Appletons' Cyclopædia of American Biography/Berendt, Karl Hermann

BERENDT, Karl Hermann, scientist, b. in Dantzic, 12 Nov., 1817; d. in Guatemala city, Central America, 12 May, 1878. He studied at various German universities, receiving his degree of M. D. at Königsberg in 1842. In 1843 he began practice at Breslau and also acted as privat-docent in surgery and obstetrics at the university. In 1848 he was a member of the Vor-Parlament at Frankfurt. His political sympathies forced him to remove to America in 1851. He proceeded from New York to Nicaragua, and spent two years in the study of the ethnography, geography, and natural history of that section. Two years later he moved to Orizaba, Mexico, and thence to Vera Cruz, where he remained from 1855 to 1862. He then gave up medicine and devoted himself to natural science, linguistics, and ethnology, paying special attention to the Mayan tribes. He spent a year in Tabasco, and thence came in 1863 to the United States. Here he devoted the greater part of the following year in copying manuscripts in the Carter Brown library. At the request of the Smithsonian institution he visited Yucatan; the results of this visit are published in its report for 1867. In 1869 he explored the ruins of ancient Centla, in the plains of Tabasco. He visited the United States several times between this date and 1876, his last visit. In 1874 he settled at Coban, Vera Paz, partly to study the Maya dialects of the region and partly to raise tobacco. At the request of the Berlin museum he spent a winter in securing and forwarding the sculptured slabs of Santa Lucia de Cozumaljualpa, Guatemala; but an attack of fever terminated his work. He contributed many articles in English, German, and Spanish to such works as Petermann's “Mittheilungen” and the “Deutsch-Amerikanisches Conversations-Lexicon.” Among his published works are “Analytical Alphabet for the Mexican and Central American Languages” (New York, 1869); “Los escritos de D. Joaquin Garcia Icazbalceta” (Merida, 1870); “Los trabajos linguisticos de Don Pio Perez” (Mexico, 1871); “Cartilla en lengua Maya” (Merida, 1871); “El ramie” (1871); “On a Grammar and Dictionary of the Carib or Karif Language,” in the Smithsonian report for 1873; “Die Indianer des Isthmus von Tehuantepec” in “Zeitschrift für Ethnologie” for 1873; “The Darien Language,” in the “American Historical Record” for 1874. Much of his work is unpublished; some manuscripts are in the library of the bureau of ethnology at Washington and others in a private collection.