Robert Brown (botanist, born 1842)

[1][7] With Edward Whymper, brother of Frederick, he attempted to penetrate the inland ice of Greenland in 1867, and made many discoveries concerning its nature which were later confirmed by Robert Peary.

He traveled in the Barbary States of North Africa, and became the foremost British authority on Morocco almost by accident, having gone there for a holiday but having found himself unable to enjoy idleness.

One example of this ability to write for generalists and specialists is the extensive commentary he contributed to an 1896 reprint of the 1807 slave narrative of John R. Jewitt, in which Brown reflects on the changes in the lives of the indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast from the time of the first European explorers in the late eighteenth century, to Maquinna's chiefdom and Jewitt's captivity, to his own explorations in 1863, when intertribal warfare was still rife, to the situation in the mid-1890s, by when many of the nations were on the brink of extinction.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, Brown's 1886 book Spunyarn and Spindrift, A sailor boy’s log of a voyage out and home in a China tea-clipper contains the earliest known usage in print of Gadget.

[8] Brown had been a strong, confident, fun-loving young man, but worked too hard, and was both incapable of relaxing and at the same time exhausted by London life.