German physician, natural historian and student of Central American linguistics. Karl Hermann Berendt (sometimes referred to as C.H. Berendt) moved from Europe to Central America in 1848 on account of political trouble at home. Born in Danzig (Gdansk), he left for New York City and then Nicaragua, moving on in 1853 to Mexico. Initially he lived in the capital, then at Orizaba and finally settled for a while in a small German community at Mirador, near Vera Cruz. Here he remained from 1855-1862, practising as a doctor.
In Mirador Berendt became interested in natural history thanks to the influence of Hermann Strebel, and began collecting plants and shells. The French-Mexican conflict forced Berendt to leave Mirador and he then spent time living in the states of Campeche and Tabasco, and finally Guatemala City, where he died in 1878 due to a fever.
After 1862 he abandoned the field of medicine and devoted himself to natural history, linguistics and ethnology, paying special attention to Mayan tribes. He left Latin America in 1863 to work at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, transcribing Mayan vocabularies. While here Berendt struck up correspondence with the bryologist William Sullivant, offering to send Mexican mosses to him. He also sent ferns to Daniel C. Eaton and flowering plants to Asa Gray. The genus Berendtia A.Gray (synonym of Hemichaena Benth.) was named after him.
Berendt returned to Central America at the behest of the Smithsonian Institution, which, together with other interested parties, financed him to undertake a collecting expedition covering the area from Belize to Chiapas in south-western Mexico. He thus left the U.S. in December 1865, travelling by boat to Belize City. From here he carried on in January 1866 along the Belize River, collecting specimens of pine, oak, freshwater molluscs and birds. He then travelled by road from San Pedro Buenavista to northern Guatemala. Based at Sacluc he made excursions along the Rio Pasion, recording observations of the Lacandon and Kekchi Maya people. He was prevented from travelling further west in October 1866 by a Mayan insurrection, and frustrated by lack of transport for his collections, decided in April 1867 to head for San Juan Bautista, capital of Tabasco, later sending for his collections. By this time his work was being subsidised by the Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology of Harvard University. This allowed him to explore the ruins of ancient Centla on the Tabascan plains in 1869-1870, resulting in rich collections for the museum.
Berendt visited the U.S. several times in the 1870s, and in 1874 settled at Cobán in the German coffee plantations of Verapaz, northern Guatemala. Here he purchased coffee groves, acquired a printing press and co-founded the local newspaper, El Quetzal. He died in Guatemala in 1878. Berendt contributed a number of articles on Central American linguistics and ethnology to various compilations but most of his manuscripts remained unpublished and were deposited in the University of Pennsylvania Museum Library. He completed some important transcriptions of manuscripts in indigenous Central American languages.
Sources:
J.H. Barnhart, 1965, Biographical Notes Upon Botanists, 1: 166
F. Godman and O Salvin, 1890-1891, Biologia Centrali-Americana, Land and Freshwater Mollusca: vii-viii
J.M. Weeks, "The Daniel Garrison Brinton Collection", University of Pennsylvania Libraries:
http://www.library.upenn.edu/exhibits/rbm/at250/anthropology/jw.pdf, accessed 25 October 2011
G. Sayre, 1975, "Cryptogamae Exsiccatae: an annotated bibliography of exsiccatae of algae, lichens, hepaticae, and musci. V. Unpublished Exsiccatae: I. Collectors", Memoirs of the New York Botanical Garden, 19(3): 291
1879, Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society,.
