German botanist who led the 1783-1788 Austrian expedition to North America and the Caribbean. Relatively little is known about Maerter. He was born in Freiburg im Breisgau in southern Germany and taught natural history, chiefly botany and forestry, at the Theresian Ritter-Akademie in Vienna. He is also known to have taught in Löwen, between Vienna and Breslau. A member of several learned societies, he wrote numerous books on botany and was sponsored by Emperor Joseph II of Austria to travel to tropical America to collect plants for the botanical garden at Schönbrunn. He was accompanied by gardeners Franz Boos and Franz Bredemeyer, the Croat physician Mathias Leopold Stupicz and Bernhard Albrecht von Moll, a German painter of shells and plants. From Philadelphia the party travelled to Florida and then broke up, Maerter and Boos going on to the Bahamas and other islands. Emperor Joseph was disappointed with the desertion of the other members of the team and chastised Maerter for failing in his leadership. Maerter suffered further when he fell sick in Haiti and was forced to give up his work for six months. He then visited Jamaica before returning to Vienna via London in 1787. Some accounts record that Maerter accompanied the German surgeon and traveller Johann Schöpf on the first part of the journey in North America. Maerter's itinerary also seems to have taken in Venezuela, for many plants collected on the outskirts of Caracas recorded in the Catálogo de la Flora Venezolana (Pittier et al., 1945-1947) are labelled jointly with his name and Bredemeyer's. He later received a pension in Vienna where he lived until his death.
Sources:
A.V. Carozzi and M. Carozzi, 1994, "Franz Joseph Märter, Travel Companion of Johan David Schöpf in a Journey from Philadelphia to Florida and the Bahamas in 1783-1784", Journal of the History of Earth Sciences Society, 13(1): 5-20
H. Lindorf, 2004, "Notices on the Austrian Expedition in a Venezuelan Document dated 1787 and Comments on Botanical Names linked to the Collectors", Acta Botanica Venezuela, 27(1):
http://www.scielo.org.ve/scielo.php?pid=S0084-59062004000100006&script=sci_arttext
H.A. Liogier, 1996, "Botany and Botanists in Puerto Rico", The Scientific Survey of Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands: 42 (in Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 776).
