I was glad to read that the Linnean Society has recently catalogued the vast collection of correspondence (around 1200 letters!) of the physician and botanist Richard Pulteney (1730-1801). The coming together of medicine and botany in the person of Pulteney got me thinking about how the quest to find and exploit new species of plants and animals is one of the hidden motors of history, a driving force largely unknown to most people.
For those who are interested in this sort of thing there is definitely a romantic appeal in the idea of the dauntless field naturalist enduring privation and danger in some distant spot, the prize being a species as yet undescribed by science. That's the myth: it all depended on the knowledge of local people who never got any credit, of course, and it could all end badly anyway. Witness some sombre 1902 correspondence in Foreign Office papers (FO 118/258, f. 280 to be precise), between Michael Rogers Oldfield Thomas of the Natural History Museum and the British Consul at Valparaiso Sir Thomas Berry Cusack-Smith, which records the brutal murder in Chile of one of Thomas's most valued field collectors - a Perry O. Simmons. Poor Perry was apparently foolish enough to flash his cash among the locals, and that was it - followed to some lonely spot and unceremoniously bumped off. Curiously, this correspondence is the only sign that the man ever existed - can't find a thing about him.
