Kappler,August b. November 10, 1815; Mannheim, Baden d. October 20, 1887; Stuttgart, Wurttemberg
German explorer who spent forty-three years of his life in Dutch Guyana. After he had finished his training as a merchant, he decided to enter the Dutch colonial service. In January 1836 he arrived in the capital of Dutch Guyana, Paramaribo.
Kappler served for six years in the Dutch colonial army and used his time to collect a large number of plants and insects, which unfortunately were lost when, on his trip back to Europe, the ship ran aground near Dover. He described his experiences from this first stay in Guyana in his book Sechs Jahre in Surinam oder Bilder aus dem militarischen Leben dieser Kolonie und Skizzen zur Kenntnis seiner socialen und naturwissenschaftlichen Verhaltnisse (Six Years in Suriname or Pictures from the Military Life in This Colony and Brief Remarks on Its Social and Natural Conditions, 1854). In 1842 Kappler returned for a few weeks to Wurttemberg, but went back to Guyana to collect butterflies, which he sold to Europeans to acquire the necessary capital for a farm. In November 1846 he was finally able to purchase aplot of land in a former Carib village on the river Marowijne (French: Maroni) that marked the border between Dutch and French Guyana. Kappler named this plot “Albina” after his fiance Alwine Lietzemaier. He would live there for the next thirty-three years of his life. He engaged in farming, traded with the natives, and, in 1853, hired several forest workers with their families to clear the forest around the former village to found a new settlement economically based on wood cutting and planting. Three years later, about seventy European settlers lived in Albina. After some misgivings among the settlers, most of the Wurttemberg settlers left the colony for Paraguay. When the French colonial government established a prison colony on the French side of the Marowijne, Albina profited from this new development by engaging in trade with the new French outpost. Kappler wrote a book about his experiences in Albina that was published under the title Over Kolonisatie met Europeanen in Surinam (On the Colonization of Europeans in Suriname) that was published in 1875.
Four years later, he left Albina in the hands of his nephew and returned to Wurttemberg. He had sold half of his possessions to the Dutch government, which developed Albina into a military outpost that slowly became a civilian settlement. In 1894 it was chosen to be the administrative center of the district of Marowijne. The Albina of the early twenty- first century is a sleepy provincial town of about 1,000 people.Living in Stuttgart, Kappler wrote two books about the Dutch colony: an autobiography, Hollandisch-Guiana. Erlebnisse und Erfahrungen wahrend eines 43jahrigen Aufenthalts in der Kolonie Surinam (Dutch- Guyana: Experiences and Adventures of a 43-year Stay in the Colony of Dutch- Guyana, 1881), and a general introduction to Guyana, Surinam. Sein Land, seine Natur, Bevolkerung und seine Culturverhalt- nisse mit Bezug auf Colonisation (Suriname: Its Land, Nature, People, and Culture in Relationship to Its Colonization, 1887). The latter includes detailed descriptions of the colony’s flora and fauna and discusses the European’s fitness for living in the tropics. Kappler’s zoological and botanical collections are displayed in several European museums (among others, in Stuttgart and Leiden).
Heinz Peter Brogiato
See also Paraguay
References and Further Reading
Hantzsch, Victor. “Kappler, August.” Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie, vol 51. Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1906: 41-44.
Haverschmidt, Francois. August Kappler als ornithologischer Sammler und Beobachter in Surinam, von 1836—1879. Stuttgart: Staatliches Museum fur Naturkunde, 1973.
Umlauft, Friedrich. “August Kappler.” Deutsche Rundschau fur Geographie und Statistik, vol. 10 (1888): 88-90.