PRESL'S "RELIQUIAE HAENKEANAE"

Abstract

The story of Thaddaeus Haenke's travels and adventures has been told by Caspar Sternberg in 1825, Rel. Haenk. 1 : vi-xv, V. Maiwald, 1904, Ges. Bot. Bohmen : 103-106, W. E. Safford in 1905, Contr. U.S. Nat. Herb. 9 : 25-27 and A. H. G. Alston in 1934, J. Bot. 72 : 223-225. Suffice it here to say that Haenke was born on 5 October 1761 at Kreibitz, Czechoslovakia, and, having been appointed naturalist to Malaspina's expedition, reached Cadiz on 30 July 1789, a day after the expedition had sailed; he accordingly took the next ship going to Montevideo, but was wrecked at the mouth of the La Plata river; he reached Buenos Aires in ill-health but managed to leave it in February 1790, crossed the pampas and Cordilleras and had the good fortune to join Malaspina's ships at Valparaiso some months later. The expedition visited the coasts of Chile, Peru, Ecuador, Panama, Mexico, California and Vancouver Island, the Philippines, Marianne Islands, New Zealand and Australia and then returned to Chile. Here Haenke left the other members of the expedition and travelled through Argentina to Bolivia, reaching Santa Cruz de la Sierra by the end of 1794. In 1796 he settled in the province of Cochabamba (Bolivia), where he practised as a doctor and acquired an estate and silver-mine. He died there in 1817, having, it is said, swallowed a dose of poison in mistake for medicine during an attack of illness. Much of his material went astray or got damaged in transit and none seems to have reached Europe after 1795. In 1821 seven chests, which had lain neglected at Cadiz and then at Hamburg,