Robert Hermann Schomburgk
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Sir Robert Hermann Schomburgk (June 5, 1804 - March 11, 1865), British explorer, was born at Freiburg, Prussian Saxony, the son of a Protestant minister.
In 1820, while staying with his uncle, he learned botany from a professor. In 1828 he was requested to supervise a transport of Saxon sheep to the American state of Virginia, where he lived for a time. He lost his fortune, partly in Virginia, where he failed as a tobacco farmer, and partly 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. 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. 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 repeatedly urged fixing the boundary with Brazil, motivated by his encounters with Brazilian enslavement of local Indian tribes, most of which no longer exist.
On his return to England he was knighted by Queen Victoria and continued in other official capacities. In 1846 he was stationed in Barbados, in 1848 he was appointed British consul to Santo Domingo, and in 1857 British Consul-General of Siam, based in Bangkok. While holding these posts he continued his geographical surveys. He retired from the public service in 1864, hampered by health problems, and died in Berlin on March 11, 1865. He was the author of a Description of British Guiana and a History of Barbados.
His brother Otto (August 28, 1810 - August 16, 1857) edited R. H. Schomburgk's Reisen in Guiana und am Orinoco während 1835-1839, published in 1841. He emigrated to Australia with a third brother, Moritz Richard.
Moritz Richard Schomburgk (October 5, 1811 - March 25, 1891) was trained as a gardner and accompanied his elder brother Robert Hermann on his second expedition to Guiana where he collected for the Museum of the University of Berlin. After the political turmoil in Europe in 1848, he emigrated to South Australia in 1849, where, in 1866 he became the second Director of the Botanical Gardens of Adelaide, a position he kept until his death.
-- This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.
