Naturalists at Sea. Scientific Travellers from Dampier to Darwin

Given the catalogue of natural calamities and physical privations experienced by the subjects of this volume – not to mention the hostility suffered at the hands of their fellow men on land and at sea – it seems little short of miraculous that private collectors and public institutions were able to benefit to the extent they did from the efforts of travelling naturalists in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Scarcely one of the voyages recorded here proves less than epic in scale and achievement, so that Glyn Williams’s survey provides a powerful antidote to any misplaced perceptions of outmoded irrelevance associated with specimens from the early phases of the history of collecting: they form, rather, precious relics from what was truly the heroic age of natural history exploration. Much of this eminently readable distillation, culled from the journals, notebooks and published works of early field-workers – explorers as much as naturalists – concerns itself with the problems they faced on multiple fronts, rather than with the scientific advances to which they might lay claim. Trouble arose from the very outset of most expeditions, for few of them had natural history at the top of their agenda: mostly their primary mission would involve surveying and hydrography. Navy ships often proved less than congenial to the scientists: service crews at every rank proved resentful to civilian interlopers who evaded the rigours of naval discipline, who unsettled routine life on the ship and who made incessant demands both for the limited space available on board and for access to shore transport.

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