Post #623587 by TikiTomD on Sat, Feb 4, 2012 9:13 AM

Mahalo, Sven. I've still not given up on finding an image of Dr. Bernhard Funk. It's got to be out there somewhere. I'd consider that the grail of this thread, so I'm hoping that all the folks out there keep a lookout.

Dr. Funk lives on as an interesting subject of academia. In Safua Akeli's 2007 Master's thesis at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, "Leprosy in Samoa 1890 to 1922: Race, Colonial Politics and Disempowerment," footnote 207 states:

Dr Funk had arrived in Samoa in 1880 as medical officer for the Godeffroy und Sohn of Hamburg firm and was later employed as the medical health officer for the Municipality [of Apia].

J.C. Godeffroy & Sohn was a German trading firm dealing in such items as copra, coconut oil and pearl shell. In 1860, it established an office at Apia, Samoa, making it the central outpost for its South Pacific operations in 1872. There's some interesting reading on the company here.

The company's founder created a Museum Godeffroy in Hamburg to house the extensive collection of material brought back to Germany by his ship's captains and collectors. This existed, according to Wikipedia, from 1861 to 1885, when Godeffroy sold his collection just before his death. Many items survive today in exhibits at the Museum of Ethnology in Leipzig, according to Wikipedia. If you go to the museum web site and can't read German, use the Google translator at the top of the screen, which seems to work really well.

-Tom