Schomburgk was born at
Freyburg,
Electorate of Saxony, a son of Johann Friedrich Ludwig Schomburgk, a Protestant minister. In 1820, whilst staying with his uncle, he learnt
botany from a professor.
Commercial career He entered commercial life and, in 1828, went to the United States, where he worked for a time as a clerk in
Boston and
Philadelphia. In 1828, he was requested to supervise a transport of Saxon sheep to the American state of
Virginia, where he lived for a time. In the same year, he became a partner in a tobacco factory at
Richmond. The factory was burned down, and Schomburgk was ruined. In 1841, he returned to Guiana, this time as a
British Government official to survey the colony and fix its eastern and western boundaries. The result was the provisional boundary between
British Guiana and
Venezuela, known as the "
Schomburgk Line", and the boundary with the Dutch colony of
Surinam. He also made further geographical and ethnological observations and was joined there by his brother,
Moritz Richard. He repeatedly urged fixing the boundary with
Brazil, motivated by his encounters with Brazilian
enslavement of local Indian tribes, most of which no longer exist. Schomburgk's survey later played a role in the arbitration of the
southern boundary between British Guiana and Brazil, with arbitration by the
King of Italy in 1904. On the brothers' return to London in June 1844, Schomburgk presented a report of his journey to the Geographical Society, for which he was knighted by
Queen Victoria in 1845, In 1857, he was promoted to the position of British Consul-General of
Siam, where Britain exercised
extraterritorial jurisdiction through
consular courts over
British subjects. In a letter to his cousin William, Schomburgk notes, "In order to get an insight into the English summary police court proceedings, I was, before I left London, obliged to attend police courts there for some time, also to acquaint myself with these proceedings by the study of books". and thence by elephant across the mountain range to
Moulmein on the
Bay of Bengal, returning to Bangkok after a trip of 135 days and approximately 1,000 English miles. Many special of Neotropical plants are named for him: •
Harperocallis schomburgkiana (
Oliv.) L.M.Campb. &
Dorr His botanical collection is at
Kew and his ethnographical collection from Guyana is at the
British Museum. ==Works==