Full article - Magnolia Press

technological shift from sailing vessels to steamships. The company did not recover. An 1878 attempt to transform
the South Sea business into a shareholder corporation (“Deutsche Handels- und Plantagen-Gesellschaft der Südsee-
Inseln zu Hamburg”; DHPG) could not turn the tide. A proposed government bailout by the German Empire,
discussed with Chancellor Otto von Bismarck in early 1879, did not come to pass. By December 1879 Godeffroy &
Sons was insolvent and stopped paying off its substantial bank loans (Hertz 1922: 59). The previously generous
support for the Museum Godeffroy ended as well.
Various aspects of the history of the Godeffroy family, its company, and its museum has been chronicled in
several publications (e.g., Evenhuis 2007; Hertz 1922; Hoffmann 2000; Kranz 2005; Scheps 2005, 2010; Schmack
1938; Spoehr 1963), most of these in German.
Godeffroy specimen collectors
Godeffroy accelerated the collecting activities not only by encouraging the existing captains and crews of his
vessels to obtain material, but also through targeted employment of dedicated contract collectors
(“Auftragssammler”). In addition to the quest for natural history and ethnographic items, the company asked these
collectors to pursue economically interesting avenues, to investigate potential sources for tropical woods, for
instance, or to look into the feasibility of pearlfishing by net (Scheps, 2005: 75). The contract collectors, often
experienced travelers and naturalists with a particular interest in the target region, were a very international and
eclectic group (Figs. 3–10). The editors of the Godeffroy Museum publications, Schmeltz and Friederichsen, and
some subsequent authors (especially Kranz 2005 and Scheps 2005) reported in much detail on their persons and
activities. Among the key figures were:
Eduard Graeffe (1833–1916; also spelled “Gräffe”; Fig. 6), a PhD zoologist from Zürich, Switzerland.
Originally hired as the collection’s first curator, after a short time helping set up the museum in Hamburg, Graeffe
traveled to Samoa in October 1861 to head up the operations there. He collected extensively in Samoa and
throughout the South Pacific, returning to Hamburg in 1872. He subsequently served in an editorial capacity for the
early phase of the JMG, but left Hamburg in 1874 for positions with the aquarium in Vienna and then with the
zoological station in Trieste. Graeffe published various reports about his travels and observations in the Godeffroy
Museum publications and elsewhere (e.g., Graeffe 1864, 1867, 1868, 1873a, b). Together with Andrew Garrett,
Graeffe provided sketches of living nudibranch mollusks that were published in Rudolph Bergh’s Neue
Nacktschnecken der Südsee monographs (see below; Fig. 17).
Konkordia Amalie Dietrich (1821–1891; née Nelle; Fig. 4) from Siebenlehn, Saxony, Germany. Dietrich had
learned plant collecting from her husband, a natural history specimen dealer in Saxony. In 1863, she accepted
contract employment with Godeffroy to collect in Queensland, Australia, from where she returned after ten years,
having obtained and supplied a multitude of natural history specimens, ethnographic, and anthropological material.
Her extensive plant collections led to a special sales catalog published by the museum (Schmeltz 1866b) and a
series of papers by Luerssen (e.g., 1874) on the flora of Queensland. Museum Godeffroy curator Schmeltz
provided various reports about her incoming material and field observations (e.g., 1874: xxv–xxx). Among the
items shipped to Hamburg were aboriginal skulls and skeletons that were anxiously awaited and studied by
European anthropologists, but their means of acquisition triggered controversies (subsequent accusations ranged
from robbing of funeral trees to outright murder; Kranz 2005). The promised lifetime employment with Godeffroy
ended with the demise of the company, but Hamburg’s Botanisches Museum provided her with a salaried position.
Her daughter, Charitas Bischoff (1912), published a somewhat fictionalized account of her mother's life, and her
period in Australia was described by Sumner (1993). Schmeltz (1891) published a brief obituary.
Andrew Garrett (1823–1887; Fig. 5) from Albany, New York, USA. Garrett, had extensive prior experience
as a collector in the South Seas. With a particular interest in mollusks and a skill in sketching and painting, he had
been a contract collector for Louis Agassiz of the Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University for a
period of eight years, had worked with William Harper Pease in the Hawaiian Islands, and also collected for the
California Academy of Sciences, San Francisco. He was hired by Godeffroy in 1866 to collect in Fiji, then in the
Cook Islands, and after 1870 in French Polynesia. Schmeltz (1874: xiii–xix) summarized some of Garrett’s
discoveries and specimen shipments. In addition to extensive zoological collections, Garrett provided photographs
of indigenous peoples, and created many color illustrations, particularly of fishes, that were published in several
volumes of the JMG as Andrew Garrett’s Fische der Südsee. He was also responsible for many of the sketches of
living nudibranch mollusks subsequently published by Rudolph Bergh (1873a, 1874c, 1875b, 1879a; see below; Fig. 17),
6 · Zootaxa 3511 © 2012 Magnolia Press
BIELER & PETIT