BAEGERT, JAKOB. — Jesuit, missionary, and geographer, born at Schlettstadt (or Sélestat, Alsace) on 22 December 1717; he entered the novitiate at Aschaffenburg in 1736 and departed in 1751 for Lower California, where he founded the mission of St. Ignatius. Expelled in 1767 by order of Carlo III, he returned to Germany and died at Neustadt on 29 September 1772.
His major geographical work, Nachrichten von der amerikanischen Halbinsel Californien (Mannheim 1771, without the author’s name), is highly valuable for its precise observations of the geography and customs of the indigenous peoples; the ethnographic section was translated into English by C. Rau in the Reports of the Smithsonian Institution, vols. XVII and XVIII (Washington 1863–64). A linguistic dissertation by B. was published in Spanish by O. Hassez: De la lengua waicura de la Baja California, in the Boletín de la Sociedad de Geografía (Mexico 1872).