He was the naturalist on board HMS Blonde during its voyage around South America and the Pacific in 1824–26, where he collected mainly birds.
Later as a Church of England minister he lived in Warwickshire and Leicestershire and made significant contributions to the study of the natural history of the area.
[2][3] In 1866, his daughter Jane Dorothea Bloxam (died 1921) married Sir Henry Hanson Berney, 9th Bart.
Margaret's sister Gertrude and their cousin Henry Middleton were both students at Oxford University, Bloxham's alma mater.
[4][5][6][7][8] The main purpose of the voyage was to return to the Kingdom of Hawaii the bodies of King Kamehameha II and Queen Kamamalu who had died of measles while visiting England.
The Royal Horticultural Society sent the Scottish botanist James Macrae, whose MS diary was edited by William Wilson and published in 1922.
After spending time both in Rio de Janeiro and St Catherine's, they left Brazil on 1 January 1825, bound for Valparaíso, Chile, which they reached on 4 February 1825.
After spending some time exploring the coast of Chile, they finally left Valparaíso on 13 October 1825, bound for St Helena in the South Atlantic, which they reached on 23 January 1826, leaving five days later.
[9] Although in later life, Bloxam was a noted mycologist and botanist and named c. 20 species of fungi and plants (see below), his contributions during the voyage were mainly to ornithology.
She is in turn critical of Macrae, saying that she regretted that "the practised collector of botanical specimens who went in the Blonde to the Sandwich Islands should not have furnished any account of the plants [..] which he collected.
[10] Between 1986 and 1996, Olson published detailed studies of Bloxam's ornithological work in the Hawaiian Islands, based on both the diary and unpublished notebooks.
A barrel contained geological and mineralogical specimens, along with insects, shells and other marine objects from South America and the Pacific islands visited by the Blonde.
According to Bagnall, Bloxam was one of the earliest English students of these genera, and from 1840 onwards issued 'fasciculi' (i.e. separate sections intended eventually to form a book), which were of great value to beginners who wished to study these plants.
In 1875, not long before he died, Bloxam was visited by Bagnall, who later wrote that Bloxam was "still full of love for botanical pursuits, with quite a host of brambles and roses cultivated in his garden, so that he might watch them more readily, and I shall always remember with pleasure my walk with him in the lanes around his village, where he pointed out the various special Rubi and Roses of that locality.
Bloxam gave new scientific names to at least 11 species of fungi in the Index Fungorum, including the Toasted Waxcap, now Hygrocybe colemanniana.