Aimé Bonpland
Aimé Jacques Alexandre Bonpland (29 August 1773 – 4 May 1858) was a French explorer and botanist.
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[edit] Biography
Bonpland's real surname was Goujaud, and he was born in La Rochelle, a coastal city in France. After serving as a surgeon in the French army, and studying under Jean-Nicolas Corvisart at Paris, he accompanied Alexander von Humboldt during five years of travel in Mexico, Colombia and the districts bordering on the Orinoco and Amazon rivers. In these explorations he collected and classified about 60 000 plants that were, until then, mostly unknown in Europe. He later described his finds in Plantes equinoxiales (Paris, 1808–1816). A semi-fictional account of these travels is to be found in Daniel Kehlmann's Die Vermessung der Welt (also published in English as Measuring the World: A Novel, translated by Carol Brown Janeway).
On returning to Paris, he received a pension and the superintendence of the gardens at Malmaison, and published Monographie des Melastomes (1806), and Description des plantes rares cultivées à Malmaison et à Navarre (1813). In 1816, after having vainly tried to convince Napoleon to emigrate to the Americas,[1] he took various European plants and set out for Buenos Aires, where he was elected professor of natural history, an office which he soon left in order to explore central South America. In 1820 Bonpland established a plantation near the Paraná, but its success annoyed José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia, the dictator of Paraguay, who had Bonpland arrested as a spy and detained as a prisoner in Santa Marta.[1][2] During his imprisonment, he devoted his services as a physician gratuitously to the poor.[1][3] He was also compelled to act as physician to a garrison.[4]
On regaining his liberty in 1831, he resided at San Borga in the province of Corrientes, Argentina. There he married and made a living as a yerba mate (Paraguay tea) farmer and merchant.[4][5] In 1853, he moved to Santa Ana, in the province of Misiones, today a small town called "Bonpland" in his honor, close to Restauracion. There he occupied himself in scientific research, and in cultivating the orange trees which he had introduced.[1] He died there, frustrating his intention to once again visit Paris to deliver his collections of plants and descriptions to the museum there.[1][4]
[edit] Legacy
Bonpland Street in the ritzy Buenos Aires neighborhood of Palermo Hollywood lies among streets named after Charles Darwin, Robert FitzRoy and Alexander von Humboldt. Many animals and plants are also named in his honor, including the squid Grimalditeuthis bonplandi and the orchid Ornithocephalus bonplandi.
The lunar crater Bonpland is named after him. Also Pico Bonpland in the Venezuelan Andes is named to his honor, although he never visited the Venezuelan Andes. A peak of over 2300m in New Zealand also bears his name. The mountain is near the head of Lake Wakatipu in the South Island.
[edit] References
- ^ a b c d e
"Bonpland, Aimé". Encyclopaedia Britannica. 4 (9th ed.). 1878. - ^ http://people.wku.edu/charles.smith/chronob/BONP1773.htm
- ^ "Bonpland, Aimé". Appletons' Cyclopædia of American Biography. 1891.
- ^ a b c "Bonpland, Aimé". The American Cyclopædia. 1879.
- ^ Obregón. 1999. Los soportes histórico y científico de la pieza Humboldt & Bonpland, taxidermistas de Ibsen Martínez. Latin American Theatre Review.
- ^ "Author Query". International Plant Names Index. http://www.ipni.org/ipni/authorsearchpage.do.
- This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Bonpland, Aimé Jacques Alexandre". Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press.
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