Alberto Vojtěch Frič

1882–1944 

Alberto Vojtěch Frič - traveller, botanist, cactus farmer and ethnographer - spent over ten years of his life in South America among Indian tribes. After returning to Prague, he worked as a publicist and private researcher, experimenting with crossbreeding of plants and domestic animals. He challenged contemporary genetic theories based on Mendelism and problematized established scientific views on the basis of his own experiments.

 

Frič went on his first trip at the age of 18; his original motivation was to learn about and collect cacti, which he had been growing since childhood and of which he was a recognized expert already during his grammar school studies. He was not interested in a university education, which was especially unpleasant for his uncle - the eminent zoologist and palaeontologist Antonín Frič. (Their mutual antipathy persisted throughout their lives, although their style of thinking, as can be seen by comparing their texts, was quite similar) and they both inherited the distinctive energy intrinsic to the famous National Czech Revival Frič family. The young Vojtěch, who then began to use the international form of the name “Alberto” on his travels through South America, made four major journeys by 1913, mostly to the Gran Chaco and Mato Grosso regions. He soon realized that while “cacti aren`t going anywhere”, Indian tribes were succumbing to the pressures of civilization and disappearing before his eyes, and he focused instead on learning about their cultures. He did not act as a scientist or conqueror, but was welcomed and respected by the Indians, which allowed him to study their languages, traditions, myths, shamanic medicine, etc. He presented his findings at international American Studies congresses. He was ostracized by German scholars because of the uncompromising position he took at the Congress in Vienna (1908) against the colonial practices of the German settlers towards the Brazilian Indians, and this led to a decline in his professional publicity. His dispute with anthropologist Aleš Hrdlička about the origin of man is also well known. Hrdlička was a proponent of the theory of the cradle of humankind in Africa, while Frič stood up for the disputed findings of the researcher Florentino Ameghin, who found the remains of a prehistoric-looking “man from the Argentine pampas” along with the remains of Tertiary fauna. This find is still astonishing in its morphological features and its much younger dating was proven only in 2013.

A. V. Frič wrote in a relaxed but thought-provoking style. His texts give a fresh impression to this day.  In the, often anecdotal diary texts, fundamental problems of science concerning evolution, inheritance, taxonomy and many other fields of science are scattered and outlined. Frič however distanced himself from the academic environment, he was self-taught and an idiosyncratic thinker. After the establishment of the new republic, he settled in Prague and built greenhouses and experimental gardens around his villa Božínka in Košíře. His home, open to all visitors, became a popular social centre. During the war, after his extensive cactus collection froze in 1940, Frič retired to seclusion and focused his experiments on breeding varieties of agricultural plants. He died in 1944 of tetanus after scratching himself on a rabbit hutch nail.

Thanks to the care of his family, his extensive written and photographic legacy has been preserved, including documentation of his original experiments. His botanical and cultural anthropological work has not yet been fully appreciated. He is known more as an eccentric traveller and a peculiar collector. He brought a large number of tropical plants to Bohemia, especially cacti, and successfully cultivated and popularized them. He created his own systematics of cacti (1935), documented by an extensive herbarium (1934). Although he described hundreds of new species, because of his attitude to botanical rules, which he did not respect very much, only a little over sixty are now published in valid form.

He wrote several adventurous and popular novels (The Long Hunter, Uncle Indian, Snake Island). The ethnographic work (which was supposed to be a trilogy but remained unfinished due to the author's death) is the book Indians of South America. In addition, he published a large number of professional, popular and travel articles, features, reports and short stories in the contemporary press. As the Czech institutions were not interested, he sold most of his ethnographic collections to museums in St. Petersburg, New York, Buenos Aires, etc. In Prague, fragments of his collection are in the depositories of the Náprstek Museum. His numerous correspondence and records of experimental research are still awaiting evaluation.

 

References

Crkal, K.: Lovec kaktusů. Praha 1983, s. 432.

Deyl, V.: Lovec života. Životní osudy A. V. Friče, cestovatele, národopisce, kaktusáře, spisovatele a tvůrce nových rostlin. Praha 1954, s. 209.

Frič, A., V.: O kaktech a jejich narkotických účincích. Praha 2015, s. 117.

Frič, A., V.: Indiáni Jižní Ameriky. Praha 1977, s. 252.

Frič, A., V.: Čerwuiš aneb z Pacheka do Pacheka oklikou přes střední Evropu. 3., upravené vydání. Praha 2011, s. 233.

Frič, A., V.; Frič Ferreira R.: Indiánská knížka. Praha 2012, s. 208. 

Fričová, Y.: Alberto Vojtěch Frič. URL: https://www.checomacoco.cz/a-v-fric/ [30. 8. 2021].

MZ