Beschreibung:

Mosses Collected in Capt. Franklin's Expedition to the Arctic Sea [1819-1822], principally named by Professor Schwaeglichen, manuscript title and 70 loose sheets with dried moss specimens mounted, mostly as multiples, to sheet rectos, a little scattered minor loss, title-page and lower mounts inscribed in ink, 'Capt. Franklin's Polar Expedition see his Bot. Appendix 1st edition' or similar, the majority additionally inscribed in another hand with pencil numbers and Latin name identifications to the specimens, some with additional location details for where the specimens were collected (Point Lake, Slave Lake, Camp Lake, Barren Grounds & Woody District, Fort Enterprise, English River, Mississippi River, Grand Rapid, Saskatchewan, Whitefall - October 1819 - Pine Forests, Borrowicks Fall (Set 17, 18, 19)), the title-page title probably in the hand of Sir John Richardson (1787-1865), sheet sizes 23 x 15cm, together with a paper fragment with ink notes in the holograph of Sir John Richardson 15.5 x 19cm John Richardson a Scottish naval surgeon and naturalist, travelled with John Franklin in search of the Northwest Passage on the Coppermine Expedition of 1819-1822. Richardson wrote the sections on geology, botany and ichthyology for the official account of the expedition. On this, the first of Franklin's Arctic expeditions, Franklin lost 11 of the 20 men in his party, most dying of starvation, but also at least one murder and suggestions of cannibalism. The survivors were forced to eat lichen and even attempted to eat their own leather boots, gaining Franklin the nickname of 'the man who ate his boots'. Franklin published his 'Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea, in the Years 1819, 20, 21 and 22' with John Murray in 1823. In the same year John Richardson published 'Botanical Appendix to Captain Franklin's Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea'. The pencil numbers and identification of specimens on these samples matches those in the Appendix, but the published account gives no specific details of locations. In the Preface Richardson writes: 'Professor [Christian Friedrich] Schwaeglichen, when in London, named the Musci, which renders that part of the list of high authority; and Professor Hooker, by undertaking the examination of the Lichenes and Fungi, has stamped a value upon a portion of the catalogue, upon which it was peculiarly desirable to have the opinion and authority of an eminent cryptogamic botanist'. Richardson returned with Franklin to Canada in 1825 but was not involved in the ill-fated third Arctic expedition of 1845. Richardson travelled with John Rae on an unsuccessful search for Franklin in 1848-49, describing it in 'An Arctic Searching Expedition' (1851). (71)