Bernoulli, Carl Gustav b. January 24, 1834; Basel, Switzerland d. May 18, 1878; San Francisco, California
Scion of a prominent family from Basel who emigrated to Guatemala in 1858, Carl Gustav Bernoulli was a doctor, pharmacist, coffee planter, explorer, and amateur archaeologist of ancient Maya sites.
He was responsible for the transfer of the world- famous carved wooden panels from temple ceilings in the ancient Mayan city of Tikal to his native city of Basel, where they are exhibited in the Museum of Cultures.Bernoulli, the son of a pharmacist, studied medicine in Wurzburg, Berlin, and Paris and received his doctorate at the University of Basel in 1857. After visiting the explorer and scholar Alexander von Humboldt, then in the eighty-ninth year of his life, he traveled to Guatemala in 1858. For ten years he practiced medicine in the capital. In addition, he opened pharmacies in the provincial towns of Mazatenango and Retalhuleu and acquired a coffee plantation in the province of Suchitepequez. In 1868 he removed to Retalhuleu. Bernoulli was a passionate botanist who classified the varieties of the cocoa plant in Central America, collected numerous plants in herbariums (which are still preserved in Gottingen and Basel), and carried on an extensive correspondence with natural scientists in Germany and the United States. He published articles on his travels through Guatemala as well as on medical, geographical, and botanical subjects in German journals and regularly sent Indian antiquities, ethnographic objects, and zoological species to Basel, where his friend Fritz Muller was director of the city’s natural history collections.
In 1877 Bernoulli undertook a voyage to the ancient Mayan ruins of Tikal in the company of O. R. Cario, a young botanist and geographer who had been sent to Guatemala by the director of the botanical collections in Gottingen. Bernoulli and Cario assembled extensive herbariums, which formed the basis for Cario’s Gottingen dissertation, and discovered the carved wooden panels in the temple ruins.
With the permission of the Guatemalan government, they instructed Franz Sarg, a German planter and businessman in the Alta Verapaz region, to ship the panels to Basel via Hamburg. The full significance of these rare wooden panels has been appreciated only in recent years, when scholars succeeded in deciphering the ancient Mayan hieroglyphs and found that they contain important information on the Mayas’ knowledge of astronomy.Bernoulli was a member of the Swiss Reformed Church who openly criticized the role of the Catholic Church in Central America. The image of the Guatamalan Indians that Bernoulli drew in his letters and articles was highly negative and reveals the influences of social Darwinism and racism.
He claimed that the Indian population could only be governed by fear and attributed the chronic labor shortage on the coffee plantations to the natives’ alleged natural laziness. In several petitions to the Guatemalan government, he demanded the systematic registration and surveillance of Indian laborers for the benefit of the agricultural export economy. Each laborer was to carry a passport in which his work performance was to be meticulously recorded. Sadly enough, the government of Justo Rufino Barrios took up this idea and initiated the forced recruitment and control of the Indian workforce in the 1870s. In the twentieth century, the infamous passport laws of the South African apartheid regime followed a similar rationale.
Bernoulli planned to return to Basel in 1878 but fell ill during the voyage and died in San Francisco. In recognition of his botanical work, two plants were named for him. The Bernoullia helvetica is a fossil plant that Bernoulli himself discovered in stone sediments near Basel, and the Bernoullia flammea Oliver is an orange- blossomed tree that was found in Tikal and first described in 1936.
Michaela Schmolz-Haberlein
See also Humboldt, Alexander von
References and Further Reading
Castellanos Cambranes, Julio. Coffee and Peasants: The Origins of the Modern Plantation Economy in Guatemala, 1853-1897. Stockholm: Cirma, 1985.
Mayer-Holdampf, Valerie. Ein Basler unterwegs im Dschungel von Guatemala: Carl Gustav Bernoulli (1834—1878): Arzt, Botaniker und Entdecker der Tikal-Platten. Basel: GS- Verlag, 1997.
Schmolz-Haberlein, Michaela. Die Grenzen des Caudillismo. Die Modernisierung des guatemaltekischen Staates unter Jorge Ubico, 1931-1944. Eine regionalgeschichtliche Studie am Beispiel der Alta Verapaz. Frankfurt am Main et al.: Peter Lang, 1993.