Karl Moritz von Beurmann

Moritz von Beurmann, in Die Gartenlaube 1862

Karl Moritz von Beurmann (born July 28, 1835 in Potsdam , † February 1863 in Mao in what is now Chad ) was a German explorer of Africa .

Life

His father was Carl Moritz von Beurmann , who later became President of the Province of Poznan . Beurmann started his military career in 1853 and made it to the position of engineer officer; but he found no satisfaction in this career.

Animated by Heinrich Barth's travels , he became enthusiastic about Africa research. Beurmann resigned in 1859 and went to Egypt in the spring of 1860 , where he followed the course of the Nile up to Korosko (a village in Lower Nubia on the right bank of the Nile, which served as the main reloading point for all shipments from Lower Egypt to Sudan ). He wandered through the Nubian desert to Berber (also El Mescheriss, the largest town in Central Cubia at the time), from where he turned to Suakin , a port on the Red Sea .

Beurmann then visited Kassala , Khartoum , the Bogoslanders and put his travel reports in Petermann's Geographische Mitteilungen (1862).

When he returned, he decided to investigate the fate of the traveler Eduard Vogel , who had disappeared in Wadai . On February 10, 1862, he set out from Tripoli through the desert to the south and reached Kuka , the capital of the Bornu Empire , via Djalo and Murzuk at the end of August , from where he first visited Jakoba, as the political situation still required an advance to Wadai not allowed. Despite money shortage and fever attacks , he kept an eye on the task at hand and tried at the end of 1862 to reach his goal around the northern end of Lake Chad . He reached Mao in Kanem on the Wadai border, where he was murdered in February 1863, probably on the orders of the Sultan of Wadai. His fate was only revealed ten years later by Gustav Nachtigal . The glossary of the Tigré language written by Beurmann was published posthumously in 1868.

literature

• Julius Löwenberg :  Beurmann, Moritz von . In: Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (ADB). Volume 2, Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig 1875, p. 586 f.
• Diedrich Hermann Westermann :  Beurmann, Karl Moritz von. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 2, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1955, ISBN 3-428-00183-4 , p. 197 ( digitized version ).
• Walter Krämer (ed.): The discovery and exploration of the earth. Brockhaus, Leipzig 1949.

Web links

Commons : Karl Moritz von Beurmann  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Wikisource: Herr von Beurmann  - Sources and full texts

• Literature by and about Karl Moritz von Beurmann in the catalog of the German National Library