Naval surgeon, Arctic explorer and natural historian, Sir John Richardson (1787-1865) published many works, several of which are reissued in the Cambridge Library Collection, notably the four-volume Fauna Boreali-Americana. At the Haslar Royal Naval Hospital, where he worked towards the end of his career, Richardson built up a library and museum that became renowned for natural history research. His published work was fuelled by his own voyages and the specimens sent back from other expeditions, as was the case for this illustrated work, completed in 1854. Richardson describes the zoological specimens collected during the 1845-51 voyage of the survey ship H.M.S. Herald, which had sailed into Arctic seas and took part in the search for Sir John Franklin. The collected fauna include fossil mammals from the ice cliffs at Eschscholtz Bay in Alaska, first discovered in 1816 by Otto von Kotzebue and his naturalists.
