Travel Log
California Illustrated
“Dear Reader: If you have visited California, you will find nothing in these pages to interest you; if you have not, they may serve to kill an idle hour." With this bit of stark understatement, the reader is introduced to California Illustrated, a journal published in 1852. This book chronicles the author’s journey with a group of travelers making their way to California. There’s whale spotting, a shipwide illness, and the travelers' arrival at the Islands of Turks and Caicos—and that’s just in the first chapter.
The Botany of Captain Beechey's Voyage... to the Pacific and Bering's Strait...
Beechey's voyage in HMS Blossom was intended to meet up with two overland expeditions in search of the Northwest Passage to the Pacific. Neither arrived, but Beechey made good use of the trip by conducting extensive scientific explorations along the northwest and west coasts of North America (reaching and naming Point Barrow, for example) and among the islands of the Pacific. The botanical collections were described in this book by Sir William J. Hooker, a British botanist who subsequently became the director of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, and his co-author George A.Walker Arnott.
