William John Burchell

Note: Many nature lovers are familiar with Burchell’s Zebra (Equus burchelli). The wild herds disappeared by 1910, and the last known individual died in the Berlin Zoo in 1918.

Williaam John Burchell was born in 1782, Fulham, London, as the son of a wealthy nurseryman. He was an accomplished naturalist, who amassed vast natural history collections and described many new species. Sadly, his achievements were not fully recognised by his contemporaries and he became a solitary and unhappy figure in later life.

He developed an early interest in natural history, and studied botany at Kew Gardens. In his mid twenties he took up the position of schoolmaster and acting botanist on St Helena. His fiancée, Lucia Green, sailed from England in 1807 to marry him. Upon her arrival she announced a change of heart, and married the captain of the ship she sailed with instead.

Thereafter Burchell never married, and left for Cape Town in 1810. He had a wagon specially built for him, and in June 1811, together with six Hottentot servants, trekked into the interior. This expedition is documented in his 2-volume work titled “Travels in the interior of Southern Africa”. He returned to England in 1815 with over 50,000 specimens, many of which he donated to the British Museum. Hutchinson (1946:625) wrote in “A botanist in Southern Africa”: - “Probably no such collection gathered by one man ever left Africa before or since”. He got into a dispute with the museum authorities when many of his specimens were damaged whilst in storage at the museum. After this dispute the keeper of the museum’s Zoological Collections named Burchell’s Zebra ‘Asinus burchelli’. Asinus is translated from Latin as meaning ass or fool.

He spend the next decade arranging his specimens and documenting his results before he left in 1825 on his final expedition, this time to Brazil, where he collected over 20,000 insects, 362 species of bird and many other plants and animals. He returned to England in 1830, and was awarded an honorary doctorate in recognition of his work. His travels however exhausted his personal fortune, and he withdrew from society to gradually become an isolated and disillusioned figure. For several years he suffered with ill health, and in 1863 he took his own life.

About two years after his death his sister, Miss Anna Burchell, donated a significant part of her brother’s entomological, ethnological, geological and zoological collections to the Oxford University Museum.

©2003 American Clivia Society