The expedition was also accompanied by H. Abeken of Osnabrück, who had been with Bunsen, first at Rome and then at London, as chaplain of the Prussian Embassy. He had made the acquaintance of the leader of the expedition on the Tiber, and was closely associated with him during the remainder of his life. Under the guidance of Lepsius he occupied himself with Egyptological studies, even after he had relinquished theology and entered the diplomatic service. This is the same Abeken, diplomatic Privy Counsellor and Acting Counsellor, who afterwards accompanied Prince Bismarck to France during the war of 1870-1, and proved of great service there. On the tenth of December, 1842, he joined the expedition in which he served incidentally as chaplain. He was the most agreeable companion to Lepsius, “with his invariably cheerful temper,” and his “witty and learned conversation.”[46] With these Germans were associated two Englishmen. The first was the sculptor Bonomi, who at that time had already won celebrity as a traveler in Egypt and Ethiopia, and of whom Lepsius himself said: “he is not only full of practical knowledge about the life there, but he is also a connoisseur in Egyptian art, and a master of Egyptian drawing.”[47] The second was the young and “genial” architect Wild, who was of great assistance to Erbkam. The leader of the expedition had himself scarcely passed his thirty-first year, and was so young and vigorous, that when he desired to hire a kavass, that is, a Turkish constable, to superintend the servants, the intercourse with the authorities, etc., he wrote home: “In Europe I should have felt more than sufficient confidence in my own ability to manage the entire practical conduct of the expedition.” He had, besides, sovereign command of the most thorough scholarship in all those departments wherein the expedition was intended to add to existing knowledge. He had garnered the whole harvest to be reaped in Europe from every field of Egyptian archaeology, and all that could be gathered anew from the banks of the Nile only needed to be stored in the receptacles which, already set apart and half-filled, stood ready for the expected gains. The conditions under which he traveled, and studied the localities of the monuments, were such as to fill us later investigators with envy. For in 1842, there was no museum of Boulak, which now lawfully claims all antiquities from Egyptian soil as soon as they are brought to the light of day. At that time there existed only the first beginnings of a collection of Egyptian monuments, and these had no supervisor nor director.