Instead, the monthly The Dawn (De Dageraad) began to appear,

which, though not edited by Junghuhn, advanced views similar to

his. One may well ask what kind of book this was, going through
several editions in just a few years. It was neither a novel, a story,
nor a travelogue, but in fact a philosophical tract in allegorical
form. In it, Junghuhn introduces four brothers called Night, Day,
Dawn, and Dusk. Each develops his own philosophy as the tale
progresses. They are making a trip through Java and, alternated by
an account of their experiences and by some splendid descriptions
of nature, they reveal their respective philosophies. Night
represents orthodox Christianity; Day, who gets to do most of the
talking, represents Junghuhn's own philosophy, which might best
be described as deism tinged with pantheism, and which he himself
calls "Natural Religion." Dawn and Dusk represent true atheism,
and they are godless in that they do not believe in the existence of a
Supreme Being or God. The conversa-
 Page 70
tions between Day and Night allow Junghuhn ample opportunity to
attack Christianity: "I openly declare that up to now Christianity
has done nothing but propagate ignorance and superstition, and has
misled the spirit to pursue nothing but tyranny and greed." Right
away, the very vehemence of Junghuhn's language makes one
suspect whether there might not be some private experience
underneath it all. That "spirit," which pursues nothing but "tyranny
and greed," really makes one wonder. For an answer to a question
such as this we usually look at a petson's childhood, in this instance
to Junghuhn's education and his relationship with his parents.
Although he generally wears his heart on his sleeve, Junghuhn is
uncommonly reticent on that score; clearly we are dealing with an
old grudge here that he kept well hidden.
There is only one passage in his work that hints at some youthful
conflict. In Images of Light and Shadow, his character Brother Day
is made to say: "Is it my fault then that my parents were Christians
and not Jews, and that I inherited my father's short temper and my
mother's sensitivity?" For the longest time, this was our only clue.
In 1909, however, celebrating the centennial of Junghuhn's birth,
Max C. P. Schmidt put out a very detailed biography using a wealth
of family documents and family stories. To tell the truth, Schmidt
gives us a great many facts but does not do much with them.
Schmidt's own father and Junghuhn were first cousins, even though
the former was seventeen years younger. Their families knew each
other well. Max Schmidt paints a rather sketchy portrait of
Junghuhn's early years, using family memoirs and his father's
recollections. Elsewhere in his book, however, and in a different
context, we find increasingly new details which allow us to
reconstruct and clarify a great deal more.
We do not necessarily have to picture Junghuhn's father as the
proverbial Prussian to know that he was stem, self-willed, and
irascible. A man, moreover, who longed for culture and adventure
but who acted and thought according to handed-down patterns.
Those same patterns were also applied to his sows education, for
whom he, and not his son, had chosen the study of medicine.
Himself a village surgeon and barber, he wanted his son to realize
his own higher ambitions, while at the same time he wanted to cast
him in his own mold. He desired his son to become a powerful
figure who would live according to the strong bourgeois traditions
of religion, authority, and obedience. He had him tutored for
university entrance by, of all people, a theologian. Naturally, the
scheme backfired. The boy came away hating Christianity,
authority, and obedience. The obituary notice of Junghuhn, written
by his brother-in-law H. Rochussen, which appeared in
Netherlands Indies Magazine in 1866, strongly confirms
 Page 71
this. Both father and son were excitable people and their clashes
were numerous. There were scenes involving beatings with a stick,
running away from home, several times no less, and an attempted
suicide near the precipitous ruins of ducal Mansfeld castle. Max
Schmidt, who gives us anything but a one-sided account of
Junghuhn senior, tells us the following about the attempted suicide.
After the severely wounded young Junghuhn had been discovered,
they naturally warned the boy's father, who was a physician, after
all. He was just pulling on his boots when they told him the victim
was his own son. With a shrug of resignation, he then took his
boots off again and threw them into a comer. Years later, when
discussing his son's attempt to kill himself, he still could not
understand how his son, a student of medicine, could have been so
stupid as to shoot himself in the back of his head. With a
meaningful gesture he pointed to his forehead, saying "That's
where he should have aimed!," his face reddening with excitement.
By contrast, Junghuhn's mother was weak, sentimental, and overly
affectionate. This too went against his grain. Once, the twenty-
year-old Junghuhn slit open the chest and belly of a live cat in
order "to study the circulation of the blood."
It is not known what transpired between father and son after the
latter tried to commit suicide. The father got his way to the extent
that young Franz did continue to study medicine, albeit in faraway
Berlin and not in Halle, situated near his birthplace. He traveled
meanwhile, and would for weeks on end wander through
Brunswick, Thuringia, and especially the Harz mountains. At the
same time his first articles began to appear about mushrooms "out
of the botanical twilight zone." His medical studies unfinished, he
got drafted into the army. There he fought a duel, and although he
himself was the one to get wounded and not his opponent,
Junghuhn was sentenced, incredibly enough, to ten years
imprisonment. He would not begin serving this sentence until the
Prussian government had fully exploited his services as a
physician, and it was not until Christmas Day of 1831 that he was
actually arrested and sent to the infamous citadel of
Ehrenbreitstein. Just what this imprisonment meant to a man with
such immense love and veneration of nature, his memoirs tell us.
Called "Flight to Africa ("Flucht nach Afrika") and written in 1834,
this moving testimony is part of Schmidt's biography:
Imagine an immense, infinite, and empty space where neither a
pebble nor a speck of dust could hope to strike a friendly ray of
sunshine, where everything is impenetrably dark. Imagine that, and
you will begin to get an idea what a prisoner's life is like. One day
drags by as slowly as the next, very slowly and without a sound.
 Page 72
Nothing interrupts this eternal monotony. Morosely you rise in the
morning, only to long for the coming of night again and a few hours
of sleep. When evening comes and night does return, a new torment
begins. You lie down with apprehension, afraid to wake up the next
morning, fearful of the terrible loneliness that morning will bring, and
that feeling in turn robs you of your night's rest. It is a blessing indeed
if a diadem spider strays onto your barren walls and breaks the
silence with its gentle ticking sound, like a clock. At the start of a
new day, the eye searches the bare walls in vain for a new distraction,
a bulge, or an irregular grain of sand perhaps. You try to get to see
something through the window bars but the view is blocked by a
treacherous wall, erected there by mistrust itself. I enjoyed each
sound, each change, and every movement I could detect rekindled my
spirits by interrupting the monotony. I even longed for the arrival of
the guard, a stupefied, ugly clod who showed himself three times a
day. The rattle of keys and the creaking of the door were music to my
ears. Alone in that place I often thought about the phantom world
conjured up by our divines and the fire and brimstone they like to
scare and fool people with. I am surprised they do not portray hell as
a limitless desert devoid of life, just as silent as it is infinite. If I could
choose between two evils, I would opt for hellfire and its devils,
anything but such a monstrous, empty wasteland.
Junghuhn's captivity lasted twenty months, till he managed to
escape and flee across Germany to France. He made it all the way
down to Toulon, then crossed the Mediterranean and enlisted in the
French Foreign Legion. The terror of that particular experience is
described in "Flight to Africa" also. After five months, he was sent
on leave. Shaking with fever, he boarded a warship that took him
back to France. In Paris, he met a Dutch botanist who informed
him of the possibility of signing on as a colonial health officer for
the Dutch East Indies through its recruiting offices in Harderwijk.
On June 30, 1835, he departed from Hellevoetsluis on board the
sailing ship Jacob Cats, and on October 12 the ship came into the
roads of Batavia. Junghuhn was to spend the next thirteen years in
Java. These would turn out to be his most important years, decisive
for his outlook and development, during which time an unknown
physician was to turn himself into a naturalist of stature. His
medical career never really amounted to much. Among his family
papers, Max Schmidt came across a list onto which Junghuhn had
carefully entered every date and place of his stay. It turns out that
he actually served no more than three years and seven months out
of those thirteen years as a health officer in Ba-
 Page 73
tavia, Buitenzorg, Semarang, and Djokjakarta. The rest of the time
he must have spent traveling about.
Junghuhn always managed to find people willing to support and
help him in his naturalistic studies, which he regarded as his
rightful calling. The first among these benefactors was the
naturalist Dr. Fritze, chief of medical services, who took him along
on his numerous tours of inspection and who laid the foundation
for Junghuhn's future scientific career. Following Fritze's death in
1839, Junghuhn had no trouble finding different supporters,
Junghuhn was an impressive figure even though he was a
troublemaker and caused difficulties wherever he went. He was, all
told, a full-blooded romantic, a man of conflicts with a divided
personality. He described this duality of soul in himself with a
quotation from Goethe's Faust: "Zwei Seelen, wohnen, ach! in
meiner Brust." Of course, his ability, independence, and
imagination made him stand out head and shoulders above the
other officials. Especially in such a narrow society as that of the
Indies, one could expect rumors and stories about a man who did
not quite fit in. There exists a very telling anecdote about an
encounter between Junghuhn, the outsider, and J. J. Rochussen,
governor-general of the Indies. Junghuhn, it appears, had just
published some less than respectful comments about several
Javanese princes in the Netherlands Indies Magazine. His remarks
had angered the government, which stood in a most delicate
relationship to these same princes, and Junghuhn was called to
account for himself. Rochussen was mad as a hatter and threatened
to have Junghuhn thrown out of the country. Junghuhn kept silent
through the entire tirade, while Rochussen got angrier and angrier,
and told Junghuhn that he had been hearing other complaints about
him as well, and that he always arrived far too late at the office.
Junghuhn is then supposed to have said: "I admit, your Excellency,
that I am often late to work but then again, I am always the first to
leave." The rest of the interview was much less stormy, and it
argues well for Rochussen and Junghuhn alike that the whole
dressing down ended with the governor-general's promise to put
Junghuhn up for membership with the Commission for Natural
Sciences, the very thing Junghuhn had wanted all along.
The job on that commission gave him every opportunity to travel.
There was hardly a place on Java Junghuhn did not visit. He was
especially taken by the grandeur and the ruggedness of Java's
mountains. For weeks on end he would tramp around, camping in
villages or outdoors, wrapped in a blanket next to the campfire, the
only European among Javanese bearers and guides. This wandering
did make him melancholy at times: "Without a place I can call my
own, without anyone really missing me on this entire island, I just
keep on roaming
 Page 74
along all by myself." But while musing thus, the tops of the
Tjiremai and Tamponas mountains break through the clouds, and
then he feels "elated" again, knowing that nature's grandeur more
than makes up for the lack of human companionship. A nomadic
existence like this ultimately had to wear down even someone as
powerful as Junghuhn. In 1848, he realized that his health had
taken a beating and his bodily strength had weakened. "I was
exhausted," he writes. In June 1848, he once again ascended the
Tangkuban Prahu Mountain (literally "upside down'' or capsized
boat), where he had a cabin built on the highest western ridge of
the crater. There he withdrew in order to regain his strength.
Friends sought him out and urged him to take a vacation in Europe.
That decision finally taken, he still found it difficult to leave the
country which he said had become his "second fatherland." Yet he
sailed on August 28, 1848, but typically spent the voyage making
notes which would later appear as Return from Java to Europe
(Terugreis van Java naar Europa, 1851). It deals with an account
of the trip made by the so-called overland mail route, that is to say,
crossing overland from Suez to Cairo (the Suez Canal not being
opened until 1869) and on to Europe. An Austrian ship took him as
far as Trieste, and from there he crossed the Alps, where he felt at
home again. He was most delighted with the trees: "How beautiful
they all looked after fourteen years' absence." While he recognized
the plants, shrubs, trees, and geological formations, there is nary a
word about people. He considered the populace good natured but
stupid, allowing themselves to be led by a bunch of "fat, arrogant,
and intolerant priests." From Munich, the train took him to the
center of Holland, and there his account abruptly ends. He felt
disinclined to write about that section of the trip from the German-
Dutch border to Leiden because only in Holland had he
encountered "such a bigoted lot of people," and writing about them
would only infuriate his readership. Better to be silent, he thought,
and he wished his dear readers farewell.
Even so, he settled down in Leiden because he could use the
university's library and he commenced to work on his notes with
the same alacrity as he had taken them. From 1852 until 1854, four
volumes appeared of his standard work, which was immediately
followed by a revised, second edition entitled Java's Shape, Flora
and Internal Structure (Java, deszelfs gedaante, bekleeding en
inwendige structuur). The work was "embellished" with maps and
drawings, outlines of mountains and landscapes, all masterfully
executed. Minister of Colonies Pahud also commissioned him to
draw a Map of the Island of Java (Kaart van bet eiland Java,
1855), and his book about Java has a companion volume of colored
lithographs done after Jung-
 Page 75
huhn's own drawings called Atlas of Views, containing Eleven
Picturesque Scenes (Atlas van platen, bevattende elf pittoreske
gezichten). To Junghuhn, an artistically appealing landscape meant
"a question of fantasy, subject to a number of interpretations." "My
landscapes," he wrote, "are essentially lifelike." They show cloud
formations that look like "clenched fists,'' side views of geological
strata, the shape of branches, and the structures of leaves. They
have been drawn exactly as he observed them either with a
magnifying glass or with a powerful telescope, Junghuhn's
landscapes are meant to illustrate his scientific purpose of natural
observation, and his introductions to the plates clearly reveal his
working method. For example, a lithograph showing the mountain
Gunung Gedeh is accompanied by the instruction that the spectator
should imagine himself in the same forest as described in volume
one of Java's Shape. However, in order to get any view at all, the
dense jungle has been omitted and only the flowering
leptospermum floribundum has been allowed to remain, he tells us.
Although Junghuhn himself considered his drawings "lifelike,"
they do strike us as decidedly unreal because their details are not
integrated with the whole. They resemble landscapes of an alien
world, and that may well explain why they are so fascinating. The
only extensive commentary written by Junghuhn on the lithographs
is to be found in the German edition of 1853, entitled Landschafts-
Ansichten von Java.
In 1852, Junghuhn married Louisa Koch, a lieutenant colonel's
daughter. He had meanwhile become a Dutch citizen. During his
furlough, which lasted an incredible seven years, he again made
extensive trips (to Tyrol, Switzerland, Italy, the Pyrenees, Sweden,
and the Caucasus), sometimes accompanied by his wife, sometimes
alone. There is no evidence anywhere that he ever revisited his
ancestral village of Mansfeld. We do know, however, that he did,
and also that he went alone. Schmidt's father met him sometime
during those years, and Junghuhn struck him as rather odd. "He
could not take to life in this small rural town anymore," was the
elder Schmidt's conclusion.
In 1855, Junghuhn finally returned to Java, but this time he had
been specifically assigned to investigate the possibility of growing
the cinchona bark to produce quinine for the treatment of malaria.
With uncanny exactitude, using his knowledge of the climate,
vegetation, etc., he pinpointed the best location for the cultivation
of quinine, on the plains of Lembang in western Java. There exists
a great deal of disagreement, however, about his choice of the
quinine variety and its proper method of cultivation, and in
connection with this he became a controversial figure. The curious
thing is that Junghuhn became famous primarily for establishing
quinine plantations, and
 Page 76
only to a lesser degree for his naturalistic research. His popular
fame therefore is based on the fact that he is regarded as one of the
"builders of Empire" who has "wrought great things." All his
biographers agree, however, that Junghuhn was well past his
scientific prime by the time he got involved with quinine. This
restless explorer had already become a retired planter who had
withdrawn with his wife and child to the secluded Preanger area.
He no longer undertook vast journeys but lived quietly amidst his
family and his mountains, near his beloved Tangkuban Prahu,
about which he said once that the mountain possessed "a human
heart where peace abides." In 1864 he died of a liver ailment. His
friend Groneman, a physician, and his brother-in-law Rochussen
were present at his death. When Junghuhn knew that his end was
near, he asked Groneman, on whose word we have this: "Would
you open the windows, please? I want to say farewell to my
beloved mountains, I want to see my forest for the last time and
inhale once more the pure mountain air."