Nicholas Miklouho-Maclay - Ancestry and Early Years

Ancestry and Early Years

Miklouho-Maclay was born in a temporary workers camp in Novgorod Governorate (currently Okulovsky District of Novgorod Oblast) in Russia, a son of a civil engineer working on the construction of the Moscow-Saint Petersburg Railway. His Ukrainian father was descended from Stepan Myklukha, a Zaporozhian Cossack, who was awarded the title of noble of the Empire by Catherine II for his military exploits during the Russo-Turkish War (1787–1792), which included the capture of the Ochakov fortress.

His mother, Ekaterina Semenovna, née Bekker, was of German and Polish descent (her three brothers took part in the January Uprising of 1863). After 1873, the Miklouho-Maclay family owned a country estate in Malyn, 150 kilometres (93 mi) northwest of Kiev.

Nicholas attended a German Lutheran school, a course at the Second Saint Petersburg Gymnasium, but only spent two months at St. Petersburg University, due to being expelled and debarred from tertiary education in Imperial Russia for "breaking the rules". He thus had to complete his studies in German universities and this provided an opportunity to study and to work with leading European scientists. He studied humanities at Heidelberg, medicine at Leipzig, and zoology at the University of Jena, where he came under the influence of the great German scholar Ernst Haeckel, who had a profound influence on his future.

Miklouho-Maclay's brilliant student records attracted the attention of Haeckel, who made him his assistant as part of a field expedition to the Canary Islands in 1866. There Miklouho-Maclay took an interest in sharks and sponges and discovered a new sponge species, which he named Guancha blanca, in tribute to the Guanches, the original inhabitants of the Canary Islands who had been exterminated by European invaders. He also became a close friend of the biologist Anton Dohrn, with whom he helped conceive the idea of research stations while staying with him at Messina, Italy.