In 1813 Langsdorff was nominated
consul general of Russia in
Rio de Janeiro,
Brazil. He acquired a farm (named "Mandioca", or
manioc) in the north of Rio and collected plants, animals and minerals. He hosted and entertained foreign naturalists and scientists, such as
Johann Baptist von Spix (1781–1826) and
Carl Friedrich Philipp von Martius (1794–1868), and explored the flora, fauna and geography of the province of
Minas Gerais with French naturalist
Augustin Saint-Hilaire from 1813 to 1820.
The Langsdorff Expedition In 1821 he proposed to the
Tsar Alexander I and to the Academy of Sciences to lead an ambitious exploratory and scientific expedition from
São Paulo to
Pará, in the
Amazon, via a fluvial route. In March 1822, he returned to Rio in the company of scientists
Édouard Ménétries (1802–1861),
Ludwig Riedel (1761–1861), Christian Hasse and (1799–1874), who would take care of zoological, botanical, astronomical and cartographical observations during the expedition. With the aim of illustrating and documenting his findings, the Baron hired painters
Hércules Florence,
Johann Moritz Rugendas and
Adrien Taunay. The inventor of the bicycle
Karl von Drais was also a participant in the expedition. After extensive preparations, the Langsdorff Expedition departed with 40 people and 7 boats from
Porto Feliz, by the
Tietê River on 22 June 1826 and reached
Cuiabá, in
Mato Grosso on 30 January 1827. The expedition was then divided into two groups: the first one, with Langsdorff and Florence, was able to reach
Santarém on the
Amazon River on 1 July 1828, with enormous difficulties and suffering. Most of the members of the expedition became ill with tropical fevers (most probably
yellow fever), including the Baron de Langsdorff. As a consequence of the febrile attacks, he became insane at the
Juruena River in May 1828. Adrien Taunay died by
drowning in the
Guaporé River and Rugendas abandoned the expedition before its fluvial phase. Therefore, only Florence remained during the whole expedition. The expedition was joined again in
Belém and returned by ship to Rio de Janeiro, arriving on 13 March 1829, almost three years and 6,000 km after its departure. Huge scientific collections were deposited into
Kunstkamera and later formed basis for South American collections of Russian museums. However, the rich scientific records of the expedition, comprising many descriptions and discoveries in
zoology,
botany,
mineralogy,
medicine,
linguistics and
ethnography, that were sent to
Saint Petersburg by the expedition, were not published and were lost in the archives for a century. They were found again by
Soviet researchers in funds of the
USSR Academy of Sciences archive in 1930. Due to the travel's hardships, Langsdorff team was unable to collect many biological specimens or study them in detail, so most of their account is geographic and ethnographic, being particularly interesting on the many
indigenous people of Brazil they met, many of which became extinct. Today, a large part of the material has been recovered and is in the Ethographic Museum, the Zoological Museum and in the repositories of the Academy of Sciences of St. Petersburg. Langsdorff returned to Europe shortly after the Langsdorff Expedition to the Amazon, and died in
Freiburg,
Germany, of
typhus, in 1852. A recent study found that Langsdorff has 1,500 descendants in Brazil, among them the most famous is
Luma de Oliveira, a
Brazilian carnival queen. ==Legacy==