Wilhelm Gueinzius
Encyclopedia
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
naturalist, collector and apothecary.
Life
Gueinzius was born in Trotha, a suburb of HalleHalle, Saxony-Anhalt
Halle is the largest city in the German state of Saxony-Anhalt. It is also called Halle an der Saale in order to distinguish it from the town of Halle in North Rhine-Westphalia...
. In his youth he attended the grammar school "Franckesche Stiftung" in Halle, but showed little academic inclination. In 1833 he became an apprentice apothecary, and was employed at the hospital of Charité
Charité
The Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin is the medical school for both the Humboldt University and the Free University of Berlin. After the merger with their fourth campus in 2003, the Charité is one of the largest university hospitals in Europe....
in Berlin
Berlin
Berlin is the capital city of Germany and is one of the 16 states of Germany. With a population of 3.45 million people, Berlin is Germany's largest city. It is the second most populous city proper and the seventh most populous urban area in the European Union...
between 1836 and 1837. Working at a pharmacy in Dessau
Dessau
Dessau is a town in Germany on the junction of the rivers Mulde and Elbe, in the Bundesland of Saxony-Anhalt. Since 1 July 2007, it is part of the merged town Dessau-Roßlau. Population of Dessau proper: 77,973 .-Geography:...
, he made the acquaintance of the police director Brueckner who introduced him to the founder of the zoological museum in Leipzig
Leipzig
Leipzig Leipzig has always been a trade city, situated during the time of the Holy Roman Empire at the intersection of the Via Regia and Via Imperii, two important trade routes. At one time, Leipzig was one of the major European centres of learning and culture in fields such as music and publishing...
, Professor Eduard Friedrich Pöppig
Eduard Friedrich Poeppig
Eduard Friedrich Poeppig was a German botanist, zoologist and explorer.-Biography:He was born in Plauen, Saxony. He studied medicine and natural history at the University of Leipzig, graduating with a medical degree. On graduation, the rector of the university gave him a botanical mission to North...
. Gueinzius was probably trained at Leipzig under Pöppig.
He arrived in the Cape Colony
Cape Colony
The Cape Colony, part of modern South Africa, was established by the Dutch East India Company in 1652, with the founding of Cape Town. It was subsequently occupied by the British in 1795 when the Netherlands were occupied by revolutionary France, so that the French revolutionaries could not take...
in 1838 and registered as an apothecary. From 1839 to 1840 he collected in the Cape Colony, in particular in the Stellenbosch district and lived in the house of the lay magistrate Theunissen in Somerset West
Somerset West, Western Cape
Somerset West |metropolitan municipality]]. In the Western Cape, South Africa It is situated in the Helderberg area , about east of Cape Town and from Strand....
, about 40 km southeast of Cape Town
Cape Town
Cape Town is the second-most populous city in South Africa, and the provincial capital and primate city of the Western Cape. As the seat of the National Parliament, it is also the legislative capital of the country. It forms part of the City of Cape Town metropolitan municipality...
. Around 1840 he moved to the Swellendam
Swellendam
Swellendam is the third oldest town in the Republic of South Africa, a town with 28,072 inhabitants situated in the Western Cape province. The town has over 50 National monuments most of them buildings of Cape Dutch architecture....
area where he worked as a tutor at Morkel's farm Onverwacht in the Hottentots Holland until 1841, when he left for Natal
Natal, South Africa
Natal is a region in South Africa. It stretches between the Indian Ocean in the south and east, the Drakensberg in the west, and the Lebombo Mountains in the north. The main cities are Pietermaritzburg and Durban...
, on an English war frigate commanded by John Marshall, shortly before Natal's annexation by the United Kingdom
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
in 1843. Initially all his specimens were sent to Pöppig, who praised the quality of his collecting in a letter to Joseph Dalton Hooker
Joseph Dalton Hooker
Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker OM, GCSI, CB, MD, FRS was one of the greatest British botanists and explorers of the 19th century. Hooker was a founder of geographical botany, and Charles Darwin's closest friend...
. Pöppig lodged these specimens under his own name in his herbarium, which has since been moved to Vienna. Pöppig collected extensively in Central
Central America
Central America is the central geographic region of the Americas. It is the southernmost, isthmian portion of the North American continent, which connects with South America on the southeast. When considered part of the unified continental model, it is considered a subcontinent...
and South America
South America
South America is a continent situated in the Western Hemisphere, mostly in the Southern Hemisphere, with a relatively small portion in the Northern Hemisphere. The continent is also considered a subcontinent of the Americas. It is bordered on the west by the Pacific Ocean and on the north and east...
, never visiting South Africa.
Gueinzius settled on the Tugela River
Tugela River
The Tugela River is the largest river in KwaZulu-Natal Province, South Africa. The river originates in the Drakensberg Mountains, Mont-aux-Sources, and plunges 947 metres down the Tugela Falls...
and supplied the medical needs of the Zulu chief Mpande
Mpande
Mpande , uMsimude owavela ngesiluba phakathi kwamaNgisi namaQadasi, as he was praised, was king of the Zulu nation from 1840 to 1872, making him the longest reigning Zulu king. He was a half-brother of Shaka and Dingane, who both preceded him as kings of the Zulu...
(Dingaan's half-brother) and his wives. Returning from an expedition to the north, he found that armed conflict had erupted between the English, Boer
Boer
Boer is the Dutch and Afrikaans word for farmer, which came to denote the descendants of the Dutch-speaking settlers of the eastern Cape frontier in Southern Africa during the 18th century, as well as those who left the Cape Colony during the 19th century to settle in the Orange Free State,...
s and Zulus
Zulu Kingdom
The Zulu Kingdom, sometimes referred to as the Zulu Empire or, rather imprecisely, Zululand, was a monarchy in Southern Africa that extended along the coast of the Indian Ocean from the Tugela River in the south to Pongola River in the north....
, and that his home had been plundered by British troops. With no reparation forthcoming and destitute, he left Natal to stay with friends in Cape Town. Here he met Charlotte Tayler, the young sister of two English businessmen. Despite being attracted to her, no permanent relationship resulted, largely because of his impoverished state. His relationship with the druggist Juritz in Cape Town, who was to send his collections and letters to Europe, fared no better when it transpired that Juritz had held back letters and had appropriated collection pieces for himself.
Gueinzius returned to Natal in 1844 on the schooner Margaret, after a storm-tossed journey of sixteen days. He stayed at first with a friend, Campion, and found that almost all the Boer families he had known earlier, had left Natal and gone north to escape British dominion. Owing money to Juritz in Cape Town and with his health failing, Gueinzius wrote to Pöppig on 12 December 1848, holding him accountable for a large part of his financial woes in that his reimbursements to Gueinzius were few and paltry. He now turned to the company of W. Schlüter in Halle, to buy his collected items - his ornithological collection ended up at the museum of Leipzig University, insects at the museum in Stettin, and the Ethnology Museum in Dresden gained an ethnographic collection of the Bantu tribes of Natal.
With the independence of Natal as an English crown colony in 1856, Gueinzius acquired a small piece of land. Here he had meetings with other German colonists sent out by Jonas Bergtheil of Bramsche
Bramsche
Bramsche is a town in the district of Osnabrück, Lower Saxony, Germany. It is about 20 km north of Osnabrück, at . Population is 30858 .In 1971/72 12 previously independent municipalities were included into the town.*Achmer*Balkum...
in order to establish a cotton-growing industry in Natal - the "Natal Cotton Company". These colonists had settled in a place they called Neu-Deutschland
New Germany, KwaZulu-Natal
New Germany is a town situated just inland from Durban in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. It has been incorporated firstly into Pinetown and now into eThekwini. It was established in 1848 by a party of 183 German immigrants who settled on a cotton growing estate named Westville after the...
, today part of the suburb of Westville
Westville, KwaZulu-Natal
Westville is an area near Durban in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, which is situated 20 km inland from the Durban city centre. Formerly an independent municipality governed by a Town Council, it now forms part of the eThekwini Metropolitan Municipality, which also includes Durban...
in Durban. The cotton endeavour soon failed and the Germans turned to growing vegetables to satisfy the growing demands of Durban. Some of the Germans settled in New Hanover
New Hanover, KwaZulu-Natal
New Hanover is a small town in the midlands of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa which was established in the 1850s by German cotton planter families. Today this area's principal economy is the sugarcane industry, while the farming of fruits, grains and timber also feature prominently....
outside Pietermaritzburg
Pietermaritzburg
Pietermaritzburg is the capital and second largest city in the province of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. It was founded in 1838, and is currently governed by the Msunduzi Local Municipality. Its "purist" Zulu name is umGungundlovu, and this is the name used for the district municipality...
.
The missionary Karl Wilhelm Posselt
Karl Wilhelm Posselt
Karl/Carl Wilhelm Posselt , was a German missionary from the Berlin Missionary Society and was active in South Africa where he became known as "the missionary with the violin".Posselt initially trained as a teacher at Neuzelle, but became inspired by mission work during his training...
(1815-1885) of the Berlin Missionary Society
Berlin Missionary Society
The Berlin Missionary Society or Society for the Advancement of evangelistic Missions amongst the Heathen was a German Protestant Christian missionary society that was constituted on 29 February 1824 by a group of pious laymen from the...
had moved to the mission station Christianenburg, near Neu-Deutschland, in 1858. He wrote "A German naturalist, named Gueinzius ... lives in this forest fissure. He leads an ingenious hermit life, very lonesome in the forest among the birds, and four-footed and crawling animals with which he has an affinity. He collects beetles and butterflies, stuffs birds and also dabbles in the spiritual world". Gueinzius also shared his home with a python. In addition to specimens of flowering plants, he collected marine algae, mosses and ferns, as well as bats, snakes and insects. He often raised butterflies from larvae and eggs. Contemporary writings describe him as striking in appearance with a wide knowledge of the natural world.
He died at Grey's Hospital in Pietermaritzburg, shortly before he was due to return to Germany to live with his brother Karl August Gueinzius in the Province of Saxony
Province of Saxony
The Province of Saxony was a province of the Kingdom of Prussia and later the Free State of Prussia from 1816 until 1945. Its capital was Magdeburg.-History:The province was created in 1816 out of the following territories:...
.