Eduard Mohr (Africa explorer)

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Eduard Mohr 1875

Eduard Mohr (born February 19, 1828 in Bremen , † December 26, 1876 in Malange , Angola ; full name: Nicolaus Carl Eduard Mohr ) was a German explorer of Africa .

biography

Eduard Mohr was the son of the Bremen merchant Nikolaus Mohr. He completed an apprenticeship as a businessman. In 1848 he went to Baltimore to set up a trading post in Cuba. But he actually traveled from New York around Cape Horn to California , where he stayed until 1851. He briefly dug for gold in California, and between 1852 and 1854 he was involved in the salt trade on the Mexican peninsula of Baja California . From here he went on various trade trips: in 1855 he traveled to Hawaii and then to India to take part in his brother's rice business. In 1859 he returned to Europe via Aden and Sues .

In 1861 he went back to New York and from there to Java . In 1863 he came to Bremen and attended the under-steering school here. In 1866 he went on a hunting trip to the Zulu countries in Africa. When he returned to Bremen in 1867, he attended the Obersteuermannsschule and in December 1868 began a new, larger trip to the Mosi-oa-Tunya or Victoria Falls of the Zambezi . The results of this trip, on which Mohr was accompanied by the metallurgical engineer Adolf Huebner , were very valuable for science because of the astronomical regulations.

In 1870 Mohr returned to Europe and lived as a private person in Ottersberg (1870/71) and in Bremen . He gave lectures about his travels and wrote several works and treatises about his experiences. At the beginning of 1876 he was commissioned by the German African Society to advance from the west coast of Africa into the unknown interior of the continent. Mohr left Europe on June 15, 1876, reached the west coast of Angola, and committed suicide in a fit of gloom.

Works

  • Articles in geographic journals
  • Travel and hunting pictures from the South Seas, California and Southeast Africa ; Bremen 1868
  • After the Victoria Falls of the Zambezi ; Leipzig 1875, 2 vols.
  • Four watercolors; Ethnographic picture collection of the Frobenius Institute in the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt
  • Articles in Petermann 's geographical reports 1869, 1871, 1872 etc.
  • Self-biography at home 1872 pp. 791, 809 (with portrait)

literature

  • Wilhelm Olbers Focke:  Mohr, Eduard . In: Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (ADB). Volume 22, Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig 1885, p. 66 f.
  • Nekrolog in Arendts' Deutscher Rundschau für Geographie 1880, p. 240 (with portrait)

Individual references and sources

  1. ^ Herbert Black Forest : The Great Bremen Lexicon . 2nd, updated, revised and expanded edition. Edition Temmen, Bremen 2003, ISBN 3-86108-693-X .
  2. Ibid.