A FORGOTTEN ASTRONOMER

Maybe it’s still there … the seventeenth-century astronomical manuscript that gave cause to this book. Maybe it is still there …, somewhere in Spain. Perhaps in the attic of a house from one of the descendants of the Spanish admiral ANTONIO DE ULLOA. After all, he was the last known owner, a man who after his death in 1795 left a huge load of books and documents. The manuscript was last seen when DE ULLOA bought it around 1770, so will it ever be found again? Fortunately, in the eighteenth century two accurate copies of this extremely interesting manuscript were made. These are now preserved and cherished, one in a Paris library, and the other (partly preserved) in Lisbon. They contain nothing more or less than the astronomical legacy of GEORG MARGGRAFE (1610-1643), the first person who attempted to map the heavenly bodies in the southern sky in a systematic way. He did this, using contemporary state-of-the-art instruments on an European-style astronomical observatory, built specifically for that purpose.

MARGGRAFE had the ambition to become famous in astronomy, and he indeed became famous. But he achieved his fame in a scholarly field he originally did not seek. GEORG MARGGRAFE (erroneously mostly named Marcgraf, Markgraf, or Marcgrave), worked more than five years in colonial Dutch Brazil; to be exact from the spring of 1638 to mid-August 1643. Posthumously he obtained many credits for his important and innovative contributions to the Historia Naturalis Brasiliae (1648). This book was the influential first account of Brazil’s zoology and botany, in which also an early form of ethnography is presented. It became the standard work for knowledge about Brazilian nature for more than two centuries. In it MARGGRAFE also presented the first daily meteorological records made in Brazil, as well as one of the first microscopical surveys of insects made in the Dutch scholarly community. MARGGRAFE is also hailed for his construction of four maps of Dutch Brazil, which are regarded as one of the most accurate and elegant products of seventeenth century Dutch cartography.

But MARGGRAFE’s first and foremost desire was to become a famous astronomer.