Jean
Charles Houzeau was born in 1820 in Havre a suburb of the city of Mons
in western Belgium. He was educated at the college in Mons and attended
the University of Brussels for a year in 1837-8. From an early age he had shown a love and aptitude for mathematics and
astronomy, and built a small Observatory near his father's home
equipping it with what instruments he could afford. In 1840-1 he
studied science in Paris and also began his involvement with journalism, contributing scientific articles especially, to a Brussels newspaper. From 1842 he worked as a voluntary assistant at the Brussels Observatory and continued writing papers and articles on astronomical topics such as meteors, asteroids and comets. In 1846 he was appointed assistant astronomer, but during the unsettled period of the 1848 Revolutions he wrote articles supporting the Republican ideas of the time and as a result he lost his job at the Observatory in 1849. After travelling to England and then to other countries on the continent he settled in Paris for the next five years. There he continued
his studies and wrote further scientific papers; he worked with Abbadie
on astronomical, geodesic and meteorological observations that had been
made in Ethiopia. In 1854 he was employed by the Belgian War Department to help with a topographical survey of the country; this employment apparently lasted until May 1857 when he left for a visit to the United States. In 1856 he was elected a member of the Royal Academy of Belgium in the section of mathematical and physical sciences; at
that time he seems also to have been working as an astronomer at the
Brussels Observatory. He published in 1857 an important work
on physical geography entitled Histoire du sol de l'Europe. His
decision to leave Belgium may have had something to do with his
political opinions, or it may have been due to his resentment at the
promotion of someone junior to him to a higher position. Houzeau's
visit to the United States extended into a stay of nearly 20 years. At
first, having passed through New Orleans, he spent some time in Texas
where he was engaged in surveying and scientific exploration. He carried out astronomical and meteorological observations and studied the natural history and biology of the area. When the  There he was the managing editor of the New Orleans Tribune, which
was published in French and English, and was the first Black daily
newspaper in the United States. His writing in the paper clearly showed
his radical opinions and support for the Black people of Louisiana; he
particularly relished the fact that his dark complexion led many to
assume that he was Black himself (possibly he did have African
ancestry, considering Belgium's past links with Spain). In 1872 he
published a memoir of this period, entitled My Passage at the New Orleans Tribune in
which he describes the Black Creole elite, and the failure of
Reconstruction in Louisiana. This memoir is due for publication by the
Louisiana State University Press in a new edition this year; it has
been translated by Gerard F. Denault of Harvard, and is edited and introduced by David C. Rankine of the University of California at Irvine. And
then, Houzeau says, 'anxious at last to live in a quiet country once
more, I concluded to come to Jamaica, where I arrived in 1868.' |