Biography

Anthropologist, botanist and colonial administrator Sir Everard im Thurn is credited with leading the first expedition to reach the summit of Mount Roraima, Venezuela. He is also known for his account Among the Indians of Guiana (1883).

Im Thurn's father, a Swiss-born businessman, went bankrupt in the mid-1870s, forcing his son to curtail studies at Oxford after gaining his undergraduate degree in 1875. On the recommendation of Sir Joseph Hooker, Im Thurn was then appointed curator of the museum in Georgetown, British Guiana (Guyana). He served in this position from 1877-1882, during which time he occasionally sent plants to the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. He then became a magistrate at Pomeroon. Around this time, Joseph Hooker read an account of the bird-life of Mount Roraima by ornithologist Henry Whitely, who had visited the area in the border region of Guyana and Venezuela in 1883. Inspired by descriptions of its rich natural history, Hooker implored Im Thurn to explore Roraima further. Im Thurn thus led the first successful expedition to the plateau of Roraima in 1884.

Accompanied by surveyor Harry Perkins and a team of indigenous assistants, Im Thurn cut through swathes of dense forest thought impassable by previous explorers. On reaching Roraima's steep cliff face, the team surmounted the formidable barrier by means of slippery ledges and boulders wrapped in spongy moss. Circumnavigating a waterfall, they succeeded where none had before, ascending to the summit of the highest table mountain, or tepui, in the region. The triumph was described in Nature as the "cherished object of botanical exploration in South America for the last quarter of a century", and held the public imagination for years to come.

Im Thurn published his account of the journey in the journal of the Royal Geographical Society and in his own Guianan scientific journal, Timehri. His factual description of the wild landscape of sandstone rock formations, marshes and waterfalls was eclipsed, however, by the fictional work it inspired, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World, an adventure story in a land of living fossils. In addition, a thick mist that enveloped the party on their final ascent prevented much specimen collecting, so it was up to followers such as J.J. Quelch and F. McConnelly, who took the path thereafter named for Im Thurn, to carry out more scientific investigation of Roraima. Among Im Thurn's botanical specimens from Roraima, scientists at Kew Gardens nevertheless identified 53 new species and three new genera.

While Roraima was explored further, Im Thurn returned to his magistrate's position and worked in foreign administration in British Guiana for the duration of the 1890s, in the latter years of the decade working for the Venezuelan Boundary Commission. He married in 1895 and continued to collect plants in Ceylon (Sri Lanka), where he was appointed Colonial Secretary, and in Fiji, where he served for six years as Governor and as High Commissioner, Western Pacific, retiring to Britain in 1910. He preferred his life abroad to that at home, where he received unwelcome attention during the First World War because of his German-sounding surname.

Im Thurn was president of the Royal Anthropological Institute from 1919-1920 and the first president of the Edinburgh and Lothians Branch of the Royal Anthropological Institute from 1924 until 1932, which founded a lectureship as a memorial to him after his death.

Sources:
Anon, 1885, "Mr Im Thurn's Achievement", The New York Times, 22 May 1885
R. Dalziell, 2002, "The Curious Case of Sir Everard Im Thurn and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: Exploration & the Imperial Adventure Novel, the Lost World", English Literature in Transition 1880-1920, 45(2): 131-157
E.F. Im Thurn, 1885, "The Ascent of Mount Roraima", Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society, 7: 497-521
The Living Edens:
www.lastrefuge.co.uk/data/articles/tepuis/Tepuis_story_page6.html, accessed 3 January 2012.