Robert Hermann Schomburgk - Biography

Biography

Schomburgk was born at Freyburg, Prussian Saxony, the son of a Protestant minister. In 1820, while staying with his uncle, he learned botany from a professor.

He entered commercial life and, in 1826, went to the United States, where he worked for a time as a clerk in Boston and Philadelphia. In 1828, he was requested to supervise a transport of Saxon sheep to the American state of Virginia, where he lived for a time. The same year, he became a partner in a tobacco manufactory at Richmond. The factory was burned, and Schomburgk was ruined. He suffered further setbacks on the Caribbean island of St. Thomas, where he lost all his belongings in a fire. Consequently he ceased his business activities.

In 1830, he left for Anegada, one of the Virgin Isles, notorious for its shipwrecks. Although he did not possess the special knowledge that is required for such a work, he surveyed the island at his own expense and sent to the Royal Geographical Society (London) a report which created such an impression that, in 1835, he was entrusted by that body with conducting an expedition of exploration of British Guiana.

He fulfilled his mission (1835-1839) with great success, incidentally discovering the giant Victoria Regia water lily in 1837 and many new species of orchids, one genus of which, Schomburgkia, was named for him. In 1841, he returned to Guiana, this time as a British Government official to survey the colony and fix its eastern and western boundaries. The result was the provisional boundary between British Guiana and Venezuela, known as the "Schomburgk Line", and the boundary with the Dutch colony of Surinam. He also made further geographical and ethnological observations and was joined there by his brother, Moritz Richard. He repeatedly urged fixing the boundary with Brazil, motivated by his encounters with Brazilian enslavement of local Indian tribes, most of which no longer exist. Schomburgk's survey later played a role in the arbitration of the southern boundary between British Guiana and Brazil, with arbitration by the King of Italy in 1904.

On the brothers' return to London in June 1844, Schomburgk presented a report of his journey to the Geographical Society, for which he was knighted by Queen Victoria in 1845, and continued in other official capacities. In 1846, he was stationed in Barbados, where he gathered information to compile a geographical and statistical description of the island, later to be published as the History of Barbados published in 1848 by Cass as a library series of West Indian studies.

In 1848, he was appointed British consul to the Dominican Republic. In 1850, he signed an advantageous commercial treaty for Great Britain and also secured a truce from Soulouque in behalf of the Dominican government. During the following years, he contributed valuable papers upon the physical geography of the island to the journal of the Royal Geographical Society. In 1857, he was promoted to the position of British Consul-General of Siam, based in Bangkok, where he also continued his geographical surveys, visiting the semi-independent Kingdom of Chiang Mai in 1859-60. He retired from the public service in 1864, hampered by health problems, and died in Schöneberg on 11 March 1865.

Schomburgk was a member of various European, American, and Asiatic learned societies, and was a knight of the Legion of Honour and of the Prussian Order of the Red Eagle.