Introduction

1In the last days of June of 1825, a Prussian man named Christian Gottfried Ehrenberg stood before a grave freshly dug in the calcareous ground of Taulud (T’walet) Island, the outskirts of the island port of Massawa. He was giving what we must imagine were cursory last rites to his colleague and travel companion Wilhelm Friedrich Hemprich, who had just died of a disease also plaguing the bereft Ehrenberg himself.1 We do not know who else stood by his side on that sad day and whether Ehrenberg dug the grave himself, though it is likely that he was assisted by the local contacts the Prussians had made in Massawa, a town that lay at the distant margins of their usual networks. Thus far they had relied on the captain who had brought them there and hailed from these parts, as well as recommendation letters all the way from Cairo that had won them the graces of the local governor.2 Hemprich and Ehrenberg had spent the previous five and a half years as Prussia’s scientific explorers in the Middle East, studying and collecting faunal and floral specimens for the newly minted “Zoologische Museum der Universität zu Berlin” (today’s Museum für Naturkunde). Their research had initially focused on Egypt and Nubia, and had subsequently assumed a remarkable maritime dimension through two Red Sea expeditions, one around the Sinai Peninsula and a second one pushing to the southern Red Sea and reaching the shores of Abyssinia (present-day Eritrea). That the two men succeeded in getting that far in late spring of 1825 was the result of their dependence on overlapping networks of scientific circles, political connections and, just as crucially, local knowledge practitioners.

2At only twenty-four years of age when he set out from Berlin, Wilhelm Hemprich was already an accomplished scientist who had completed excellent studies in medicine and zoology; a year older, Christian Ehrenberg was a similarly promising and gifted naturalist, who had studied theology, and then medicine and botany. During his studies in Berlin, Ehrenberg had become associated with the great polymath and dedicated patron of scientific inquiry Alexander von Humboldt.3 The learned circles and northern European scientific patronage networks that Humboldt embodied constitute the most intimate milieu and the immediate context for understanding the legacy of Hemprich’s and Ehrenberg’s Red Sea scientific mission. What made their travels possible in the first place was funding by the Prussian government but also the broader web of politics and diplomacy of European imperial and sub-imperial actors in the “Near East” in general and Egypt more specifically. British and French imperial ambitions and a constellation of myriad other interests in the territories of the Ottoman realm were beginning to see the Red Sea as an avenue of new trade and communication. But ultimately, the scientific knowledge gained at great cost was also, and perhaps most immediately, owed to the local networks of transportation and people on the ground with intimate and deep experience of the ecology of the Red Sea itself.

3In the introduction to a partial account of their journey, Ehrenberg details the illnesses that hampered the naturalists’ work and even took lives of expedition members, and notes that their outfit throughout those six years of Middle Eastern scientific travel “resembled more a field hospital than a research institute”.4 Hardship may have become a topos of European travel writing in this period as Mary Louise Pratt has pointed out,5 but illness and danger were real and constituted decisive factors in the outcome of early scientific projects. That the two men persevered in the final leg of their journey down the Red Sea can be demonstrably connected to their specific scientific interests; tellingly, they saw Massawa as the gateway to the natural world of highland Ethiopia, “the Alps of Abyssinia” as Ehrenberg put it, where they could verify relatively recently published reports and add much that was new to them and their peers.6 In spite of the difficulties and the suffering throughout, moreover, Ehrenberg’s and Hemprich’s endeavors, including their two Red Sea journeys, produced significant new knowledge: in total, they managed to send back to Berlin some 80,000 plant and animal specimens, recording numerous new biota.7 From the southern Red Sea in particular came 23 out of 107 trunks of specimens, as well as a wealth of information about the marine and littoral environments of the region. This fieldwork confirmed and supplemented the baseline environmental record established by the famed Swedish naturalist and student of Carl Linné Pehr Forsskål half a century before them, and the French savant and member of the Napoleonic Mission scientifique Jules-César Savigny closer to their own time.8 Their contemporary Bavarian naturalist Eduard Rüppell, the German explorer-turned-ornithologist Theodor von Heuglin and later the German medical doctor Karl Benjamin Klunzinger produced publications that are more complete and deservedly far better known for the development of modern zoology, botany and marine biology of the Red Sea and its coasts.9 But Ehrenberg’s and Hemprich’s efforts were pioneering and left their mark on Red Sea research – especially, as we shall see, in the study of coral reefs, a characteristic biological feature of these waters.10 Most significantly for the purposes of this paper, the record of Hemprich’s and Ehrenberg’s sailing itinerary preserves important navigational and topographical information about both sides of the Red Sea and can be fruitfully compared to the geographic offerings of celebrated British travelers James Bruce and the pair George Annesley (Earl of Mountnorris, styled Viscount or Lord Valentia) and Henry Salt before them. Moreover, it offers us a supplementary view of the relationship between local interlocutors and European interlopers.

4The two young Prussian naturalists’ journey thus represents a significant early moment in the post‑Napoleonic engagement between European learned circles and the Middle East, as well as in the development of modern scientific knowledge of the Red Sea in particular. Regarding the European scientific “project” in the 18th and 19th centuries Mary Louise Pratt has developed the concepts of contact zones and hegemonic transcultural interaction and argued that naturalist and “naturalising” travel narratives were essential to and complicit with the bourgeois European sense of European authority over the whole world; more generally she has noted the “overdetermined” nature of these narratives, the naturalists’ globalizing discourse, and the displacement of indigenous modes of knowledge by European ones.11 While not discounting the validity of such dynamics in particular historical contexts, this essay attempts to differentiate between naturalist (meaning trained, specialist scientific) and naturalising (meaning non-specialist but scientifically minded) texts and their authors, and to emphasize the interplay between mostly oral local knowledge and the written results of scientific inquiry. This is in order to highlight the nature and contributions of that otherwise poorly visible local expertise. Because of the idiosyncrasies of scientific travel in general, their own positionality as representatives of a sub-imperial European power, but perhaps also because of their personal scholarly sensibilities and youthful earnestness, the record that Hemprich and Ehrenberg produced during their Red Sea expedition both conforms to and contrasts the model of “overdetermined” narratives on non-European people and places in European texts.12 Specifically, it reflects the complicated relationship between local knowledge and seemingly detached scientific data production, which came into being thanks to the crucial contribution of indigenous informants and a variety of personal contacts between “outsiders” and “insiders”. I thus posit that discursive and visual products such as those of Hemprich and Ehrenberg’s voyage offer more than a reflection of the well-understood hegemonic, conflictual, and asymmetric dynamics of contact zones, such as that of the Red Sea, in the age of imperialism and colonialism. Resulting from a complex web of relationships and interactions, they provide multiple insights into contact zone dynamics in particular historical moments, and can even preserve, albeit in a refracted and fragmentary way, an outline of local knowledge and experience that is otherwise inaccessible to us.

Imperial networks and local entanglement round the Red Sea

5The Massawa where the two Prussian naturalists arrived in late April 1825 and where Ehrenberg buried Hemprich barely two months later was in that period still “a somnolent little port-town with no more than a handful of coral stone houses and a multitude of disorderly thatched huts”, but it also had an Ottoman past and was already once again coming under Egypt’s expanding sphere of influence; in other words, it was becoming more closely intertwined with political and commercial networks running the length and breadth of the Red Sea.13

6In the previous quarter century, the era ushered in by the aftermath of the Napoleonic interlude in Egypt (1798‑1801) saw the establishment of Mehmet Ali’s governorship of Egypt (1805‑1849) and the Egyptian state’s increasingly expansionist program, including its forays across the Red Sea and by land south into Sudan. British interest and influence in Egypt had also intensified, as witnessed by the installation in Cairo of consul‑generals who were now controlled by the British crown rather than the mercantile interests that had created the institution in the first place.14 One of these consuls was Henry Salt, who had traveled across the Red Sea and into Ethiopia and had recorded crucial physical information and collected antiquities.15 He had done so initially thanks to his wealthy and well-connected patron Lord Valentia, whose own goals were strategic and commercial, educated and favoring erudition though he was; and later (1809‑1810) independently, as an emissary of the British government to the emperor of highland Ethiopia. Salt’s appointment as consul‑general (1816), as well as his location in Cairo, close to Mehmet Ali’s court rather than in Alexandria, where the other European consuls resided, clearly shows his own political entanglement, as well as those of his patrons and his country. While Ehrenberg referred to Valentia’s map and to Salt’s scientific observations frequently, he and Hemprich also had to rely on British diplomatic support for their endeavors down the Red Sea. One of the unpublished items at the Academy of Sciences in Berlin is a document issued for our Prussians by none other than Henry Salt as consul‑general in Egypt. A letter of recommendation addressed “to Gideon Hutchinson Honorable Company’s Resident, Mocha”, on behalf of “Dr Hemprich and Dr Ehrenberg, two Prussian travelers of great respectability”, requests that Hutchinson “have the goodness to afford them every assistance in your power, and protect them as if they were British subjects in case of need”.

7Henry Salt, on the one hand, epitomizes the ways in which political and scientific networks were intertwined; Hemprich and Ehrenberg, on the other hand, remained at the periphery of those politics. While they never made it to Mocha, they carried with them his as well as Egyptian officials’ recommendations on their way south, and counted on them as life-lines, a fact that reflects not only Prussia’s status as a secondary, recently constituted national power but also the nature and motives of the two men’s presence in the region. In the introduction to an early and partial account of their journey, Ehrenberg spells out their reliance on others:

Certain Europeans of the Orient, but also certain brown and black men, whose names I will mention in the course of my narrative, have, upon closer familiarity, excited in me feelings of affection and friendship based on respect. But three men were in particular to the greatest degree our advising and greatly helping friends: the Austrian consul in Cairo Herr François Champion, the Jewish doctor of Alexandria Herr Dr Marpurgo, and the praiseworthy and noble Turkish General Abdim Bey.16

8The racializing language and the clear preference, here and elsewhere, for men of letters or of consequence are as inescapable here as they are problematic, but the effort to acknowledge debts to local interlocutors, even in the abstract, is noteworthy.17

9An anecdote from the subsequent century provides a revealing counterpoint to the motives and sensibilities of the two Prussian naturalists and underlines the difference between naturalists and naturalising travelers. In his account of a dangerous enterprise to document the course of the Awash river in Dankalia (in present-day Eritrea), latter-day British explorer Wilfred Thesiger describes a momentous and precarious meeting with the Amoita of the Danakil that was to decide the fate of the whole endeavor, and in the process makes his motives abundantly clear: “I had come here in search of adventure: the mapping, the collecting of animals and birds were all incidental”.18 Thesiger’s passion for the place he craved to “discover” and the respect he evinces for his local interlocutors throughout the account notwithstanding, his colonial upbringing had bequeathed him the “naturalising” habit to possess through description of the natural world. A century before him in an adjacent geographical space, Hemprich and Ehrenberg had similarly pursued their goal of reaching Abyssinia with enthusiastic resolve, and youthful intensity of focus is something they had in common with Thesiger. To them, however, “the mapping” and especially “the collecting of animals and birds” were the compelling reason to push themselves beyond their limits, and the information they painstakingly acquired, incorporating several elements of local knowledge, found its place in the scientific annals of natural history.

The naturalists’ Red Sea: scientific networks and contributions

10In the spring of 1823, Hemprich addressed from Egypt a rather impatient letter to Hinrich Lichtenstein, director of Berlin’s aforementioned zoological museum.19 Dated 10th April 1823 from Damietta, the letter sets out the arguments for why Hemprich and Ehrenberg should extend their researches to the Red Sea in spite of delays in instructions from Berlin and persistent problems with funding. Their destination would be the Gulf of Suez and the shores of the Sinai up to the port town of Tor (El Tor). Although, Hemprich noted, the political circumstances were now more favorable for research in Egypt and the Red Sea itself, funding and communication problems meant that they would have to “deny ourselves the pleasure of a whole new, longer voyage to Ethiopia or the Red Sea”.20 Hemprich’s and Ehrenberg’s two Red Sea journeys began two months after Hemprich had written to Lichtenstein about their reasons for venturing there. In early June of 1823, he was again writing to their sponsor at the Zoology Museum in Berlin, this time from Suez:

Here we are at last on the Red Sea, delighting in its treasures: twelve species of fish, nine of them known to Forsskål plus three new ones, six species of holothurians, most new, six types of starfishes, three types of Ophiura [brittle stars and serpent stars], five types of Ascidia [tunicates], many mussels with and without animals, a dozen crustaceans, another one of Nereids [ragworms], and so on and so forth are the gleanings of the first excursion that I made by boat in the area of Ajün Musa [Uyun Musa].21

11From Suez, the pair and their small entourage (two hunters, a painter and a cook) proceeded to Tor, which they used as a base to explore both seawards, the Gulf of Suez and the littoral waters eastward all the way to Sharm El‑Sheikh, and landwards, the hinterland of the Sinai Peninsula. In autumn Hemprich returned to Cairo to organize the dispatches of samples, while Ehrenberg stayed on, and one of the results of this part of the voyage was a cross-section of a coral reef, possibly the first such view of the underwater world ever to be produced, and a particular product of the encounter between local people and the naturalists to which we shall return to later in this essay. After some disagreement over subsequent plans, more delays in instructions and funds, and a venture to Mount Lebanon, the two returned to Suez in January of 1825 and from there embarked on their last and most difficult undertaking. This southbound passage, which ultimately produced some of their most interesting topographical observations, took them first to Yambu and Jeddah, and from there down the Arabian coast to Qunfudhah, the Farasans and Al‑Luhayyah, before the crossing the Red Sea westwards to the Dahlak archipelago and ultimately to the port of Massawa on the Eritrean coast.

12An explicit focus on the exploration of the Red Sea and its natural world was what had partly animated the entire expedition in its inception, what the Prussian state and scientific establishment sponsors had originally intended for the two men.22 As mentioned earlier, European naturalists exploring Middle Eastern marine and coastal environments in the early 1800s were following in the footsteps of Pehr Forsskål and Jules‑César Savigny – a case in point being a list of collected specimens from El Tor written by Hemprich, with species identifications dutifully referencing those two renowned scholars.23 Particularly Forsskål’s pioneering work on zoology, conducted during the famed Danish expedition in Arabia in 1761 till his death in 1763 and published posthumously in 1775‑1776, can be said to have been “dominated by his investigations on the Red Sea”,24 which he was able to traverse in its entire length, reaching as far as Yemen and producing a solid record of marine and coastal environments on the sea’s eastern shores. Savigny, under the auspices of the Napoleonic Mission scientifique, had been limited to Suez and contributed a natural history volume of the Description de l’Égypte, with illustrations of marine species that also served as a basis of species identification for later researchers. The three “naturalising” British travelers, James Bruce, George Valentia, and Henry Salt, had also contributed to the study of Red Sea ecologies, collecting and recording as laymen with primarily commercial and political interests in the region, but also with an Enlightenment-trained eye for the natural world.25 The prestige and networking potential of this scientific heritage would have been paramount in the calculation of the Prussian institutional sponsors; and as their writings amply attest, the scholarship itself loomed large in the minds of Hemprich and Ehrenberg themselves. Thus, the infusion of money and the scholarly determination that made that final leg of the entire expedition possible after four years of productive but difficult meanderings in Egypt and the Sudan can be seen as a testament to the allure that the Red Sea, the closest tropical sea to Europe, exercised individually and collectively in post-Enlightenment Europe.26

13In their field notes Hemprich and Ehrenberg make references both to the naturalists and to the naturalising travelers before them, that is Forsskål, Savigny, Bruce, Valentia and Salt. What distinguished the Prussians’ undertaking from those of these predecessors? Unlike Bruce, Valentia and Salt, but like Forsskål and Savigny, Hemprich and Ehrenberg were formally trained in the natural sciences of their day. Unlike Forsskål and Savigny, but like Bruce, Valentia and Salt, the Prussians undertook a passage of the entire length of the Red Sea, and experienced both of its coasts. Finally, like Forsskål and Bruce, but quite unlike Savigny, Valentia and Salt, their backing was not part of a clearly delineated and fully committed imperial project in the region. In their dual capacity as travelers and scientific naturalists, and their ambiguously empowered, sub-imperial status, their entanglement in political, scientific and local knowledge networks of the Red Sea makes for a more precarious but also a more direct experience. One gets a sense of that in a letter by Hemprich to his professor Karl Asmund Rudolphi towards the end of his sojourn on the Red Sea the first time around:

There is still a lot to find here, especially in the south. On the people front, we have not yet encountered any obstacles; in Moileh [Al Muwayleh] we encountered the Pilgrimage caravan heading to Mecca, but there was no unpleasantness. Of course, now we speak Arabic, and in addition we look quite gruff with our shotguns and pistols. But the sea shows us and our tiny boats a mean face, and there neither Arabic nor shotguns or pistols are of any help. Our means do not allow for the hire of a larger boat, and a small one puts us in grave danger.27

14Without the escort of a naval ship, a big entourage, or funds to dispense at will, the Prussian naturalists conducted research and collected specimens heavily dependent on their ability to ingratiate themselves with the people they met along the way, and on their use of letters of introduction to gain the support of local authorities. This scheme also had specific implications for their reliance on local knowledge. In terms of collecting specimens, they supplemented their own personal efforts with charging local inhabitants, sometimes children, with the task.28 Learning Arabic and querying local people on the names of biota collected was also important to them though often the names they give are difficult to decode either in Arabic or in transliteration. In terms of gathering geographical information on maritime topography, moreover, a decisive factor was their exclusive use of local vessels; the captains and crew of these vessels chose routes and named places along the way, thus giving Hemprich and Ehrenberg the opportunity to record topography against maps that they carried with them.

15The most immediate archive produced by Hemprich’s and Ehrenberg’s six years of Middle Eastern journeys was the corpus of specimens itself. The fate of this hard-earned collection and its publication was checkered, and fell victim to miscommunications and differences of vision concerning the fate of the samples between its collectors (Hemprich and Ehrenberg) and its curators (especially Lichtenstein) back in Berlin.29 Publication was further compromised by Hemprich’s unfortunate demise, but also by Ehrenberg’s change of scientific focus upon his return. Before abandoning the publication project and moving on, Ehrenberg succeeded in producing a first installment of the expedition’s zoological and botanical results in five meticulously documented and lavishly illustrated but partial albums on mammals, birds, fishes, and botany. Some of the species pictured and described come from the Red Sea area. In a characteristic example, the volume devoted to avian species includes representatives of a stork species (Ciconia sphenorrhynchus Abdimii) and an egret or heron (Ardea lepterodas schistacea) native to “Dongola et maris rubri insula Dalac prope Habessiniam” (Dongola and the Red Sea island of Dahlak off Abyssinia) and “in mari rubro septentrionali et meridionali frequens” (endemic to the northern and southern Red Sea) respectively. They are both represented in marine, presumably Red Sea landscapes, are accompanied by the local Arabic names of the species, and the former is even formally named after “Abdim Beg” (‘Ābidīn Bey al‑Arnā’ūṭ), the same provincial governor in Nubia and gracious host to the two Prussians that Ehrenberg singles out for thanks and high praise among the individuals who assisted them along the way; they thus constitute tantalizing examples of the much fuller unpublished record and its local resonances.30

16If the monumental volumes remained unfinished, however, in the 1830s Ehrenberg also presented and published in Berlin an influential series of three papers on corals. Soon translated in an abridged form into English, this groundbreaking work on corals became part of a growing scientific debate about the nature of these complex organisms for which the Red Sea was the proximate frontier. In print, Ehrenberg acknowledged his debt to European precursors in Red Sea research: about Savigny he says that he was the most knowledgeable of Red Sea researchers, while he notes about Forsskål – whom he generally and frequently mentions in almost reverential terms – that concerning the nature of corals he seems to have been “led astray”.31 Also included in this article is a detailed description of the process of collecting the information, to which we will return below.

17Ehrenberg’s newly found and intense interests in microscopy, micropalaeontology and microsedimentology may have taken him away from completing the publication of the Red Sea and other Middle Eastern biota collections, but even so were not entirely disconnected from his Red Sea travels or from the development of Red Sea research after him. He was the first to scientifically record the Red Sea’s “red tides”, the biological phenomenon caused by concentration of marine microorganisms (planktonic cyanobacteria, or the alga trichodesmium erythraeum); while the relationship of this phenomenon with the origin of the sea’s name, a question that certainly animated Ehrenberg and many of his contemporaries, may be an unsolvable debate, the understanding of the microbiology of red tides can be said to foreshadow research in the Red Sea’s extreme saline environments and the characteristic evaporite deposits along its shores known as sabkhas.32 Furthermore, Ehrenberg’s interest in microorganisms in sediments may also be linked to developments in Red Sea research after his time: it was referenced in some of the earliest deep sea sampling that took place through another German-speaking initiative, the Austro-Hungarian Pola expedition near the turn of the 20th century.33

18The published scientific corpus is only one part of the expedition’s record, and an indirect one at that. As with the Danish scientific expedition of the 1760s, a more direct image of the engagement of the naturalists with the space they were exploring appears in their voluminous correspondence with sponsors, patrons, and scientific interlocutors.34 An anthology of Hemprich and Ehrenberg’s correspondence was transcribed and edited by Erwin Stresemann, whose work constitutes the foundation of any study on the progress of the two men in the Middle East. Kept at the Akademie der Wissenschaften in Berlin, these, and many other, unpublished letters as well as a large number of other written ephemera of the expedition constitute its main archive. Some items, such as letters of introduction that the two men carried with them during their voyages down the Red Sea, lie there unopened since the 19th century, perhaps awaiting a future study on the imperial and sub-imperial networks of politics and science of the time.

19An additional archive is accessible to researchers at the Berlin Zoological Museum’s Institute for Evolution and Biodiversity, with field notes, lists, additional letters, and most remarkably field drawings sent back from Egypt and the Red Sea, as well as drawings made of the collected specimens in the subsequent decades as publication work dragged on.35 Directly relating to Red Sea research, is a folder of drawings of corals mostly from Suez, El Tor, and Sharm El‑Sheikh, as well of other marine organisms and littoral fauna, including a series of crustaceans labeled with their provenance from Massawa and the Dahlak islands. Most importantly, this volume also contains a cross-section sketch of a coral reef, with the figure of a man putting in a sounding (fig. 1). As mentioned earlier, this may be the first such drawing, the first view of the Red Sea’s underwater world and thus a concrete vestige of a new and essentially maritime perspective on nature.36

Fig. 1 – Coral reef cross-section sketch by Ehrenberg, kept at the Museum for Natural History in Berlin (Museum für Naturkunde, HBSB, ZM B VIII 649‑653, Skizzenbücher Christian Gottfried Ehrenberg, Nr. 20; photo by J. Affolter).

20It dovetails well with a passage from the introduction of Ehrenberg’s groundbreaking publications on corals in which he contrasts the view of corals from the land with the experience of them from a boat:

He who sails in a small vessel during a calm, enjoys a happier and richer view of these inhabitants of a new and to him unknown world, upon the luxurious coral banks of the high sea, than he who travels along the coast, where the unequal depth of the sea produces only a few crippled specimens of this kind. At length, much excited and burning with curiosity, he steps into a boat, and endeavors in a shallow place to lay hold of some of the most beautiful of these forms, in order to examine them more minutely. The crew who on such occasions willingly assist, or he himself step out into the water, but as soon as they touch the ground of the coral banks all those brilliant colors which an instant before beautified this spot, gradually disappear.37

21Although describing for rhetorical effect the traveler with no scientific understanding of corals, the passage conveys a glimpse into Ehrenberg’s romantic memory of how he himself must have first experienced field research on corals in his early excursions from Suez and El Tor. Although the people who assisted him appear only fleetingly and vaguely as shadows in his writings, reading between the lines of the rest of the corpus, we learn a bit more about those willing crew and their contributions.

The islanders’ Red Sea: navigating the sea of corals

22In querying their biology, Ehrenberg’s scientific interest in corals – and in the question of their calcification – focused on the ways in which these marine organisms build up into different kinds of networked formations, thereby shaping underwater topography. The Red Sea passage in 1825 acquainted Hemprich and Ehrenberg first-hand with the dangers presented by these formations, coral banks or reefs. Already on the first leg of the voyage, from Suez to Jeddah, their ship “run onto a coral reef in the middle of the high seas off Wusch [the port of El Wajh] but luckily sustained no damage”.38 In the letter containing this quote, written in Jeddah to their professor Rudolphi in Berlin, Ehrenberg also describes that, of the other ships in their convoy from Suez, six had gone missing and some of those had sunk. In addition to noting the web of local information and news that Ehrenberg’s remarks imply, it is important to emphasize here that while lingering on dangers is a topos of European travelers’ and naturalists’ accounts of “contact zones”, the emphasis on the real dangers of navigating around and through coral reefs is a very old feature of descriptions of the Red Sea, as, for example, a well-known passage from 12th-century Andalusian pilgrim and original travel writer Ibn Jubayr amply illustrates.39

23On the southern Red Sea, Ehrenberg later noted that:

I had also sufficient opportunity of ascertaining that there is no want of coral banks in those regions, for when we crossed the sea from the Arabian isle Camaran [Kamaran] to Dhalac [Dahlak Kebir], we met with coral banks near every island and with several detached coral rocks, nearly the whole of which were covered with water, and consequently would be reckoned amongst the most dangerous in the Red Sea if they were situated in the track of vessels.40

24Indeed, the sea passage as a whole afforded the two men the opportunity to exercise another aspect of scientific travel of their day, namely the recording of geography, and more specifically of maritime topography. Their unpublished papers include listings of landmarks and toponyms – ports, anchorages, capes, coastal mountains, islands – along the mostly coastal routes they traveled, outlines of coasts and islands, and rough drawings of particular route segments – the westward passage across the southern Red Sea from Kamaran off the Arabian coast to Dahlak on the Abyssinian coast chief among them. Moreover, their letters and a memoir kept by Ehrenberg’s family and partially published by Stresemann (the Erinnerungen), provide crucial complementary information about these itineraries and the experience of sailing the Red Sea more broadly speaking.41 In all, the juxtaposition of the published work and the unpublished sketches and other research ephemera yields information regarding three aspects of local knowledge: marine topographical knowledge and navigational practices; local toponymy and the names of islands; and, at a metalevel, the ways in which outsiders learned from those routinely navigating the Red Sea and inhabiting its coasts and islands. Put otherwise, it is in recording the truly maritime and nautical aspects of the Red Sea that Hemprich and Ehrenberg and other European interlopers relied most centrally on the crews and captains with whom they sailed, and on the local knowledge these men purveyed. This local knowledge, in turn, had a long, diverse and continuous history in the region, exemplified partly in the writings of the Arab navigational authors of the 9th‑10th/15th‑16th century, and partly in the local mariners’ orally transmitted principles and directions, recorded as late as our own days.42

25The itineraries of Hemprich and Ehrenberg are in themselves revealing of the degree to which they relied on local and regional navigational networks. Roughly following the eastern route down the Red Sea as taken before them by the Danish expedition and, with the notable difference of starting from Quseir, by James Bruce, they traveled from Suez to Jeddah on board a local vessel, apparently carrying the common Arabic ship name Fatḥ al‑Khayr and participating in a convoy of pilgrim ships.43 In a brief note to his father, Ehrenberg reveals that this was no great sailing vessel but rather an “offnes Schifflein”, an undecked little boat, coasting to its destination.44 In Jeddah, a midpoint between the navigationally divided waters of the northern and southern Red Sea, they boarded a different boat. Ehrenberg’s memoir reveals that the captain of this vessel was a Dahlaki, an islander from the Dahlak archipelago off the western coast of the southern Red Sea.45 That this man was covering – and as we shall see, had both expert knowledge of and contacts in – both shores of this part of the maritime terrain, constitutes an important insight into the mechanics of maritime networks in the area. A “sensible old fellow… an inhabitant of Dhalac” was also employed as pilot to accompany the British vessels of George Valentia’s foray across the Red Sea, while James Bruce’s captain who hailed from the Egyptian port of Quseir seems to have been less well acquainted with and run into considerable trouble in the southern reaches of the Red Sea.46 Thus, the great extent of island-hopping involved in the itineraries followed by Hemprich and Ehrenberg coupled with the identity of the captain who took charge on the second leg of the journey reveal the importance of island networks in the Red Sea and the particular kinds of navigational knowledge they produced.

26Two prime examples of island complexes defining navigation on either side of the Red Sea were experienced directly by Hemprich and Ehrenberg: the Farasans off modern-day Saudi Arabia not far from the border with Yemen, and the Dahlaks off modern-day Eritrea. Somewhat surprisingly, the Farasans had not been firmly identified by the earlier European reporters who traveled the same route in the 18th and early 19th centuries. The Red Sea map created by Carsten Niebuhr vaguely indicated islands off the coast of the port of Jizan and one of these is labelled “Firān”, but neither the proper toponyms nor the characteristic outline of the Farasan archipelago appear on either the Danish or the British maps of the period.47 So it was that Ehrenberg could boast of a “discovery”:

At noon on March 6th we steered in a southeastern direction on the high seas. With a light northerly, which kept switching to a calm, we reached at eleven at night an island group, which our pilot, a Dahlak islander, called Farsan. This, however, was not marked on Lord Valentia’s map, a copy of which we had brought along. We discerned in the moonlight the flat shore of the island and asked the captain to run into one of its harbors.48

27Ehrenberg continues by pointing out that, contrary to their request, their captain set the anchor offshore, because, as he admits, knowing the waters in these parts the Dahlaki navigator was well aware of dangerous shallows even at a distance from land. When they finally and cautiously approached the archipelago’s main island the next day, the captain explained that this was Farasan Kebir, the archipelago’s main island, and went with a small party onshore “to seek an islander who could safely steer us”. There “the island shaykh, Ibrahīm Abū Sayfayn (Twin‑Sword)” eventually provided the local pilot to steer their ship through the Farasan shallows and into the island’s main harbor. Thus, it was thanks to the Dahlaki islander’s local knowledge as well as his local connections that this segment of the route could be negotiated, a fact that reveals the nature of dovetailed maritime turfs and their dynamics.

28Hemprich and Ehrenberg’s westward crossing of the Red Sea followed very closely the route taken by James Bruce some fifty years earlier: starting at the Yemeni northern port of Loheia (Al Luhayya), they passed a number of coastal islands, lingered at Kamaran and its surrounding islands, and then struck out for the open sea, seeing in the distance the remarkable volcanic Jabal al‑Tair that marks the midway point between the west and the eastern shore of the Red Sea; soon thereafter they entered the Dahlak archipelago. A very rough sketch of this leg of the journey, preserved in the Museum für Naturkunde archive, contains a number of island names (fig. 2), which coincide with those mentioned in Ehrenberg’s memoir. Checked against the island names attested in the accounts of James Bruce and Lord Valentia and later cartography but also against those that occur much earlier in the works of the renowned Arab navigators Sulaymān al‑Mahrī and Aḥmad Ibn Mājid, the list of islands contained in the record of Hemprich’s and Ehrenberg’s voyage contributes to the study of the evolution of island toponymy in the region.49

Fig. 2 – Rough sketch map of Hemprich’s and Ehrenberg’s crossing of the southern Red Sea, kept at the Museum for Natural History in Berlin (Museum für Naturkunde, HBSB, ZM B VIII 649‑653, Skizzenbücher Christian Gottfried Ehrenberg, Nr. 20; photo by J. Affolter).

29Listed in the order in which they were encountered as the Prussians and their companions made their way across the sea are the following islands (their names here given as they appear in the original German text with modern names in parentheses)50:

• eastern side of the Red Sea: Camaran (Kamaran) – Badie (al Bawdi, El Bhodie) – Hatabahn (Hataban) – Ketaban (Big Kadaman, Al‑Urmar) – Kossur (Kusi, Qasi) – Fokfahsch (Antufash) – Okban (Uqban) – Ketame (Al Khawtamah);

• midway: Gebel Fehr (Jabal al‑Tair)51;

• western side of the Red Sea: Megaede (Mojeidi) – Aukan (Aucan) – Darganasch (?) – Belhosse (Bulissar) – Seit ambar (Seil Anber) – Gesiret el Messara (Museri) – Seit um Ali (Assarca?) – Dhalak (Dahlak Kebir) – Hauakel Island (Hawakil) – Gesiret al Ajuse (Umel‑Ajuz) – Amfala (island in Anfila Bay?) – Tel Eht (Assarca?) – Seit um Ali (Assarca?) – Schummaha (Shumma) – Dhalak (Dahlak) – Modat (Madote) – Massaua (Massawa).

30This list reveals that the route chosen cut across from the area of Kamaran and its fringing islets heading westwards and reaching the southern outer edges of the Dahlak archipelago (the islands of Mojeidi and Aucan); then proceeded south-westward to the adjacent island group of Hawakil, eventually doubling back to spend a full week on Dahlak Kebir, the main island of the archipelago. Juxtaposing firm and possible identifications and other references to these islands in the cartographic and geographic literature reveals different sailing patterns and overlapping circuits; this list offers the first attestation of at least one island name, Seil Anber (in Arabic transliteration Ṣayl ‘Anbar), a toponym that refers to a beach or strand (ṣayl or sayl) where ‘anbar, the valuable ambergris, would have been collected.52

31The list and sketch thus represent not only what the two Prussian naturalists expected to find from their reading of the latest British map of the area, but also what they were told by the Dahlaki captain who brought them to the shores of Abyssinia. As G.R. Tibbets pointed out a long time ago, generalized sailing networks in medieval and early modern times barely ventured inside the Dahlak archipelago. The degree to which names of individual islands other than the main island of Dahlak Kebir show up or rather do not show up in maps and accounts of navigation in the area is a sign of insider-outsider dynamic that impacted sailing patterns. Names of individual islands of the archipelago other than the main island first appear in a twelfth-century Jewish merchant’s letter preserved in the Cairo Geniza, the poetic correspondence of Alexandrian itinerant poet Ibn Qalāqis (d. 1169), and the travel account of Ibn al‑Mujāwir (fl. ca 1229), but these are sporadic and singular occurrences; later, in the early 10th/16th century, the Arab navigational authors Sulaymān al‑Mahrī and Aḥmad Ibn Mājid provide additional names, and especially al‑Mahrī gives a full list of several names, but it is interesting to note that even these authors name islands only on the periphery of the archipelago, demonstrating that non-islanders sailed around rather than sailing through.53

32Island toponymy can tell us a lot about the ways in which maritime space was used and conceptualized through time.54 In maritime spaces with long histories of regional and local navigation such as that of the Red Sea, multiple and often overlapping names were conferred by indigenous multilingual and multicultural crews, islanders and littoral people occupying the sea, and memorialized things that were important to them. Some of these persisted, and often resisted the attempted renaming that hegemonic newcomers felt entitled to impose. Deciphering possible etymologies of these names and tracing their transformation over time can be revealing of local dynamics in the occupation and use of maritime space. For example, local toponymy can tell us about how places were conceptualized through the raw materials or other goods that humans associated with them – such as the ambergris (‘ambar) of Seil Anber or the firewood (khawāṭib) of Hawatib Island in the Dahlak archipelago. In a complementary scheme, names could have derived from stories told about landmarks that helped the mnemonics of practical navigation – as suggested, for example, by the toponym Gesiret al Ajuse/Umel‑Ajuz, likely from the Arabic jazīrat al‑‘ajūza (“the island of the old woman”).

33In the process of exploring the waters of this part of the African coast, Lord Valentia saw it fit to name after himself the island of Dissei in the Bay of Zula, which thus came to appear in some maps as Valentia Island.55 The name did not stick, however; the sea of local occupation, local history and local knowledge washed it away. In a move that reflects a similar structure of European discursive claims over non-European geographic space, Ehrenberg mused later in life about the fact that the German geographer Berghaus had assigned his and his deceased companion’s names to the small outer islands of the Dahlak archipelago.56 The appellation was even shorter-lived than that of Valentia, and remains only as a fragmentary vestige of the Prussian Red Sea endeavor’s aftermath. During the time actually spent in the archipelago, Hemprich’s and Ehrenberg’s attention was decidedly not on such future claims but on the maritime and insular natural world they seem to have delighted in:

We passed by the east shore of the flat island Schummaha, and reached the small islands off Dhalak belonging to it. At three o’clock we dropped anchor off the south shore of Dhalak Island, at the roads of the village of Dhalak Kebir. A foray ashore on the island brought such a splendid yield of birds and plants, that we decided to stay here a few days, partly to get to know better this richly endowed island, and partly to properly pack the collection acquired so far and to secure the sample boxes with pitch.57

34After this happy sojourn at the archipelago’s main island, it was time to head to Massawa, which was to be their headquarters for their Abyssinian forays. On the way, a distant warship, apparently patrolling the waters on behalf of the governor of Massawa, fired a warning shot, intercepting them. The moment must have been tense, but any anxiety the foreigners felt at that moment was soon alleviated when the captain of their vessel greeted the commander of the intercepting vessel; the two knew each other and after an amiable exchange went their separate ways, proving once more the importance of the very local network to the success of the regional and transregional enterprise of the two Prussian visitors. Though their Red Sea ventures were brief and their work interrupted, the record of their itinerary and of incidents such as these, as well as their scientific harvest offer valuable insights into both the particular moment in modern scientific inquiry into marine environments and the ways in which local interlocutors participated crucially in its development.