Andrew Garrett

Garrett was born in Albany, New York; his family moved to Middlebury, Vermont, when he was a child. Considering himself a "Vermontian" throughout his life, he went to sea at age 16 (after an apprenticeship in a local iron foundry) mainly to get away and collect sea shells. Making Hawaii his home from 1857 to 1863, Garrett was initially supported and sponsored by local shell collectors, including the malacologist William Harper Pease. They admired his zeal and sense of adventure as together they found new species and developed a keen sense for scientific details. Soon they were publishing papers on the topic of conchology, for both for local and international scientists - mostly under Pease's name. Running out of funds, Garrett approached the ichthyologist Louis Agassiz, who had moved from his native Switzerland to head the new department of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University. Within the year he was part of a team that hunted for unusual species all over Polynesia, to sketch and paint them as lifelike as possible and send fishes conserved in alcohol for the growing collection at Harvard. Completely self-taught, Garrett became a renowned and admired specialist in the field himself: a skilled artist and adventurer-scientist, he eventually found a new sponsor in Johann Cesar (VI) Godeffroy, a wealthy scion of international commerce based in Hamburg, Germany. This support helped him explore and describe the shells and fishes of Eastern Polynesia: Samoa, Fiji and other locations. Settling on the island of Huahine in 1870, he made it his home and headquarters as he kept collecting shells, fish and eventually also native tools and artifacts, of anthropological importance, to the Museum Godeffroy in Germany until 1879, when Godeffroy went bankrupt. Garrett's seminal work Fische der Sundsee was first published in 1872 and remained of primary importance for the next generation of ichthyologists. He never returned to the United States, and died on November 1, 1887, on the island of Huahine where he had put down roots. Rumor has it that he wrote his own obituary, and had the local missionary Ebenezer Cooper (from the London Missionary Society) send it out into the world he had left behind in his wanderings.