Henry Georges Fourcade

Henry Georges was born at 16, Rue de Treuils, Bordeaux, the son of Justin Jadé Fourcade and Marie Prat. He had one other sibling, his older sister Jeanne Marie. His father was a general storekeeper, who soon moved to Yokohama, Japan and became an importer of wines and liqueurs, where the family lived at No. 10 on the Bund or waterfront. When he was twelve, he returned to France to finish his secondary school education, obtaining a school-leaving certificate just after turning fourteen, winning the first prize in ethics, as well as a prize in physics and chemistry. The next year he attended technikon and obtained good results in English, French, German, arithmetic, chemistry and commerce. In late-1880, Mrs. Fourcade, for reasons unknown, set sail for Table Bay, in the Cape colony. She returned to France a year or two later, but her children remained in Cape Town. Henry Georges enrolled at the South African College, doing a course in the Theory of Land Surveying.

In July 1882, having just turned 17, Fourcade took up an appointment with the Cape Colony's Forestry Department, serving under its first Superintendent of Woods and Forests, Médéric de Vasselot de Régné, originally from the French National School of Forestry at Nancy. With de Vasselot, Fourcade studied forest science and management, acquiring knowledge about the climate, soils and indigenous trees.

De Vasselot boasted about the progress shown by his protégé and put Fourcade in charge of the departmental herbarium. A few months later, he was sent to Knysna, with the task of surveying and then sectioning the forest into manageable parts. He performed this job well, training the existing marksmen to comply with new regulations that had come into force and that were designed to make the forest sustainable. This early exposure to the practical side of sawmilling and forest management would become very valuable years later, when he had his own sawmilling business. In an era of indiscriminate felling of trees, he stressed the risks inherent in upsetting the balance of nature by felling one or two species of tree only, pointing out that such selective fellings would undermine the principle of removing mature growth to improve conditions for young growth in the forest. By 1886, the area sectioned under Fourcade amounted to 12 814 hectares, outperforming his colleagues. In his annual report, he proposed a few allotments to be allocated to bona fide wood-cutters near the then new Millwood goldfield.

In 1876, gold had been discovered in the Knysna Forest – see Millwood, South Africa. Prospectors flocked to the area and a town rapidly came into being. It had a post office, six hotels, three newspapers, many shops and a law court. The impact on the forest was quite dramatic. Fourcade had to watch more or less helplessly how up to 600 men lived in the forest, with timber theft rife. The Conservator of Knysna had limited jurisdiction over the forests until the Forest Act of 1888 was passed. In the intervening period, ruination of forest land was tolerated by the Civil Commissioner, a Maximillian Jackson, who many a time found himself at loggerheads with Fourcade. In what was to become a pattern in later life, Fourcade, who did not shy away from confrontation, spoke his mind clearly and once delivered a curt reply so stinging to the Commissioner that it led to accusations of 'insolence and insubordinate conduct'. Despite this, the quality of his work impressed his opponents. Fourcade was punctilious and appeared to have little time for fools. These character traits earned him ample hardships during his long life, but despite this his motivation never flagged. He was very good at written communication and sometimes continued fighting battles long after the other party had conceded defeat. The last round of the clash with the Commissioner was concluded as follows: "I am sure that Mr Jackson has tact enough if he chooses to enable me to avoid further friction" (Storrar 1990a, p. 28). Mr Jackson probably did exercise a lot of tact, as a few years later he invited Fourcade to join him for lunch with the Governor, Alfred Milner and the Mayor of Knysna, an exclusive event for just four people. All that was still in the future. At the time, there was public concern about the depletion of the Natal Colony's forests. A request had been made to the Governor for expert assistance and advice. De Vasselot had wanted to go himself, with Fourcade as his First Assistant, but that plan was scuppered when the Natal Government didn't provide enough funds.

In the years 1891–1899, Fourcade was employed essentially as a surveyor, demarcating the Knysna forest area. In March 1892, he had an inspiration to attempt a delicate and skilled exercise in higher surveying. This would normally be permitted only to a very experienced and specially trained surveyor. Fourcade set himself the task of performing the secondary triangulation of the Outeniqua-Zitzikamma area, to test his idea of connecting all forest surveys to the Colony's Geodetic Survey network. He requested books and mathematical tables from the Assistant Commissioner and immersed himself in the work. In the same year, he also presented a modest first paper to the South African Philosophical Society, which had to do with repetitive angle measurements in triangulation work. He soon became a member. The Society (as well as its successor, the Royal Society of South Africa) were to eventually publish 14 of his papers, over a period of 50 years, despite a sometimes strained relationship (Storrar 1990a, p. 50).

• The Outeniqua – Zitzikamma – Langkloof secondary triangulation
• The Sandflats – Alexandria secondary triangulation
• The 1904 map of Devil's Peak, revisited in 1985
• Private Land Surveying

• Farming at Ratel's Bosch
• The Zitzikamma Saw Mill
• Witte Els Bosch
• The Fourcade Bequest

Fourcade had collected sporadically in the 1880s and also during the visit to Natal. Each time however, his specimens were lost. In 1905, he began a personal herbarium and by 1910, he had collected several hundred species, being a keen collector. It was only in 1920, when he was 55, that Fourcade took up Botany seriously, upon invitation by Selmar Schonland, who established the Botany Department at Rhodes University. The next 20 years would see him collaborate with a number of herbaria, build up close professional relationships with the leading botanists of the time and become a major collector of the Southern Cape floristic region.

• The Bolus Herbarium
• Kew Gardens

Botanical species named by Fourcade include:

• Invention of a stereoscopic method of photographic surveying
• The Fourcade Correspondence theorem
• Patents & instruments
• MI4 and aerial reconnaissance [1]

• Honorary Doctor of Science, University of Cape Town, 1930.
• Honorary Doctor of Science, University of South Africa, 1947.
• Botanical species named after Fourcade:

• The Fourcade Museum at Witte Els Bosch
• The Fourcade Trail near Jeffreys Bay
• Mount Fourcade (latitude: 64° 36' S longitude: 62° 30' W) on the west coast of Graham Land, Antarctica. UK-APC, 1960.

• Fourcade, Mount
• Why must taxonomists keep changing the names?
• The Bolus Herbarium
• University of Cape Town Libraries: The H. G. Fourcade Bequest
• Fourcade Trail Archived 4 June 2011 at the Wayback Machine
• Biography of Henry Georges Fourcade at the S2A3 Biographical Database of Southern African Science