Johann Cesar VI. Godeffroy
The family sought asylum in Prussia and finally settled in the port city of Hamburg, founding a trading empire known as J.C. Godeffroy & Sohn.
At first the trade was in Western Europe and the West Indies with textiles as export item; the goods returning to Hamburg included copper, coffee, wine, figs, and sugar from Cuba.
[1] Among these ships were the barques Johann Caesar, Peter Godeffroy, La Rochelle, Wandram, Suzanne, Iserbrook, Victoria, and until the economic crisis of 1857, the renowned American-built clipper Sovereign of the Seas.
Nevertheless, in 1878, the company went bankrupt due to speculations with German mining stocks and then emerged as Deutsche Handels- und Plantagen Gesellschaft der Südseeinseln zu Hamburg, or DHPG, with continuity and management by Godeffroy personnel.
His brother Gustav Godeffroy was a Senator for the city of Hamburg in the Frankfurt National Assembly and Chairman of the Supervisory Board of Norddeutsche Bank.
The rest of the year they lived far outside the city Dockenhuden, today a part of Blankenese[5] in a cottage built by the Danish architect Christian Frederik Hansen in 1789 Landhaus J. C. Godeffroy.
Nearby, in the area known as Iserbrook, he planted extensive woodlands where Hamburg bourgeoisie, notably Ernst Merck, William Henry O'Swald, Corad Hinrich Donner Johann Heinrich Schröder and Robert Miles Sloman were entertained at a tennis club.
In June 1836 with his younger brother, Adolph, Carl Merck, Charles Parish, Dr. Edward Sieveking, Dr. Johann Gustav Heckscher and five other enthusiasts he founded the Hamburg Rowing Club.
Starting Pacific trading in Cochin-China and supported by merged, partner companies, share-holders (including Otto von Bismarck) and bankers in Hamburg and under the close direction of Johann Caesar Godeffroy the company was soon throughout the South Seas,[6] with centres of operation at Apia and Valparaiso, and a fleet of trading barques, brigs and schooners, which traded through the islands from China to the Pacific coast flying the company colours – a white flag with a ribboned golden dove on a blue horizontal bar with golden stripes, below the bar is a blue inscription: "J.C.G.
These were supplied to the warring factions on Apia in exchange for 10,000 hectares (25,000 acres) of the finest alluvial soil soon transformed into plantations of, mainly, copra or coconut oil, pearl-shell or sea-island cotton.
It was time to find a proper place to house, list, organize, and finally display them to a fascinated public, and in 1860 Godeffroy wrote to Dr. Eduard Heinrich Graeffe (1833–1919) in Switzerland to request his services in founding a museum.
Graeffe settled in Apia and directed the Godeffroy operations there for the next decade while also collecting in Tahiti, Fiji, Tonga, Australia, Samoa, and other South Pacific Islands.
Other scientific collectors were hired by the company who, working in different areas of the Pacific Ocean, helped increase the holdings of the Museum with their successful collecting of birds, mammals, fishes, shells, butterflies, beetles and other insects, plants, and ethnographic objects.
