From Plant Press, Vol. 24, No. 1, January 2021.
By Julia Beros.
“There are thousands and thousands of ways to dig out a little plant, even if one has to resort to digging with his own nails,” such is the acumen of János Xántus, rather John Xantus, or perhaps Louis Vesey, or potentially and more accurately, J. Xántus de Vesey. A man enrobed by myth and lore Xántus was a famed Hungarian lawyer, then Lieutenant and then exile, but foremost a self-taught collector of plants and animals who contributed to the foundations of the Smithsonian Institution and the namesake to many novel species. Depending on where you look for information he is described as a zoologist, or an ornithologist, a naturalist, but never defined as a botanist. In a recent publication in Ann. Mus. Hist. Nat. Hung. (111: 145-177; 2019) by Daniel Pifkó of the Hungarian Natural History Museum’s Botany Department, researchers endured a massive undertaking of finding and accurately cataloging Xántus’ early plant collections from the 1850s in North America, which were sent largely unidentified and with jumbled data, ultimately delivering clarity and placing his collections in context with its greater and mythic history.
Born in Hungary in 1825, Xántus finished his secondary schooling and promptly pursued a legal career. In 1848, the Hungarian Revolution spurred war and Xántus at age 23, equipped with cartographic skills, became a chief lieutenant. He was captured and sent to Austria to be enlisted in the army there, but was soon freed and while fleeing was arrested again in Prague, where he somehow escaped and absconded to the United States. Arriving with seven dollars, Xántus made a career of odd jobs, visiting different cities and leaving “after picking conflicts” with locals, and then enlisted in the U.S. army where his unlikely career in science began. Enlisting under the name “Louis Vesey” his first station was at Fort Riley in Kansas where he met William Alexander Hammond, military physician and neurologist who made a hobby of collecting biological specimens for naturalist friend Spencer Fullerton Baird (Smithsonian Curator who served as Assistant Secretary and then as the Smithsonian Institution’s 2nd Secretary from 1878-87). The serendipity of this first assignment for Xántus gave him not only opportunity and motivation to collect biological specimens but training and mentorship from one of the world’s leading naturalists of the time as well. As one of Baird’s goals was to make the natural history collections more robust he was happy to enlist more collectors (keeping a vast list of contacts around the continent to solicit for collecting and sending material) and continue building the nation’s collections of a practically unstudied flora, essentially from scratch.
Xántus’ time with the army took him to Fort Tejon, California as a paramedic and, to the displeasure of his superiors, he continued collecting both plants and animals in his free-time for Baird. He soon left the army and joined the U.S. Coast Survey in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. Again, not on the greatest terms with his superiors, he continued collecting and sending material to Baird. Despite a lack of resources, experience and knowledge in the field, and often necessary tools, Xántus always found a way to procure specimens and preserve them as safely as possible with detailed information about location in his notebook, and with duplicates, often covering most of the important taxa in each region. His personal enthusiasm and curiosity for naturalism motivated him to learn on his own time reading guide books and corresponding with Baird when possible. Throughout his travels and time collecting in North America, legend says that Xántus fathered multiple children in a small tribe in the Baja California Peninsula of Mexico while also acting as a “diplomat” to so-called local despots. Despite this unconfirmed gallivanting, he sent back 122 different flowering plants, 17 of which were previously undescribed. He wrote frequently to his mother during his time in North America, often seasoning his letters with “imaginary achievements.” It is noted that his murky history is in part a result of both the lack of corroborated written history surrounding Xántus and his fabled tales regaled to his mother that were often unsubstantiated but retold and republished as some of the few records of his time collecting on the continent. His scientific achievements, however, are certainly not imagined.
Among his collections from California and Baja, Xántus sent 245 species of flowering plants. This does not include the sea stars and shellfish, the birds, the 200 mammals, the sloshing jars of fish, the insects, the bird’s nests, and any reptile that happened to cross his path. All of this material, comprising thousands of specimens, is part of the first systematic study of North American ecologies. His contributions are honored not only in his efforts in collecting and seeing that all material be sent to experts in each field (Asa Gray having identified and described all of the herbarium collections), but many of the species described from these bestow his name. Xántus made a point to have duplicate material sent to different institutions which he outlined in a letter, namely The Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, and the Royal Hungarian Society of Natural Sciences (which forwarded the material to the Hungarian National Museum).
An exile of a volatile political climate and a wartime escapee, Xántus found his way back to his home country via an extended collecting trip through North America. Upon returning in 1862 he made detailed records of his new-found knowledge in collecting and preparing biological specimens. Fueled by his curiosity he pursued knowledge and discovery and faced new challenges at every point of his career with an enthusiasm to study the natural world. Using the tools of our scientific collections, the tedious record keeping, the notebooks filled with numbers corresponding to other numbers corresponding to illegible five-syllable scribbles, the obscure letter or two with a one-word clue about a specimen’s location tucked away between drying plants or bookmarking a page in a flora publication, the researchers at the Hungarian Natural History Museum became detectives unravelling the cluttered catalog of Xántus’ legacy. A man said to be the inspiration for Winnetou’s “Old Shatterhand,” among other mythic characterizations, he is an example of the rich history of botanical collecting and collaborative work of science. As a correspondent to Baird he worked independently as a refugee in a new country with little experience in ecology, botany, or fieldwork, and with little guidance beyond intermittent letters and available books. Inspired by the world he was discovering and inspired by his own potential, he worked alone but as part of a greater mission: “the increase and diffusion of knowledge.”
Left: Holotype of Polygala xanti (Polygalaceae) collected in Cape San Lucas, Mexico by János Xántus between August 1859 and January 1860.
Right: Isotype of Clarkia xantiana (Onagraceae) collected in the vicinity Fort Tejon, California by János Xántus between 1857 and 1858.
Over 300 plant specimens collected by Xántus can be viewed in the Smithsonian’s online Botany Specimen Catalog <https://collections.nmnh.si.edu/search/botany/?q=cr+xantus>. I also encourage readers to view Pifkó’s publication:
Pifkó, D. 2019. Botanical activities of János Xántus (1825–1894) and his herbarium at the Department of Botany of the Hungarian Natural History Museum (HNHM). Ann. Mus. Hist. Nat. Hung. 111: 145-177. http://publication.nhmus.hu/annales/cikkreszletes.php?idhoz=7652
I would like to thank Zoltán Barina for sharing this publication with me and for his contagious enthusiasm for botany!
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