Expeditions and Endeavours : Images of Nature

Since the 18th century, scientists and artists together have embarked on a succession of perilous expeditions to document the natural world. Expeditions and Endeavours presents a stunning selection of some of the images that were created as a result of these great voyages of natural history discovery.

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 Tonge from her travels to India, and Henry Walter Bates and Alfred Russel Wallace from their time spent exploring the Amazon.