She is 79.98 meters long, 17 meters wide and has been sailing the world’s oceans since this spring: last March, the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research (NIOZ) named the brand new research vessel Anna Weber-van Bosse. Who was the namesake of this research vessel?
A young widow who developed into an internationally renowned algae expert, according to the recently published biography Out onto the coral reefs in a long skirt. In it, historical man of letters Andrea Kieskamp describes in detail the life and career of Weber-Van Bosse: biologist, feminist and explorer.
Anna van Bosse (1852-1942) grew up in the Amsterdam canal belt, as the youngest daughter in a wealthy family. She often goes to Artis with her governess; in her spare time she devours books about plants. But what makes her life and thus the biography so interesting is her idiosyncrasy and her determination. Is horse riding in Amsterdam considered too little for women of her class? She goes into nature and simply does it anyway. After she married a wealthy neighbor, painter Wilhem Willink van Collen, at the age of nineteen, the new couple inherited an estate, but refused the inheritance because of the obligations it entailed.
They prefer to live a freer life in the city. There, Van Bosse and like-minded people set up a ‘Reading Museum for Women’ – it is the time of the first feminist wave, in which women stood up for, among other things, the right to vote and the right to paid work. Kieskamp mentions in passing the friendship with Aletta Jacobs, the first female PhD candidate in the Netherlands who was appointed doctor of medicine in 1879. At the defense of her thesis, Jacobs thanks Mrs. De Wed. Willink van Collen […] for the many and constant expressions of sympathy and friendship that I have received from you.”
Anna Weber-van Bosse with the gibbon Sampie, which she brought with her from her first trip to the Dutch East Indies.
Photo Collection Amsterdam City Archives
Anna van Bosse, 26 years old, had been a widow for just a few months at the time – Wilhem had died of pulmonary tuberculosis. As a board member, she is involved in improving childcare and facilities for the blind and visually impaired. But botany continues to appeal and so she, as one of the first three women, enrolls at the brand new University of Amsterdam. It has been in existence for three years at that time.
Her botany teacher is the famous Hugo de Vries, whose lectures and practicals make Anna ‘drunk with joy’. She is not the only one of her sex with a botanical interest (in England around the same time there was ‘pteridomania’ or fern madness among young women, and seaweed collecting was also popular) but she does have an idiosyncratic preference within the field: for algae, the ‘lower’ plant-like organisms without roots, stems and leaves.
At the age of twenty-nine, she meets her future second husband at a dinner: the German doctor and zoologist Max Weber. He woos her by sending her materials from an expedition in the Barents Sea. Or as she herself writes: “Shuddering, I accepted the beautiful material, as I was completely convinced of my own inadequate knowledge, but my love for those plants that inhabit the bottom of the sea is so great that I, on the other hand, eagerly took advantage of this opportunity to get to know some species that are rare for us.” They get married two years after meeting. They leave for Norway for their honeymoon, to conduct whale research and collect animals for the Artis collection.
A few years later, in 1885, the zoo played a decisive role in Van Bosse’s scientific career. The Dutch Society of Sciences and Humanities is organizing a competition about the fur of sloths. It is so richly covered with plant material that the brown takes on a green sheen. Ideal camouflage in the jungle – but, the committee organizing the competition wants to know: what exactly are those ‘vegetable parasites’ on the fur?
Van Bosse asks a friend who has moved to Suriname to send her two sloths, which she places at Artis. Much later, just before her ninetieth birthday, she told the magazine about it Dragonfly: “For the sake of the competition […] I crawled into their cage every day to examine their livestock.” She discovers that two algae species occur together in the sloth’s fur, both from a yet unknown genus. They grow in the grooves of the hair and not only provide a good camouflage color, but – as it turns out, long after Van Bosse’s research – also form a vitamin-rich addition to the sloth diet. And the ecosystem of the sloth’s fur is even more complex: moths live between the overgrown hairs, which in turn attract hungry birds.
Van Bosse receives a gold medal for her discovery. In a series of 1,206 competitions, of which 169 were awarded, she is, says Kieskamp, ”the first and the last woman to receive a medal.” And that is the starting signal for her further career, which is all about the symbiosis between plants and animals. It is a subject that received a lot of attention at the end of the nineteenth century, when it had just become known that lichens consist of a form of society between an algae and a fungus.
Kieskamp notes how Van Bosse uses the symbiosis in the plant and animal kingdoms “as a metaphor for her second marriage”, with equal partners who strengthen each other. In doing so, she breaks with the ideas of botanists such as Carl Linnaeus, in whose natural classification the male reproductive organs, the stamens, were higher in hierarchy than the female pistils. Or as the biography states: “In this way he not only projected the gender ideologies of his time onto nature, he also provided ‘natural evidence’ for them, thus legitimizing the subordinate position of women.”
Not so with the Weber-Van Bosse couple. The two embark on several scientific ocean expeditions together: around Sumatra they jointly describe the symbiosis between algae and freshwater sponges, in Malaysia Anna discovers a parasitic algae on a pancake plant. They return home with an addition to their family: several parrots, an Indian mongoose and a silver gibbon named Sampie. Later they traveled to South Africa and India, among other places, eventually returning to Indonesia in 1899.
Anna Weber-van Bosse has ship’s cat Titi on her lap. She sits among all those on board the Siboga, ready for departure in March 1899.
Photo Collection Allard Pierson (UvA), Artis Library
During that trip with the Siboga, Van Bosse became the first woman in history to participate as a scientific staff member in an oceanographic expedition. Unique, writes Kieskamp: “Until the mid-twentieth century, female scientists were not allowed to go on oceanographic expeditions.” During the trip, Van Bosse studies the coral reefs, which appear to be full of algae. Years later, she writes in a handbook for amateur collectors how this works: in a thin woolen bath suit (with a modest long skirt) and high boots (as protection against sharp coral and pointed sea urchins). She removes the algae with tweezers, knives and hammers, which she then dries in a herbarium press for detailed examination later.
She discovers, among other things, a new species of algae, Coccospherae sibogaand see how extensive underwater banks of the red lime algae Lithothamnios “helping vigorously to build reefs everywhere.” This makes her the first to determine that calcareous algae are crucial for the growth of coral reefs. Later, a renowned American algologist used her Lithothamniosphotos for further research, and eventually writes a publication about it in a professional journal Science. Other leading algae researchers are also building on Van Bosse’s groundbreaking discoveries: that coral reefs basically support living organisms.
Her name recognition gradually grew nationally and internationally and in 1910 scientific recognition came. She is the first woman in Dutch history to receive an honorary doctorate. But she doesn’t show up at the ceremony: she thinks it’s too much of an honor. The Weber-Van Bosse couple remains active in science well into their eighties. They work on their scientific publications from the Siboga expedition and conduct microscopic research from home.
In 1933, a seaworthy research vessel named Max Weber was put into use by the Dutch Zoological Society; in Indonesia, the Laboratory for Sea Research uses a ship of the same name. Both ships have now been out of service for a long time. But now, almost a century later, the equality that was so important to the couple has finally arrived: in the coming decades, RV Anna Weber-van Bosse will sail around the world – including to conduct research on coral reefs.
