The Tragic Death of Redowsky

At the age of 31, Ivan Ivanovitch Redowsky (1774-1807) set out on J.M.F. Adams’ (1780-1838) expedition to the River Lena in Siberia. There, in the Wild East, a scientist must have been a rare sight. Early the year 1807, when he was traveling along the northern coast of the Sea of Okhotsk, close to the river Gizhiga, he was thougth to be a spy from the Russian tsar, and duly killed (by poison, if you wonder). His collections were after his death transferred to the French/German poet and botanist Adelbert von Chamisso (1781-1838); it is after Chamisso this sedge is named. Somehow parst of his herbarium came to Königsberg (today’s Kaliningrad), from where Eric Hultén (1894-1981, former professor at our department) received these fragments.

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