Botany of the 1860 Chadbourne Expedition from Williams and Bowdoin colleges to Labrador and Greenland. Part 1: Greenland
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17348/jbrit.v19.i2.1403Abstract
In 1860 Paul A. Chadbourne, Professor at both Williams College and Bowdoin College, arranged a scientific expedition to Labrador and Greenland. Traveling by schooner, the party of nineteen comprised nine students and two recent graduates from Williams, three from Bowdoin, two from Harvard, and three others, plus the Professor and the ship’s owner and captain, Charles E. Ranlett of Thomaston, Maine. They departed Thomaston on 27 June, left seven members of the party on Caribou Island in the Straits of Belle Isle, and proceeded toward West Greenland, hoping to make landfall at Paamiut (Frederickshåb). Instead, they were forced northward by storm-driven pack ice ca. 250 miles before making landfall near Maniitsoq (Sukkertoppen), where they collected plant and animal specimens 19–30 July. They then sailed south ca. 100 miles to the capital, Nuuk (Godthåb), where they collected additional plant specimens and purchased or were gifted various other natural history and cultural materials. Leaving Nuuk on 14 August, they returned to Caribou Island, boarded the students who had made similar collections there, and returned to Maine on 11 September.
The Expedition’s Greenland plant collections, comprising more than 220 specimens and representing 93 taxa, are in two main two groups. The smaller collection, with 64 specimens, was purchased from Professor Chadbourne and donated anonymously to Bowdoin College in 1881 and is now at the Pringle Herbarium. The other, larger, set of more than 175 specimens collected by Williams ’61 student William P. Alcott was deposited at Williams College and is currently housed at Muskingum University in New Concord, Ohio. A few additional Alcott specimens, apparently sent to others for identification, are in other U.S. herbaria. These sets of collections and images were studied, identified, and revised as necessary and are published here for the first time. The Chadbourne Expedition specimens constitute the earliest large, systematically collected set of herbarium records for central West Greenland and should be considered historically significant.
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