August Heinrich Petermann - Fame For The Armchair Traveller

Fame For The Armchair Traveller

Petermann was sometimes accused of being an ‘armchair’ geographer as he never traveled wide or experienced new discoveries with his own eyes, but the quality of the maps and geographic ideas he produced proves the accusation unfair. Some people are better at observing and describing circumstances and phenomena, others are better at interpretation of data. Petermann’s greatest accomplishment lay in the interpretation and evaluation of sometimes contradictory sources, and his great legacy is that he was able to develop this faculty in most of his pupils in such a fine way that geography at large has profited from it ever since. Should one criticize the journal under his direction for not being geographically innovative then one may come nearer to the truth. Lots of articles are of a descriptive physical nature, with lots of intimate details in the explorers’ colloquial style, and hardly any tries to find explanations for the physical phenomena. Most emphasis is laid on geomorphology and geology — old disciplines by then with their own technical language already — meteorology, botany and biology. Articles on anthropogeography usually reach no further than ethnographic descriptions of regions. It is still the era of data-gathering and in this they weren’t far beyond the cameralistic nature of the first half of the nineteenth century. One should have expected more articles concerning (parts of) Europe, but a count in the annuals for 1860–1864 shows that only 16% of the articles and 22% of the Kleinere Mitteilungen (small communications) concerned Europe. As accommodation one might say that the journal, though geographic by nature, was aimed at popular use. That was one of its strengths, as shown by its large circulation.

“Petermann’s achievement falls in a period in which raw material was gathered, especially through explorations. It was the flowering of geographic dilettantism. Interest was not only stirred by news as such, but the news in itself was interesting, because every educated person without special prior knowledge could understand it.”

According to Weller Petermann signed 226 articles in Petermanns Geographische Mitteilungen, including 41 on Africa, 98 on the Polar regions and 37 on the history and use of cartography. The same source puts his total production of maps at 535, including his maps for the Stieler, the Physical atlas and several miscellaneous items. Stams, using the ten-year indexes, counts 280 maps in Petermanns Geographische Mitteilungen that can be said to have been constructed and edited by him.