Expeditions and Endeavours is illustrated with over 100 paintings and drawings created on some of the most significant voyages of natural history discovery undertaken over the past 300 years. Andrea Hart and Paul Martyn Cooper explore how these successive expeditions and the intrepid explorers who went on them have enhanced our scientific understanding of the natural world. They tell us about the lives of some of the individuals and the great lengths they were driven to in their desire to document what they observed and collected.
Seminal voyages represented include all three of Captain Cook's voyages to the Pacific, the Challenger expedition which changed the nature of oceanographic and marine exploration, and Robert Falcon Scott's Discovery and Terra Nova expeditions to Antarctica. There are also many stunning illustrations from lone naturalist-explorers such as William Bartram and John Abbot in the Americas, Paul Hermann in what is now Sri Lanka, Olivia Tongue from her travels to India, and Henry Walter Bates and Alfred Russel Wallace from their time spent exploring the Amazon.
Andrea Hart is Head of Library Special Collections at the Natural History Museum where she has worked for over 20 years. Andrea has wide experience of all of the subject collections in the library, having worked on their curation, research, conservation, development and outreach.
Paul Martyn Cooper is the Special Collections Librarian at the Natural History Museum. In a long career at the Museum, Paul has focussed on curating the Library's historic collections, promoting knowledge of them and enhancing access to them. He is the author of The Bauer Brothers (2015) in the Images of Nature series.