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collection and with Johan Cesar VI Godeffroy (and his son, Johan Cesar VII Godeffroy) in Hamburg for the two
other parts that had remained in family possession (the scientific and duplicate collections). No agreement could
be reached and various museums (including Berlin, Leipzig, Leiden, London, and Hamburg) began competing
for purchase of the ethnographic and zoological collections, initially only offered together (Scheps 2010: 16). In
October of 1885, shortly after Johan Cesar VI Godeffroy’s death, it was the Museum für Völkerkunde zu
Leipzig that managed to purchase the ethnographic display collection from W. Godeffroy. Hamburg then
purchased the scientific (ethnographic, anthropological, and zoological) collections from the Godeffroy family
in Hamburg in February of 1886 and the zoological, anthropological, and tropical wood collections from W.
Godeffroy in March of 1886. According to Kraepelin (1901: 129), Hamburg obtained “the most valuable part of
the zoological collections of The Museum Godeffroy—in total over 50,000 numbers—for the relatively low
price of 60,000 Mark” [our translation]. Some items apparently went to other museums. The collection of
duplicates was specifically excluded from the sale to the city and was taken over by Schmeltz’s former assistant
C. Pöhl. He made them to the nucleus of his own natural history supply company, with specimens identified as
“Pöhl Südsee”, but often still showing Godeffroy museum numbers on their labels (Panning 1956: 15). His
company was listed by Friedländer [& son] (1895: 39) as “C. A. Pöhl, Naturalienhandlung”, with specialties
given as Ethnologia and Conchylia, in Hamburg's Bernhardstrasse 1–2 which is the same address as listed for
Godeffroy collector Eduard Dämel's dealership.
According to Trew (1990: 71, 79), the British natural history dealers Robert Damon (1814–1889) and his son
Robert Ferris Damon (1845–1925) had purchased the Godeffroy Museum stock of specimens “after the collapse of
the company“, with it later having been sold off at London auctions in October 1909, June 1910, and March 1929.
Several published obituaries of Robert Damon, including those by Woodward (1889: 336) and Crosse & Fischer
(1890: 89), likewise credited him with having acquired the [zoological] collections of the Museum Godeffroy.
Murray (1904: 253) remarked “The principal part of ethnographical collection went to Leipzig. The remainder of
the Museum was purchased by Mr. Damon, of Weymouth“. This cannot have been the entire stock, of course, as
German sources refer to Pöhl as having taken over the holding of duplicates for his own business and to the
purchase of [much of] the zoological collections by the Hamburger Naturhistorisches Museum. German authors
who discussed the fate of the Godeffroy specimens in considerable detail (Panning 1958; Scheps 2005) made no
mention of such a sale to Robert Damon. In any case, the claim that after the Godeffroy Museum had closed, “all
zoological objects, including fishes, were transferred to the Natural History Museum in Hamburg” (Thiel et al.
2009: 10) is incorrect.
In subsequent decades, the botanical collection of the Naturhistorisches Museum found its way into Hamburg's
Botanisches Museum (Voigt 1901: 37), the Mineralogisches-Geologisches Institut split off from Hamburg’s
Naturhistorisches Museum (1907) and moved into own quarters (Mineralogisch-Geologisches Museum, 1910),
followed by the ethnographic collections (Museum für Völkerkunde, 1912). The zoological collections and
displays of the Naturhistorisches Museum expanded accordingly and became the Zoologisches Museum (Klatt
cited in Ladiges et al. 1968: 13).
Exactly 100 years after the Naturhistorisches Museum was founded, it was burned out during WWII air-raids
by allied bombers that destroyed most of the city in July of 1943. As with the majority of the museum’s assembled
wealth, the dry molluscan collection, which at the time were considered the fourth largest in the world and
contained the specimens of Godeffroy, Röding, Otto Semper, and many others, was completely lost. The alcoholpreserved
material had been secured in a temporary shelter in Hamburg’s underground subway system (Ladiges in
Ladiges et al. 1968), and about 7,000 wet-preserved molluscan samples were thus saved, including the valuable
alcohol-preserved cephalopod specimens (Dzwillo 1993: 18). The formalin-preserved specimens, including the
larger cephalopods, had been left behind in the building and were lost in the museum’s destruction (Kosswig in
Ladiges et al. 1968: 42). Fortunately, half of Otto Semper’s molluscan collection had been given to the Museum in
Altona (previously an independent Prussian city and since 1938 a borough of Hamburg). Semper’s surviving
Altona collection, which among others also contained type specimens by Karl-Theodor Menke and Ludwig
Pfeiffer, became part a nucleus of the post-war collections of the ZMH, the latter now part of the “Biozentrum
Grindel” at Hamburg’s Martin-Luther-King Platz (institutional web site: http://www.uni-hamburg.de/biologie/
BioZ/zmh/mal/sam.html). The Godeffroy material in the mollusk collection has been databased but not yet been
fully verified (B. Hausdorf, pers. comm. May 2012).
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