Heinrich Wilhelm Ludwig Romberg

Heinrich Wilhelm Ludwig Romberg (born March 28, 1833 in Bromberg ; † December 29, 1906 ) was a German navigator .

Life

Heinrich Wilhelm Ludwig Romberg was the oldest of ten children of Heinrich Romberg's senior consistorial councilor and had a happy youth in the Bydgoszcz parsonage. He attended high school in Bromberg up to Obersekunda. At the beginning of the revolution in March 1848, as a 15-year-old boy, he was enthusiastic about the German and liberal cause and took part in the movement against the Poles.

Now animated by the desire for freedom, Romberg did not complete his high school education, but learned the trade of a seaman despite references to the associated hardships . Initially he was hired in vain for the German Navy, but in the autumn of 1849 he was hired as a cabin boy on the Herder Wätjens boat through the mediation of the cathedral pastor Knippenberg in Bremen . He received permission from the captain of Hagen to acquire knowledge of theoretical seafaring sciences, mathematics and natural sciences in his free time . He served on this ship until June 1854, where he went to East India, Australia and China . He then worked until May 1855 on the sailing ship Joseph Heyden as a whaler in the South Seas .

1855–57 Romberg graduated from the seafaring school in Bremen with good success and then began on the advice of the director Dr. Breusing completed his training as a navigation teacher through a four-semester course at the Technical University in Hanover and at the University of Berlin. In August 1859 he obtained his doctorate in Jena and in the same year became a teacher at the seafaring school in Bremen. He held this position until 1892, after which he was director of the same educational institution until December 1, 1897.

Romberg was also active in literature. He sent descriptive reports on his voyages as a cabin boy to magazines for young readers and became a military reporter for the Weser newspaper during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870/71 . He also constantly commented on the development of German seafaring in various papers. He also published the text Das Straßenrecht auf See (Bremen 1870), which shows his interest in questions of maritime law. This contributed to his appointment as Reich Commissioner for the Bremerhaven Maritime Administration in 1877 , in which function he received much recognition, so that shortly afterwards he became a representative of Bremen in the Technical Commission for Maritime Shipping. Retired in 1897, he devoted himself to writing his memoirs and philological studies in the last years of his life. He was married to Elisabeth (* 1841; † 1872), a daughter of the shipowner Franz Tecklenborg , and died at the end of 1906 at the age of 73.

literature

• C. Schilling Romberg, Heinrich Wilhelm Ludwig . In: Bremische Biographie des Nineteenth Century , 1912, p. 414 f.