Wilhelm Gueinzius

Wilhelm Gueinzius (15 March 1813 – 24 January 1874) was a German naturalist, collector and apothecary.

Gueinzius was born in Trotha, a suburb of Halle. In his youth he attended the grammar school "Franckesche Stiftung" in Halle, but showed little academic inclination. In 1833 he became an apprentice apothecary, and was employed at the hospital of Charité in Berlin between 1836 and 1837. Working at a pharmacy in Dessau, he made the acquaintance of the police director Brueckner who introduced him to the founder of the zoological museum in Leipzig, Professor Eduard Friedrich Pöppig. Gueinzius was probably trained at Leipzig under Pöppig.

He arrived in the Cape Colony in 1838 and registered as an apothecary. From 1839 to 1840 he collected in the Cape Colony, in particular in the Stellenbosch district and lived in the house of the lay magistrate Theunissen in Somerset West, about 40 km southeast of Cape Town. Around 1840 he moved to the Swellendam area where he worked as a tutor at Morkel's farm Onverwacht in the Hottentots Holland until 1841, when he left for Natal, on an English war frigate commanded by John Marshall, shortly before Natal's annexation by the United Kingdom in 1843. Initially all his specimens were sent to Pöppig, who praised the quality of his collecting in a letter to Joseph Dalton Hooker. Pöppig lodged these specimens under his own name in his herbarium, which has since been moved to Vienna. Pöppig collected extensively in Central and South America, never visiting South Africa.

Gueinzius settled on the Tugela River and supplied the medical needs of the Zulu chief Mpande (Dingaan's half-brother) and his wives. Returning from an expedition to the north, he found that armed conflict had erupted between the English, Boers and Zulus, and that his home had been plundered by British troops. With no reparation forthcoming and destitute, he left Natal to stay with friends in Cape Town. Here he met Charlotte Tayler, the young sister of two English businessmen. Despite being attracted to her, no permanent relationship resulted, largely because of his impoverished state. His relationship with the druggist Juritz in Cape Town, who was to send his collections and letters to Europe, fared no better when it transpired that Juritz had held back letters and had appropriated collection pieces for himself.

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