Charles Telfair

Charles Edward Telfair (1778 Belfast - 14 July 1833 Port Louis) was an Irish botanist.

Telfair was the son of a Belfast schoolmaster. He studied chemistry under Joseph Black and later qualified as a medical doctor. In 1797 he joined the Royal Navy and was soon appointed as ship's surgeon, visiting Mauritius and Réunion with the Navy in 1810. He returned to Mauritius in 1816 and established botanical gardens in Mauritius and Réunion. Having worked in several Government offices in Réunion, he was appointed personal secretary of Mauritius Governor Robert Farquhar. Telfair improved the education and housing of estate slaves, and found less strenuous occupations for elderly slaves. He was honorary curator of the botanical garden at Pamplemousses from 1826 to 1829. His old colonial château has now been turned into a restaurant, watercolours of local flora painted by Telfair’s wife Annabella Chamberlain, adorning the walls.

The Charles Telfair Institute in Mauritius, formerly known as DCDM Business School, was renamed after Charles Telfair.

A number of naturalists were actively collecting in Mauritius in the early 19th century. In 1826 Telfair persuaded two local collectors, Julien Desjardins and Louis Bouton, to donate their collections to form the nucleus of a proposed colonial museum. As this offer met with no response from the Governor, Telfair, together with Bouton, Desjardins, Wenceslas Bojer, François Liénard and other local naturalists convened an 1829 meeting at which the Société d’Histoire Naturelle de l’Ile Maurice was founded. Desjardins, who had already set up his own museum at Argy in the Flacq district, left for Paris in 1839, intending to write a natural history of Mauritius, but unexpectedly died there in 1840. His widow donated his entire collection to the Society. Bouton, inspired by the gesture, added his collection of plants, and Adrien d'Épinay his library. The nascent museum opened to the public in 1842 as the Muséum Desjardins, in Port Louis, with Bojer acting as the first curator. The Mauritius government provided the accommodation, and half the curator's and taxidermist's salaries.

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