Robert Hermann Schomburgk

Sir Robert Hermann Schomburgk (5 June 1804 – 11 March 1865) was a German-born explorer for Great Britain who carried out geographical, ethnological and botanical studies in South America and the West Indies, and also fulfilled diplomatic missions for Great Britain in the Dominican Republic and Thailand.

Schomburgk was born at Freyburg, Prussian Saxony, the son of a Protestant minister. In 1820, while staying with his uncle, he learned botany from a professor.

He entered commercial life and, in 1826, went to the United States, where he worked for a time as a clerk in Boston and Philadelphia. In 1828, he was requested to supervise a transport of Saxon sheep to the American state of Virginia, where he lived for a time. The same year, he became a partner in a tobacco manufactory at Richmond. The factory was burned, and Schomburgk was ruined. He suffered further setbacks on the Caribbean island of St. Thomas, where he lost all his belongings in a fire. Consequently, he ceased his business activities.

In 1830, he left for Anegada, one of the Virgin Isles, notorious for its shipwrecks. Although he did not possess the special knowledge that is required for such a work, he surveyed the island at his own expense and sent to the Royal Geographical Society (London) a report which created such an impression that, in 1835, he was entrusted by that body with conducting an expedition of exploration of British Guiana.

He fulfilled his mission (1835–1839) with great success, incidentally discovering the giant Victoria Regia water lily in 1837 and many new species of orchids, one genus of which, Schomburgkia, was named for him. He also laid to rest the persistent myth of Raleigh's Lake Parime by proposing that the seasonal flooding of the Rupununi savannah had been misidentified as a lake. In 1841, he returned to Guiana, this time as a British Government official to survey the colony and fix its eastern and western boundaries. The result was the provisional boundary between British Guiana and Venezuela, known as the "Schomburgk Line", and the boundary with the Dutch colony of Surinam. He also made further geographical and ethnological observations and was joined there by his brother, Moritz Richard. He repeatedly urged fixing the boundary with Brazil, motivated by his encounters with Brazilian enslavement of local Indian tribes, most of which no longer exist. Schomburgk's survey later played a role in the arbitration of the southern boundary between British Guiana and Brazil, with arbitration by the King of Italy in 1904.

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