Biography

Austrian naturalist and explorer who spent much of his life studying the flora of Portugal. The government of his adopted nation later sent him to gather plants of economic value in Angola, a Portuguese colony. Welwitsch is thus responsible for the most important and extensive herbarium ever collected in Angola, so much so that after his death a three-year court case ensued, involving the Portuguese government, the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew and the British Museum (U.K.) over the distribution of his specimens. He has one family, six genera and 300 species of plants, as well as 29 animal species, named after him.

A native of Maria-Saal in Carinthia, Friedrich Welwitsch grew up speaking German and received a good education. Interested in botany from childhood his father encouraged him by leading long walks in the nearby woods and helping him identify plants. Despite this encouragement his father, wanting prosperity for his son, saw fit that he attend the Faculty of Law at Vienna University despite Friedrich's blatant aptitude and passion for the natural sciences. The clash of interests which followed found the determined naturalist in the Medical Faculty but cut of from all of his father's wealth. Initially surviving as a theatre critic, his love of botany grew and while still an undergraduate he made some important contributions to the systematics of the flora of southern Austria. At 28 the mayor of Vienna awarded him a prize for a paper on the cryptogamic flora of the region and, realising that his son was flourishing in his self-chosen field, he welcomed him back into the Welwitsch family. As well as receiving funding from his father once more, Friedrich Welwitsch also worked as a travelling tutor for a noble family before he graduated in 1836. By this time a competent field botanist the Unio Itineraria of W⟼rtemburg commissioned him to collect in the Azores and Cape Verde Islands and to remit specimens for their private shareholders. Another factor encouraging this voyage was that an ✢act of youthful indiscretion on his part, in the course of enjoying too freely the gaieties of Vienna, rendered it expedient for him to leave Austria for a time✢. In 1839 he left the country and would never return.

After arriving in Lisbon his onward journey was postponed by bad weather and for many weeks Welwitsch stayed on the mainland, collecting thousands of plants, shell and insects and learning to speak Portuguese. In fact he never reached the Azores, but instead remained in Portugal for 14 years, collecting throughout the country and sending some 56,000 specimens, including cryptogamic plants and fungi, back to the Unio Itineraria. Through his dedicated study Welwitsch's knowledge of his adopted country's flora was soon unparalleled and he published works such as Some notes upon the cryptogamic portion of the plants collected in Portugal (1853). Heading, for a time, both the botanic garden of Coimbra and that of Lisbon, as well as supervising the Duke of Palmella's gardens throughout the country, his hard work and expertise afforded him a great deal of respect amongst the Portuguese aristocracy and he was friends with the king, Pedro V. This position meant that when the government decided to send a naturalist to explore their territory in present day Angola, Welwitsch was the first name that came to mind.

In 1853, after a short trip to England in order to consult expert botanists there, he arrived in São Paulo de Loanda (Luanda). What followed was nine years of dedicated research and extensive collecting, battling against a variety of tropical diseases, violent locals and an insufficient salary, which the Portuguese authorities refused to increase. In order to finance his excursions he was forced to send duplicate sets of his collections to London, but this only served to anger his Portuguese employers, who expected to receive a steady stream of seeds, plants and papers which could be used to improve their economy both in Africa and in Europe. Welwitsch, however, was far to busy marvelling at the new plants which he considered of interest and in 1859, he made the most important discovery of his career, the gymnosperm known as Welwitschia bainesii Carri⟨re. This bizarre plant is the only species in its genus, named after its discoverer by J. D. Hooker, and has only two continuously growing leaves which split and eventually rot at the ends, and which lives for hundreds of years.

Welwitsch published one important contribution to the flora of Angola while in Africa: Apontamentos phyto-geographicos sobre a Flora da Provincia de Angola (1857). As a collector he was tireless, barely sleeping and keeping to a strict schedule, it is said that he was fond of spending day after day up to his waist in water in search of algal specimens. This frenzied activity continued despite his being bombarded with tropical illness, such as fevers, scurvy and ulcerated legs. Towards the end of his trip Welwitsch also suffered at the hands of local warfare, during his stay in a town in Huila province they were attacked by some 15,000 Munanos who held the settlement barricaded for two months. As a member of the garrison Welwitsch fought to protect the town and eventually the assailants left with no more than cattle and goats. He returned to Portugal in 1861 and soon obtained permission from the government to stay in London in order to study his hoards of specimens at Kew and the British Museum.

On arrival he had to find lodging for 10,000 plant specimens, representing 5,000 species as well as a zoological collection of 3,000 examples (for he was interested in animals too, particularly the insect orders Hymenoptera and Coleoptera). Still suffering from many ailments contracted in Angola, he set about identifying the plant specimens with the help of Hooker, then head of Kew. Welwitsch received a generous salary of two pounds a day and lived in three different houses at various times in the West End, enlisting the help of botanists at the herbarium BM (at this time still part of the British Museum in Bloomsbury). Unfortunately relations between the Austrian botanist and his employers continued to deteriorate and, due to his failure to publish any of his findings and his lack of correspondence, they assumed he was selling the specimens in order to live a decadent lifestyle and cut off his funding completely. It is true that Welwitsch did not publish a huge amount during his life, but he did create Fungi angolense in 1868 and his one particularly substantial work, the Sertum Angolense (1870), at a personal cost of £130. After a fire nearly destroyed his specimens, causing him considerable distress, the pressure of chronic illness and poverty became too much for him and he died in 1872.

The story does not end there though, for in his will Welwitsch left the 'study copy', or best set of his specimens, to the British Museum, with two sets going to the Portuguese government and one to the British. The Portuguese were outraged that his specimens, collected as an employee of the Portuguese crown, would not be entirely in their hands. This led to legal action against the executors of the will, one of whom was William Carruthers, head of the Botany Department of the British Museum. J. D. Hooker, at one point a close companion of Welwitsch, sided with the Portuguese (perhaps because of conflict with Carruthers, who stood to get the best copy of the specimens), and there was much argument over whether or not Welwitsch had deserved the funding cut he received. Three years after his death the debate was settled in a compromise; the British Museum would receive the second best copy of the specimens and the Portuguese the rest. Despite the fact that he did not publish extensively, his specimens were a vital resource for the authors of the Flora of Tropical Africa at the British Museum and some 1,000 types have since been identified in his collection.

Sources:
S. Albuquerque, R.K. Brummitt and E. Figueiredo, 2009, ✢Typification of names based on the Angolan collections of Friedrich Welwitsch✢, Taxon, 58(2): 641-646
T.D.V. Swinscow, 1972, ✢Friedrich Welwitsch, 1806-72: A centennial memoir✢, Biological Journal of the Linnean Society, 4: 269-289
H. Trimen, 1873, ✢Friedrich Welwitsch✢. Journal of Botany, 11: 1–11.