Frederik Adolph de Roepstorff
{{Short description|Danish philologist}}
Frederik Adolph de Roepstorff (25 March 1842 – 24 October 1883) was a Danish philologist who worked in the Andaman penal colony in India, where he was shot dead by a convict. He studied the languages of Andaman and Nicobar tribes and collected numerous natural history specimens. The Andaman masked owl (Tyto deroepstorffi) was named after him by Hume.
Biography
De Roepstorff was born aboard an English ship sailing from Madras to Europe near the Cape of Good Hope and baptized in Cape Town, which gave him English citizenship. He was the son of Captain Adolph de Roepstorff and Charlotte Georgiana Holmes née Farley. He studied at Horsens Statsskole, Copenhagen, graduating in 1863. He went to India in 1867 and became an extra assistant superintendent in the Andaman Islands penal colony and later became in-charge of the Nicobar Islands. His work was to supervise the prisoners. He went back to Denmark in 1871, married Hedevig Christiane Willemoës (30 November 1843 – 21 August 1896, Copenhagen) on 11 January 1872 and made a trip again in 1878. His wife was a missionary and continued her work in the Andaman and Nicobars. The penal settlement largely consisted of Indian sepoys from the 1857 rebellion.{{cite book| pages=[https://archive.org/details/annualreport04yorkgoog/page/n355 159]-164 | chapter=Port Blair Penal Settlement in British India| author=Roepstorff, F.A. de |url=https://archive.org/details/annualreport04yorkgoog |title=Twenty-Sixth annual report of the executive committee of the Prison Association of New York and accompanying documents for the year 1870|year=1871| place=Albany}}
File:Christiane de Roepstorff og moder.png
The death of Roepstorff has two versions. In one, a small group of Indian soldiers had been posted to Kamorta where one was reported stealing coconuts from the natives. He was reprimanded by Roepstorff with the threat of being sent off to Port Blair. The next morning, as de Roepstorff was mounting his horse, the aggrieved soldier shot him and injured him grievously. He sent off a letter to the Andamans but died before help could arrive. He was nursed by the Nicobarese who refused to let Indians near him and buried him after he died. The other version, said to be of greater veracity, is that a havildar from the Madras army stationed at Nankauri was on trial for assaulting a convict. The case had been adjourned by de Roepstorff and, afraid of being dismissed from the army, he had taken a shot at de Roepstorff who was riding by. When he found that he had mortally wounded de Roepstorff, he shot himself. It took five days for the news to reach, and for officials to arrive, leaving Mrs de Roepstorff to deal with the situation on her own.{{cite book| author=Kloss, C. Boden |title=In the Andamans and Nicobars |year=1903 |publisher=John Murray|place=London|url=https://archive.org/details/inandamansnicoba00cbod| pages=[https://archive.org/details/inandamansnicoba00cbod/page/95 95]-96|isbn=9788120609594 }}{{cite book|chapter=de Roepstorff, Frederik Adolph, 1842-83|title=Dansk biografisk Lexikon .Volume XIV.|pages=519–520| editor=Bricka, Carl Frederik| year=1900| publisher=Gyldendalske Boghandels Forlag| place=Kjøbenhavn|language=da|url=https://runeberg.org/dbl/14/0521.html}}{{cite book| url= https://archive.org/details/orientalcrime00adamuoft|page=[https://archive.org/details/orientalcrime00adamuoft/page/370 370]-371| title=Oriental Crime| author=Adam, H.L.| publisher=T. Werner Laurie|place= London| year=1908}} His grave was described as being in ‘the little Camorta graveyard, where the bluff near the English settlement overlooks the beautiful Nancowry harbour, and the nestling huts of the natives whom he loved so well’. The grave of Nicolas Shimmings was next to his.
De Roepstorff was a member of several scholarly societies including the Asiatic Society of Bengal to whose journal he contributed notes. In his spare time he took a great interest in the fauna and flora, collecting specimens for the Indian Museum, as well as sending them to specialists in Europe. He also explored the region and wrote to various journals of ethnology and geographical exploration.{{cite journal|author=Roepstorff, F.A. de|year=1878|title=The Inland Tribe of Great Nicobar|url=https://archive.org/details/geographicalmaga05mark|journal=The Geographical Magazine|volume=5|pages=[https://archive.org/details/geographicalmaga05mark/page/39 39]-44}} He was familiar with Danish Kjokkenmoddings (kitchen midden) and recognized the antiquity of shell heaps in the Andamans. With geologist Ferdinand Stoliczka, he explored a kitchen midden in the Andamans that they dated to the Neolithic period.{{cite journal|author=Stoliczka, F.|year=1870|title=Note on the Kjokkenmoddings of the Andaman Islands|url=https://archive.org/details/proceedingsofasi1870asia|journal=Proceedings of the Asiatic Society of Bengal|pages=[https://archive.org/details/proceedingsofasi1870asia/page/13 13]-23}} He also helped set up the Nicobar Islands Eclipse station to observe the total solar eclipse of 6 April 1875. The scientific team included Captain J. Waterhouse, Professor A. Pedler and Pietro Tacchini.{{cite news|date=1875-06-26|title=The Nicobar Islands Eclipse Station|pages=608–609|newspaper=The Illustrated London News}} As an ethnologist, he also recorded stories and beliefs. In one publication, he notes that the Nicobarese had a rule that the name of a dead person should never be mentioned. This essentially meant that they could not have an oral history.{{cite journal|author=De Roepstorff, F.A.|year=1884|title=Tiomberombi. A Nicobar Tale|url=https://archive.org/details/journalofasiatic5311asia/page/n35/mode/1up|journal=Journal of the Asiatic Society|pages=24–39}} De Roepstorff and his wife were both interested in linguistics, philology, and ethnography and they compiled a dictionary of the Nancowry dialect. They also edited a translation of the Gospel of Matthew into Nicobarese which had been begun by Moravian missionaries and this was published after his death by his wife in 1884.{{cite book| url= https://archive.org/details/MN41617ucmf_0|page=[https://archive.org/details/MN41617ucmf_0/page/n129 100]| title=Christian Progress in Burma| author=McLeish, Alexander |year=1929| publisher=World Dominion Press}} His work on linguistics was continued by his successor Edward Horace Man.{{cite book|chapter=The Shompen of Great Nicobar Island: new linguistic and genetic data, and the Austroasiatic homeland revisited|year=2010| chapter-url=https://www.isw.unibe.ch/ueber_uns/e41180/e523709/e544715/2010b_ger.pdf| author=Driem, George van| title=Austroasiatic Linguistics: Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Austroasiatic Linguistics, 26-28 November 2007|place= Mysore| publisher= Central Institute of Indian Languages|editor1=Nagaraja, K.S.|editor2=Mankodi, K.|pages=224–259}} He also collected specimens of birds from the Islands and corresponded with A.O. Hume who named it Strix De-Roepstorffi (now Tyto deroepstorffi) after him in 1875.{{cite journal|title=Strix De-Roepstorffi, Sp.Nov. |pages=390–391| author=Hume, A.O.| journal=Stray Feathers|volume=3| year=1875|url= https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/page/30108038}} He contributed insects, molluscs, and snake{{cite journal|url= https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/page/32617867| title=Notes on the collection of snakes in the Indian Museum with descriptions of several new species| author=Sclater, W.L.| year=1891| journal=Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal| pages=230–250}} specimens to the Indian Museum.{{cite book|url=https://archive.org/details/IndianEntomologyHistory/page/n5/mode/1up/|author=Husain, M. Afzal | title=Entomology in India: Past, Present and Future.|publisher=Proceedings of the Twenty-Fifth Indian Science Congress, Calcutta|year= 1939|pages= 201–246 }} Several insects described from his collections bear his name - including Eurema blanda roepstorffi, Euploea midamus roepstorffi, Prosopeas roepstorffi, Hebomoia glaucippe roepstorffi and Diceros roepstorffi . He sent molluscs to the Indian Museum among which he named one species as Ennea (Huttonella) moerchiana after his Danish collaborator Otto Andreas Lowson Mörch in a manuscript, a name that was retained in the formal description by Geoffrey Nevill.{{cite journal| author=Nevill, Geoffrey| title=New or little-known Molluca of the Indo-Malayan Fauna| year=1881|journal= Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal|volume=50| issue=3| pages=[https://archive.org/details/journalofasi501881unse/page/125 125]-167|url=https://archive.org/details/journalofasi501881unse }} His collections of molluscs were made available to H.H. Godwin-Austen by Christiane after her husband's death.{{cite book| page=[https://archive.org/details/dli.zoological.occpapers.126/page/n4 1]| title=Land molluscs of Andaman and Nicobar Islands. Records of the Zoological Survey of India. Occasional Paper No. 126|author1=Rao, N.V. Subba| author2=Mitra, S.C.| url=https://archive.org/details/dli.zoological.occpapers.126 | year=1991| publisher=Zoological Survey of India}}
References
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External links
- [https://archive.org/details/vocabularyofdial00roeprich Vocabulary of dialects spoken in the Nicobar and Andaman Isles : with a short account of the natives, their customs and habits, and of previous attempts at colonisation (1875)]
- [https://books.google.com/books?id=J5ACAAAAQAAJ A dictionary of the Nancowry dialect of the Nicobarese language (1884)]
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Category:Expatriates in British India