orchids and orchidology in central america. 500 ... - lankesteriana.org

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would stay in Costa Rica for the rest of his life. His
real name was Julian Carnigohl, a widower whose
wife had died in Germany a few months earlier. He
came to Costa Rica with four children, Ana, Berta,
Franz, and Julio Carnigohl. When they arrived in
Costa Rica they changed the name to Carmiol. “A
naturalist by profession, he felt especially attracted
to horticulture and ornamental plants, as well as
to wildlife and ornithology...” (Carmiol Calvo,
1973: 4). He travelled to the Smithsonian Institute
and to England in 1867, and seems to have had an
arrangement with Osbert Salvin (one of the editors of
the Biologia Centrali-Americana), to collect birds and
butterflies in Costa Rica (Letter from Salvin to Dow,
November 1, 1867). In a letter to Professor Spencer
F. Baird of the Smithsonian Institute (April 29, 1862)
Captain John M. Dow refers to a collection of birds
from Costa Rica: “The person I bought them from is
a German gardener living in the outskirts of the city”.
“Many of the Costa Rican plants that were adopted by
European floriculturists owe their introduction to this
humble German gardener” (Pitier, 1908: 21). Carmiol
also collected herbarium material and birds, which
he sent to American and European institutions. We
know, from letters by Baird and Salvin, that in 1867
he formed a large collection of objects of natural
history which he personally took to Washington and
London. Bovallius tells us about Carmiol in his old
years, during the Swedish biologist’s visit to Costa
Rica in 1882: “I paid several visits to an old German
collector and merchant, Carmiol, and I never tired to
admire his beautiful orchard, where he had collected
a large amount of rare plants from all regions of Costa
Rica…. For those who study this […] flora in the
museums of Berlin and London, the name of Carmiol
is well known, because many interesting species have
been sent by him to their collections” (Bovallius,
1974: 120).
Among his collections of orchids we find Lycaste
xytriophora Linden & Rchb.f. and Epidendrum
campylostalix Rchb.f. Helmuth Polakowsky wrote
about another orchid, Vanilla sp., in 1876: “I have
never found vanilla in the market and only in the
house of a German gardener [J. Carmiol] did I see
by chance fresh pods, which his people had brought
him from the forests behind Angostura” (Polakowski,
1940). As Frantzius wrote: “Nobody has examined
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LANKESTERIANA 9(1—2), August 2009. © Universidad de Costa Rica, 2009.
so thoroughly the slopes of the Central American
mountains” (González, 1921: 87). We remember
Carmiol in Phaedranassa carmioli Baker, of the
Amaryllidaceae and Crotalaria carmioli Polakows. of
the Leguminosae. Besides being a gardener, Carmiol
owned a restaurant in San José.
The Moravian Evangelical Church of Herrenhut in
Saxony, Germany (known as the “Bruedergemeinde”,
or “Community of the Brothers”) began to send
missionaries to the Caribbean in the early years of the
XVIII century, founding an establishment in Suriname
(Dutch Guyana) in 1735. These missionaries traveled
along the Antilles and the Central American coast
and much later founded a mission in the Mosquito
Coast. “[The missionaries] waged war against the
native shamans, or sookia (sukia), [...] and today the
remaining sukia must practice under considerable
stigma. [...] After living in local communities for
many years, the missionaries produced the first
grammars and dictionaries of the Miskito language
and successfully translated the Bible” (Bell, 1989:
vii-viii).
Heinrich Rudolf Wullschlaegel (1805-1864) came
in 1849 to the mission of the “Bruedergemeinde”
in Suriname. To communicate with the natives, the
missionaries had to learn their language, a mixture
of English, Dutch, Portuguese and African elements,
known today as Sranan. Wullschlaegel created a
“Negro English Grammar” and a “German-Negro
English Dictionary” which were published in 1856 and
1865 in Germany. Wullschlaegel traveled to Brazil, the
Antilles and the Mosquito coast. An amateur botanist,
he made some interesting collections. In Jamaica he
discovered the type of Lepanthes wullschlaegelii
Fawc. & Rendle (Wullschlaegel, s.n.) and in Suriname
Macroclinium wullschlaegelianum (Focke) Dodson
(Wullschlaegel s.n.). In the Mosquito Coast he
collected four species of orchids (all on the same day,
January 5, 1855, and in the same locality: ‘Pearlkey
Lagoon’), that were described by Reichenbach
in his ORCHIDEAE WULLSCHLÄGELIANAE
(Reichenbach, 1866: 104), among which is the type of
Dichaea trulla Rchb. f. (Wullschlägel s.n.,‘Pearlkey
Lagoon auf Palmen’). Reichenbach dedicated to
him in 1863 the genus Wullschlaegelia, from a
plant collected originally by Swartz in Jamaica and
described as Cranichis aphylla Sw.