Von Hügel’s curiosity

Abstract

In April 1875, Anatole von Hugel, natural historian and committed Catholic, arrived in Fiji on the John Wesley, a Methodist missionary ship. The south Pacific archipelago had, only a year earlier, become a British Crown Colony; the first governor was yet to arrive; the nature of the administration and hence the future of Fijian societies were uncertain. Von Hugel, who was just twenty years old, was missing his fiancee, and unsettled by an acrimonious row with the veteran missionary Lorimer Fison. What had brought him to the islands in the first place was the long sea voyage often recommended to the affluent by physicians of the period, an improbable remedy one might have thought for afflictions such as the rheumatic fever that the patient in this case suffered from. But the young man also travelled out of filial piety: he was of mixed aristocratic Austrian and Scottish descent; his father, Karl—who, the son acknowledged, had inspired all his own tastes and interests—himself travelled widely in Asia and the Pacific, made extensive botanical, zoological, and ethnographic collections, and written a book on the geography of the great ocean. He had died in 1870; Baron Anatole, as he became, had indeed been ill, but his voyage was something of an act of homage, indeed a re-enactment. 1