The son of Louis Marie, Count of
Chamisso, by his marriage to Anne Marie Gargam, Chamisso began life as Louis Charles Adélaïde de Chamissot at the
château of
Boncourt at
Ante, in
Champagne, France, the ancestral seat of his family. His name appears in several forms, one of the most common being
Ludolf Karl Adelbert von Chamisso. In 1790, the
French Revolution drove his parents out of France with their seven children, and they went successively to
Liège,
the Hague,
Würzburg, and
Bayreuth, and possibly
Hamburg, before settling in
Berlin. There, in 1796, the young Chamisso was fortunate in obtaining the post of page-in-waiting to the queen of
Prussia, and in 1798 he entered a Prussian infantry regiment as an
ensign to train for a career as an army officer. Shortly thereafter, thanks to the
Peace of Tilsit, his family was able to return to France, but Chamisso remained in Prussia and continued his military career. He had little formal education, although he is a noted alumnus of the French Highschool of Berlin (
Französisches Gymnasium), that has existed since 1689 for the express purpose of accommodating the children of exiled French nobles. While in the
Prussian military service in
Berlin he assiduously studied
natural science for three years. In collaboration with
Varnhagen von Ense, in 1803 he founded the
Berliner Musenalmanach, the publication in which his first verses appeared. The enterprise was a failure, and, interrupted by the Napoleonic wars, it came to an end in 1806. It brought him, however, to the notice of many of the literary celebrities of the day and established his reputation as a rising poet. fitted out at the expense of Count
Nikolay Rumyantsev, which
Otto von Kotzebue (son of
August von Kotzebue) commanded on a scientific voyage round the world. His
diary of the expedition (
Tagebuch, 1821) is a fascinating account of the expedition to the
Pacific Ocean and the
Bering Sea. During this trip Chamisso described a number of new species found in what is now the San Francisco Bay Area. Several of these, including the
California poppy,
Eschscholzia californica, were named after his friend
Johann Friedrich von Eschscholtz, the Rurik's
entomologist. In return, Eschscholtz named a variety of plants, including the genus
Camissonia, after Chamisso. On his return in 1818 he was made custodian of the botanical gardens in Berlin, and was elected a member of the
Academy of Sciences, and in 1819 he married his friend Hitzig's foster daughter Antonie Piaste (1800–1837). He became a leading member of
the Serapion Brethren, a literary circle around E. T. A. Hoffmann. In 1827, partly for the purpose of rebutting the charges brought against him by Kotzebue, he published
Views and Remarks on a Voyage of Discovery, and
Description of a Voyage Round the World. Both works display great accuracy and industry. His last scientific labor was a tract on the
Hawaiian language. Chamisso's travels and scientific researches restrained for a while the full development of his poetical talent, and it was not until his forty-eighth year that he turned back to literature. In 1829, in collaboration with
Gustav Schwab, and from 1832 in conjunction with
Franz von Gaudy, he brought out the
Deutscher Musenalmanach, in which his later poems were mainly published. His collections are in the care of a number of European museums. Some of his fungal specimens were distributed by
Johann Friedrich Klotzsch in his highly influential
exsiccata Herbarium vivum mycologicum sistens fungorum per totam Germaniam crescentium collectionem perfectam (1832). == Botanical work ==