La Recherche Expedition

A letter dated 22 March 1837 revealed that Joseph Paul Gaimard and Xavier Marmier were preparing a trip to Copenhagen and Christiania (Norway) whose purpose was to gather additional information on Iceland and Greenland.

[1] On 13 June 1838 the French corvette La Recherche left Le Havre in France, bound for Northern Scandinavia.

Joseph Paul Gaimard (1796–1858), a physician and zoologist was the commanding officer of the expedition.

The expedition was on a purely scientific nature, rather than a colonial venture in cooperation with the governments of Norway and Sweden.

The Arctic exploration in the 1870s marked a watershed in the history of international scientific cooperation.