Verreaux sold many specimens to the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle to add to its collections.

Jules Verreaux began his training in the family business at just 11 years of age, when he accompanied his uncle, naturalist Pierre Delalande, to the South African Cape. They stayed there exploring and collecting from 1818-1820, among their achievements being the first hippopotamus skeleton acquired for the Paris Museum of Natural History. Back in Paris, Verreaux attended anatomy classes under zoologist Georges Cuvier, and began to show an aptitude for taxidermy.

Verreaux worked in South Africa again in 1825, where he helped Andrew Smith found the South African Museum in Cape Town.

No stranger to scandal in his lifetime, while in South Africa Jules Verreaux was summoned to court after a woman claimed to have borne his son. Verreaux had previously asked Elisabeth Greef to marry him, but revoked the proposal. The young mother then brought a suit against him, but lost the case as Verreaux was still a minor at the time of the proposal in 1827.

He was reputed to have set out on the trail of various already extinct and mythical creatures in the Cape, including the unicorn.

More body-snatching: In 1830, while travelling in modern-day Botswana Verreaux witnessed the burial of a Tswana warrior. Verreaux returned to the burial site under cover of night to dig up the African’s body where he retrieved the skin, the skull and a few bones. Verreaux intended to ship the body back to France and so prepared and preserved the African warrior’s corpse by using metal wire as a spine, wooden boards as shoulder blades and newspaper as a stuffing material. Then he shipped the body to Paris along with a batch of stuffed animals in crates. In 1831, the African’s body appeared in a showroom at No. 3, Rue Saint Fiacre. It was later returned and buried in Botswana in 2000.

Jules’ brother Édouard delivered a consignment of collections back to Paris in 1831, and returned to South Africa with the third Verreaux brother, Alexis. Alexis remained in South Africa for the rest of his life, while the course of Édouard and Jules’ lives over the next decade is somewhat confused. Some sources say that both travelled to China and the Philippines and remained there until 1837, but it is also possible that Jules stayed in South Africa during this time. He seems to have returned to Paris in 1838, in which year a large number of his collections were lost in a shipwreck while being transported back to Paris.

In 1864 he took over as assistant naturalist at the Paris Museum. In 1870 he left France at the start of the Franco-Prussian War, seeking refuge in England. He remained there for the concluding three years of his life.

Jules Verreaux left a particular legacy in ornithology. Verreaux’s Eagle (Aquila verreauxii) and Verreaux’s Eagle Owl Bubo lacteus bear his name; More a trader than a scientist, his specimen labels often give only the country of provenance and are sometimes attributed to localities incorrectly, perhaps to make them more commercially valuable, but diminishing their scientific value.

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Sources: JSTOR; wikipedia
Anon., 1874, Ibis, 16(4): 467-469
M. Gunn and L.E.W. Codd, 1981, Botanical Exploration of Southern Africa
M. Molina, 2002, “More notes on the Verreaux brothers”, Pula Botswana Journal of African Studies, 16(1): 30-36.

Explorers 3. Masson

As I travel around Southern Africa I often think, ‘I wonder what it was like here before we spoilt it’. I especially would love to have seen the open grasslands, one of the habitats we have changed the most. I imagine the highveld grasslands unfenced; miles of grass with koppies; very few trees, but wherever there was a south-facing valley there’d be little damp folds with trees and tree ferns and special plants and animals.

So whenever I can, I read the early explorers’ accounts with great interest and a pinch of salt. Here’s my short pen-sketch number three – the third lucky fella, our first Scot, who saw new places and discovered new things (fair warning: amateur historian on the loose!).

Francis Masson (1741 – 1805) – was a Scottish botanist and gardener, and Kew Gardens’ first plant hunter.

Masson was the first plant collector to be sent abroad by King George III’s Kew Gardens and his unofficial director, Sir Joseph Banks; Masson sailed with James Cook on the HMS Resolution to South Africa, landing in October 1772. Masson stayed three years, during which time he sent over 500 species of plant to England.

– a Masson orchid –

By contrast, he later traveled widely in North America for seven years collecting plants and seeds, visiting Niagara Peninsula and Lake Ontario, but amassed only 24 new species.

In October 1785 he left England on his second voyage to South Africa. The political climate there had altered much since his first visit, owing to the attempt by a donnerse British expeditionary force to annexe the Cape in 1781. The restrictions imposed on his movements by the Dutch Governor caused Masson considerable frustration, and when he sailed for England in March 1795, his plant collections bore little comparison with those of his triumphant first expedition. Quite right, too, bloody Engelse thinking they owned everything!

As it is he discovered in excess of 1700 new species including well known and loved plants such as Agapanthus, Amaryllis, Zantedeschia the arum lily, Strelitzia, the King Protea, Kniphofia the red hot poker, etc.

a few of Francis Masson's flowers of South Africa
– a few of Francis Masson’s flowers of South Africa –
– Masson’s cycad in Kew Gardens –

Not all our explorers were adventurers. Masson was sent to the Cape – this was work! He was paid £100 a year! He whinged a bit: ‘The country is encompassed on all sides with very high mountains, almost perpendicular, consisting of bare rocks, without the least appearance of vegetation; and upon the whole, has a most melancholy effect on the mind.’ In 1773, while botanizing in the mountains near the River Zonderend, Masson described the struggles of the day and his conflicting emotions: ‘Climbed many dreadful precipices until we arrived at the dark and gloomy woods with trees 80 to 100 feet high interspersed with climbing shrubs of various kinds. Trees were often growing out of perpendicular rock and among these the water sometimes fell in cascades over rock 200 feet perpendicular with an awful noise . . . I endured the day with much fatigue, and the sequestered and unfrequented woods, with a mixture of horror and admiration.’

Masson’s only book, Stapeliae Novae, on the South African succulents also known as ‘carrion-flowers’ because of their smell, was published in 1796.

The large collections of living plants and seeds sent back from the Cape by Masson set off a craze for Cape flowers in England at the end of the eighteenth century. Nearly one-third of the 786 plates of flowering plants in the first 20 volumes of William Curtis’s Botanical Magazine were introduced through Masson’s efforts. A wealth of proteas, gladioli, calendulas, xeranthemums, hibiscuses, ericas, tritonias, lobelias, amaryllises, gardenias, pelargoniums, stapelias, and massonias!

Earlier explorer Thunberg named this Cape Massonia pustulata after Masson:

Poor bugger should have stuck to South Africa. He went to Canada and died of the cold!

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Lest we forget: All these explorers told tales of derring-do and how THEY explored. Actually they were usually shepherded around by local inhabitants who were generously showing them their ‘backyard.’ None of them would have made it without local knowledge. So when they say they ‘discovered’ things, usually these plants and animals were known to other humans before. That said, we are grateful these guys recorded them for posterity, writing and sketching so we could share in the thrill of their ‘discoveries.’

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wikipedia; doaks.org; biographi.ca; explorersgarden.com; thegardenstrust.blog; Kew Gardens; Joseph Banks;

Look at this book!;

Explorers 2. Sparrman

I often think ‘I wonder what it was like here before we spoilt it’ as I travel around Southern Africa. I especially would love to have seen the open grasslands, one of the habitats we have changed the most. So whenever I can I read the early explorers’ accounts with great interest and a pinch of salt. Here’s short pen-sketch number two: Another Swede.

Anders Sparrman (1748 – 1820) – was a Swedish botanist, naturalist and abolitionist – and another of ‘the seventeen apostles’ of Carl Linnaeus.

He sailed for the Cape of Good Hope in January 1772 to take up a post as a tutor. When Captain Cook arrived there later in the HMS Resolution at the start of his second voyage, Sparrman was taken on as assistant naturalist to Johann and Georg Foster. After the voyage he returned to Cape Town in July 1775 and practiced medicine, earning enough to finance a nine-month journey to the eastern Cape. Traveling by horse and ox wagon and accompanied by a local guide, the young Daniel F. Immelman, he first went to the warm spring at present Caledon, where he ‘took the waters’ and collected for about a month. He then continued towards Mossel Bay and via Attaquas Kloof, near Robinson Pass to the Little Karoo, following the Langkloof eastwards to Algoa Bay. The furthest point they reached was on the Great Fish River near Cookhouse. His excavation of a stone mound in the Eastern Cape has been described as the first archaeological excavation in southern Africa.

– Sparrman reached 800km east of Cape Town (arrowed) –

His account of his travels in South Africa was published in English in 1785 as ‘A voyage to the Cape of Good Hope, towards the Antarctic polar circle, and round the world: But chiefly into the country of the Hottentots and Caffres, from the year 1772 to 1776.’ (2 volumes). It is regarded as the first personal account of extensive travels in the settled parts of the Cape of Good Hope and the first fairly accurate account of the territory and its natural history. He spoke of the local people having ‘a great quantity of cattle, and seemed to live very happily in their way. As soon as ever they had taken their cattle up from pasture they milked them; an occupation they inter­mixed with singing and dancing. We seldom see such happiness and contentment as seems to be indicated by this festive custom, in a handful of people totally uncultivated, in the midst of a perfect desert. . . we were received by them with a friendly simplicity and homely freedom, which by no means lessened them in our thoughts as men. They presented us with milk, and danced at our request; at the same time giving us to understand, that our fame, as being a singular people with plaited hair, as well as flower-collectors and viper-catchers, had reached them long before our arrival.’

He described much fauna and flora, including the aardwolf, the Greater Honeyguide, the African buffalo and the Essenhout tree which he named Ekebergia capensis after his sponsor Ekeberg.

– Ekebergia capensis – pic: Geoff Nichols –

Other naturalists named this bream and this grasshopper after him:

Sparrman
– grasshopper Lamarckiana sparrmanii and bream Tilapia sparrmanii –

Sparrman was regarded as a competent and likeable person during his years of scientific activity, clever and steady, though a little prim. According to Per Wastberg, a lifelong admirer – who admittedly may have invented some of Sparrman’s traits in his ‘biographical novel’ – Sparrman adored life and the richness of nature and saw happiness in the native African population who lived in harmony with their surroundings. He saw how slavery was destroying the African people and – out of sync with his era – he was a staunch abolitionist, attending and speaking at Wilberforce’s London forums. He avoided the populist travelogues of the day which aimed to entertain people by promoting deceits such as the ‘savagery’ of the natives.

Despite his groundbreaking achievements scientifically, he died in poverty, a physician to the poor, forgotten and maligned by his peers and society.

wikipedia; vanriebeecksociety.co.za; s2a3.org;