European and American voyages of scientific exploration

From the early 15th century to the early 17th century the Age of Discovery had, through Portuguese seafarers, and later, Spanish, Dutch, French and English, opened up southern Africa, the Americas (New World), Asia and Oceania to European eyes: Bartholomew Dias had sailed around the Cape of southern Africa in search of a trade route to India; Christopher Columbus, on four journeys across the Atlantic, had prepared the way for European colonisation of the New World; Ferdinand Magellan had commanded the first expedition to sail across the Atlantic and Pacific oceans to reach the Maluku Islands and was continued by Juan Sebastián Elcano, completing the first circumnavigation of the Earth.

Among some of the most important achievements of the expedition were the discovery and subsequent introduction in Europe of a number of new plants that did not exist in the Old World, but that quickly gained acceptance and become very popular among European consumers, such as pineapples, cocoa, corn, and many others.

[3] Sloane bequeathed his vast collection of natural history 'curiosities' and library of over 50,000 bound volumes to the nation, prompting the establishment in 1753 of the British Museum.

Books of distinguished social figures like the intellectual commentator Jean Jacques Rousseau, Director of the Paris Museum of Natural History Comte de Buffon, and scientist-travellers like Joseph Banks, and Charles Darwin, along with the romantic and often fanciful travelogues of intrepid explorers, increased the desire of European governments and the general public for accurate information about the newly discovered distant lands.

This stimulated great advances in the scientific disciplines of natural history, botany, zoology, ichthyology, conchology, taxonomy, medicine, geography, geology, mineralogy, hydrology, oceanography, physics, meteorology etc.

[7] In the late 19th century, when this phase of science was drawing to a close, it became possible to earn a living as a professional scientist although photography was beginning to replace the illustrators.

A circumnavigation by the English navigator Samuel Wallis, on board HMS Dolphin, accompanied by Philip Carteret on the consort ship Swallow.

The discovery and description of Tahiti by Louis Antoine de Bougainville in his trip influenced several Enlightenment philosophers including Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78).

On return Captain Malaspina was forced into exile because of his ideas, suggesting, among other things, that Spain abandon the military domination of its colonies in favour of a Federation.

This expedition was a success, returning to the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew with 1,283 plants including varieties of apple, pear, oranges and mangoes.

L'Uranie visited Rio de Janeiro to take a series of pendulum measurements as well as other observations, not only in geography and ethnology, but in astronomy, terrestrial magnetism, and meteorology, and for the collection of specimens in natural history.

In 1824 Byron was chosen to accompany homewards the bodies of Hawaiian monarchs Liholiho (known as King Kamehameha II) and Queen Kamāmalu, who had died of measles during a state visit to England.

With the consent of Christian missionaries to the islands, he also removed wooden carvings and other artifacts of the chiefs of ancient Hawaii from the temple ruins of Puʻuhonua O Hōnaunau.

In the desolate waters of Tierra del Fuego Stokes, the captain of HMS Beagle, became depressed and shot himself on 2 August 1828 dying a few days later.

A Russian circumnavigation on the ship Senyavin, sailing from Kronstadt and rounding Cape Horn, accompanied by Captain Mikhail Nikolaievich Staniukovich in command of the sloop Moller.

A world circumnavigation to make a hydrographic survey of the coast of Patagonia, Tierra del Fuego, Chile and Peru, and establish accurate longitude measurements.

The second voyage of L'Astrolabe, this time accompanied by La Zélée, sailed on 7 September 1837 and at the end of November, the ships reached the Strait of Magellan.

The "Wilkes Expedition", included naturalists, botanists, a mineralogist, taxidermists, artists and a philologist in the ships Vincennes, Peacock, the brig Porpoise, the store-ship Relief, and two schooners, Sea Gull, and Flying Fish.

Departing Hampton Roads on 18 August 18, 1838, the expedition stopped at Madeira and Rio de Janeiro, Argentina; visited Tierra del Fuego, Chile, Peru, the Tuamotu Archipelago, Samoa, and New South Wales.

The expedition returned by way of the Philippines, the Sulu Archipelago, Borneo, Singapore,Polynesia and the Cape of Good Hope, reaching New York City on 10 June 1842.

The two ships left the United Kingdom on 19 September 1839, stopping to explore the Kerguelen Islands in 1840, and then on Tasmania to build a magnetic observatory for the Antarctic and to conduct cartographic work.

A French expedition circumnavigating the world via Cape Horn, stopping in Tahiti and Ualan to determine an astronomical Meridian intended for future travel in the Pacific, then arriving in China.

There, the ship performed several missions of exploration including, in July–August 1852, in the seas of Korea and Japan (then very little known in Europe) and on the coasts of Kamchatkata, completely unknown since the Lapérouse expedition.

This American expedition explored the coasts of Japan, China, Siberia and Kamchatka before putting in at the Cape of Good Hope and returning to the United States.

The celebrated Challenger Expedition was a grand tour of the world covering 68,000 nautical miles (125,936 km), organised by the Royal Society in London in collaboration with the University of Edinburgh.

Wrangel Island was discovered and made part of the United States in August 1881 with the landing of famed explorer John Muir and the crew of U. S. Revenue Marine ship Thomas Corwin under the command of Captain Calvin Leighton Hooper.

Albatross belonged to the Committee on Fisheries of the United States and it carried out numerous scientific expeditions under the direction of Alexander Emanuel Agassiz (1835–1910).

In the 1936 book Oceanic Birds of South America by Robert Cushman Murphy, Rollo Beck describes the seminal telegram from C.M Harris that started his long and important association with the Galápagos Islands.

There is also a photo from Beck's Sierra Nevada collecting trip in the archives of the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology on the University of California, Berkeley campus.

This trip lasted from June 1897 to February 1898, after having started on a tragic note with the deaths of three of the original crew to Yellow Fever, and having to reconstitute the expedition in San Francisco, California.