Jean-Baptiste Du Tertre

Jean -Baptiste Du Tertre ( born as Jacques Du Tertre, * 1610 in Calais, † 1687 in Paris) was a Dominican monk and botanist.

1633 he worked in the Dutch army headquarters in Maastricht. Subsequently, he joined the Dominican Order, where he took the name Jean -Baptiste. In 1640 he was sent as a missionary to the West Indies, from where he returned in 1658 to France.

He is the author of several works on the West Indies, in which he described the indigenous people, the flora and the fauna. These include Histoire générale des îles Saint -Christophe, de la Guadeloupe, de la Martinique et autres de l' Amérique (Paris, 1654), Histoire naturelle et morale des îles de l' Amérique avec un Antilles vocabulaire caraïbe ( 1658), La Vie de Sainte Austr Eberte (1659 ) and l' Histoire générale des Antilles habitees par les Français ( four volumes, 1667-1671 ). Especially in his last work you designed Tertre the myth of the "good savage", in which he " made ​​virtue the Caribs pagan about the moral decline of the Europeans " the.

Du Tertre was the first to describe the yellow fever, as in 1635, 1640, 1648 and 1667 several epidemics in Guadeloupe and Saint Christopher broke out. In his work " Histoire Generale des Antilles " ( 1667) he describes a genocide, the French and British settlers in 1626 on the islands of St. Kitts and Nevis to have perpetrated on the people of the Kalinago.

Works (selection)

Literature on Jean -Baptiste Du Tertre

• Maurice Boubier (1925 ). L' l'Evolution de l' ornithology. Librairie Félix Alcan (Paris), coll Nouvelle collection scientifique: ii 308 p. (French)