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84 A LANKESTERIANA B C Figure 33. A — Map of the Belgian colony in Santo Tomás, Guatemala. In Wagner, 2001: 42. B — Warczewiczella discolor Rchb.f. Xenia Orchidacea I, Plate 93. C — Michael Frederik Liebmann (1813-1856). Courtesy of the Botanical Garden & Museum, Copenhagen. LANKESTERIANA 9(1—2), August 2009. © Universidad de Costa Rica, 2009.
ossenbaCh — Orchids and orchidology in Central America Rchb. f., (Friedrichsthal, AMES 25856) (Fig. 32C). In Reichenbach’s description, the locality of collection is referred to as: Guatemala, Chontales, in Monte Aragua, although it is well known that Chontales is in Nicaragua. Other collections by Friedrichsthal include the type of Ornithocephalus inflexus Lindl. (Guatemala, am Fluss Torre), Gongora quinquenervis Ruiz y Pav. (Guatemala, San Juan River (!)) and Schomburgkia tibicinis Batem. (Río de Mico, Petén). “Friedrichsthal is considered one of the pioneers of expedition photography. Already in the year after Daguerre‘s technique was publicized [1837], he employed this new technique to depict Maya ruins. In 1840, he was the first European to describe Chichén Itzá”. He must have met Skinner, who in one of his letters to Alexander Mac Donald in Belize asks: “Did le Chevalier Frederickstal [sic] find much up the river?” (Letter from Skinner to Mac Donald, Feb. 26 th , 1841). It was, by the way, Mac Donald’s wife who introduced from Belize into England the type specimen of Brassavola (=Rhyncholaelia) digbyana Lindl., today the national flower of Honduras 22 . A different version states that the plant was sent by Governor Digby, and named in honor of his kinsman, Lord Digby; it had been collected by employees of Messrs. Brown, Ponder, and Co., of Belize, who dealt in mahagony and logwood (Boyle, 1901: 151). A large part of his collection and equipment was stolen during a robbery in the province of Yucatan, at the southern end of the peninsula of the same name. At the end of October 1841 he reached Vienna, badly suffering from the serious illness he had caught in Latin America and that was to lead to his death a few months later. “Last Monday George brought here a Pole – a great traveller & one of the first botanists in the world. His name is Warscewicz.... He talks a mixture of Spanish and Polish, & wears a beard, in fact, is all hair, from his nose downwards!”. Mrs. Skinner, in a letter to her friend Juliana Raymond dated April 15, 1850, described with these words her first encounter with Josef Ritter von Rawiez Warscewicz (1812-1866) (Fig. 32D). Warscewicz was born in Lithuania, of Polish ancestors, mostly military (Lückel, 1982: 125), and “received his initial training in Botany at Rumzill’s [really Jundzill] Botanical Gardens in Poland [actually in Vilnius, Lithuania] and at the Berlin Botanic Gardens, and then joined a Belgian contingent of settlers [in Guatemala] in 1845 to collect plants for the nurseryman Van Houtte of Ghent, Belgium” (Milligan & Banks, 1999: 22). Van Houtte owned a large garden in Santo Tomás, now Matías de Gálvez, Guatemala (Savage, 1970: 275). The colonization program in Santo Tomás had started in 1834, when the Guatemalan Congress passed a law promoting the development of the Departments of Verapaz, Livinston and Santo Tomás. Colonization began in 1836 by the British ‘Commercial and Agricultural Company of the Eastern Coast of Central America’ but in 1841 the British interests were sold to the Belgian Colonization Company (Wagner, 2007: 17-22) (Fig. 33A). But the new Belgian colony in Santo Tomás, Guatemala, was a complete failure. “They sold him the idea that he would find a prosperous town full of rich settlers. When he arrived, in February of 1845, Warscewicz found that instead of the promised city there was only a hamlet of straw huts. Instead of rich and active settlers he found immigrants so sick that they looked like corpses raised from the dead. From the 32 healthy and strong individuals who arrived with Warscewicz from Europe to join the colony, only our botanist and the group’s physician survived” (Heckadon-Moreno, 1998 62). The Belgian Colony was officially dissolved by the Guatemalan government in 1853 (Wagner, 2007: 33). Thanks to Humboldt’s recommendation [Humboldt had previously recommended him to the Botanical Garden in Hamburg], Warscewicz initiated correspondence with Skinner, with whom he did not start off well, possibly because they did not meet personally until 1850 (Skinner was at the time in England). “I have had enough of him... (Letter from Skinner to Hooker, 15.09.1846)”. “...And I am disgusted with Warscewicz and almost feel inclined to have nothing more to do with him” (Letter from Skinner to Hooker, 15.12.1846). But the relations would improve, until Skinner became an admirer of the extravagant Pole. “From Guatemala, Warscewicz traveled to El Salvador, where, due to extensive deforestation, he found only few plants. He went on to Nicaragua and met there Dr. Oersted, who informed him of the best regions for botanical exploration. Together they 22 The name honors Edward St. Vincent Digby, an orchid grower from Minterne, Dorsetshire, who first received the plant from Mrs. Mac Donald. LANKESTERIANA 9(1—2), August 2009. © Universidad de Costa Rica, 2009. 85
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