While much of this blog has been squarely set in London - in and between the Royal Society, Admiralty, Board of Longitude, Royal Observatory and instrument-makers' workshops - we have also from time to time strayed out to the Pacific or Arctic, following Captain Cook in 1769 and the move of the 1818 Longitude Act to incorporate previous rewards for locating the North West Passage. What was found in Arctic by
John Ross,
William Parry and their crews was not, of course, the long-sought route to the Pacific but data, specimens and a testing ground for new techniques and instruments.
While it would make no sense to suggest that such things would not have been accessed without the availability of chronometers and
Nautical Almanacs, these expeditions and their collections are necessarily part of our story. There is the same confluence of people and interests, and the longitude technologies added to the precision of, and confidence in, the data brought home. While botanical specimens seem a long way from testing and using navigational instruments, they represent the way in which expeditions were helping to bring the faraway and unfamiliar near, just as they allowed the possibility of taking well-known things long distances. They each reveal the ambition of knowing, recording, collecting, measuring, cataloguing and, essentially, stating a claim for things in the world.
In thinking about how to represent these things in exhibitions, I have recently had a look at some of the botanical specimens collected in the Arctic on Parry's expeditions. It was a great treat to see inside the
Herbarium at the Royal Botanic Garden in Edinburgh, and to see a range of specimens that, in some cases, closely represented how they were originally arranged by the Arctic voyagers and, in others, demonstrated how working Herbaria incorporate historical specimens into their modern taxonomic arrangements. I have written
another post elsewhere which muses on some of what such collections can tell historians, and with another image of a set of specimens from the Parry collection.
The image below represents what happens to specimens when they are incorporated into the Herbarium proper. Two specimens have been cut from their original paper mounts and placed on the same piece of paper of a standard size, used across the Herbarium. They are not type specimens - these are marked out with a red stripe on the paper - but exist as a representation of a species in a particular time and place. The bare historical information remains: the specimen on the left came from the Rocky Mountains (I see the names Drummond and Harkes(?) but am unsure who these people were or when this expedition occurred), the one on the right was collected at
Melville Island on Parry's first voyage - the place that British Arctic explorers first overwintered.
It was clear from the Edinburgh Herbarium alone that a large number of specimens were brought back from the Arctic on these voyages. The British Museum was the primary repository - its plant collections now part of the Natural History Museum - but duplicate, triplicate and more specimens could be sent to other Herbaria and collectors. This was not only because the surgeons, the chief naturalists on such voyages, were assiduous in their work, but because many other officers were collecting too. One of the Parry collections was put together by Lt William Hooper, the Purser, but across the whole Herbarium many other individual collectors can be identified. In some cases brief field notes, recording the scarcity or otherwise of the plant, have also been kept, revealing adherence to Parry's scientific instructions to write down as much as possible.
Despite this, only one 1820s specimen that I saw (for which, sadly, I have lost the photograph) attempted to record a precise location. Ironically, perhaps, it gives Latitude to the second but the space next to 'Longitude' was left blank. TBC, perhaps.
