THE BRITISH FLORA IN THE ARCTIC

• Main Author: Geoffrey Halliday
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: Arctic; Baffin Bay; Canada; Greenland; Hooker; Baffin; North West Passage
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.670.1518; http://archive.bsbi.org.uk/Wats24p133.pdf

I should like to preface a discussion of the flora with a few words about British botanists in the Arctic. It is necessarily few since British botanists, like romantics and artists, gourmets, hedonists and political Europhiles have long been seduced by the lure of the south, Goethes land where the orange trees bloom. In the nineteenth century the only arctic territory in the former British Empire was northern Canada and thanks to largely Admiralty inspired initiatives there was a succession of expeditions seeking to find a vital safe route, the north-west passage, to the Indies. Besides the crew, the expeditions usually included a number of variously qualified scientific members and during the course of these expeditions botanical collections were brought back to Britain to be identified and, not infrequently, written up. Two famous botanists who had a part in this were Robert Brown and William Hooker. Neither were especially interested in the Arctic, or at least not sufficiently motivated to visit it, but both made important contributions in describing species: Hooker, chiefly during the period of his professorship at Glasgow University, prior to his southwards move to Kew. The most important collections processed by Brown were those made by Ross and Sabine on the former’s 1818 expedition (Ross 1819) to Baffin Bay, during which they explored both the Greenland and Canadian shores, and one made by the members of Parry’s