Paul Erdmann Isert

Paul Erdmann Isert was a German-Danish surgeon, botanist and planter, born in Angermünde, Brandenburg, in 1756 and educated in Berlin. He was appointed Chief Surgeon to Christiansborg in Danish Guinea, arriving in 1783, and took the post chiefly to collect plants in West Africa. On the Gold Coast he also recorded the life of the inhabitants, so his work is ethnographic as well as botanical. He was the first scientist to identify the bird now called the Red Bishop. In 1788 he published his travel book on Guinea and the Caribbean islands, which set out his objections to the slave trade, and with funding from the Danish finance minister Ernst Heinrich von Schimmelmann he founded the crown plantation Frederiksnopel in the Akwapim Hills as an alternative based on paid African labour. He died of a probable tropical fever on 21 January 1789.