#david lyall

[ltwilliammowett]

A Royal Navy hat owned by David Lyall (1817–1895) a surgeon, botanical explorer and lifelong friend of Sir Joseph Hooker (1817-1911)

He was born in Auchenblae, Kincardineshire, Scotland on 1 June 1817 and entered the Royal Navy in 1839 and was immediately appointed, on 6 June, as assistant surgeon on H.M.S. Terror, under Captain Francis Crozier (1796-1848), one of the two ships forming Sir James Clark Ross’s Expedition to the Antarctic. Lyall’s medical qualifications and the fact that he had already acquired experience in the Arctic must have made him an obvious choice. Hooker (later to be knighted) was assistant surgeon on the other ship of the expedition, H.M.S. Erebus.

Hooker and Lyall made good use of their time botanising on Kerguelen Island and Lyall had the rare distinction of having a whole genus, Lyallia, named after him by Hooker.

[lobsterwizard]

oh, we're really in it now Lyalls Wren Traversia Lyalli, the only flightless song bird. Discovered by David Lyall on Stephens Island in 1894, declared extinct by David Lyall in 1985.... my baby..

[thecunnydiaries]

19th Tuesday

Fine. Went onshore with the Doctor Bird-Nesting: caught some young Albatross on thier nest: had some good sport. Houses finished onshore.

Christmas Harbour, from Ross, Voyage, I. Frontispiece.

Campbell's notes:

Doctor Bird-Nesting, presumably the ship’s surgeon Jno [sic] Robertson, although it might have been the assistant surgeon David Lyall. McCormick, the surgeon of Erebus, was ashore this day but records a very different excursion. McCormick, Voyages, I. pp. 51–3

Ross, Voyage, I. p. 90. ‘The level beach at the head of the harbour afforded us convenient sites for our observatories, which were immediately erected; that for magnetic purposes being placed at the north extreme, under the protection of the hill to the north, which effectually prevented the sun's rays deranging the temperature, and within a few feet of high-water mark; that for astronomical and pendulum observations on nearly the same level, at more than a hundred yards distant from it towards the centre of the beach; and close by this two small huts were erected for the convenience of the officers and men employed at the observatories.’

[handfuloftime]

Dr. David Lyall, naval surgeon, botanist, and Arctic & Antarctic explorer, born June 1, 1817.

[handfuloftime]

Following on from this post, a random accumulation of biographical details about David Lyall, assistant surgeon on HMS Terror during the Antarctic expedition:

He volunteered as surgeon on HMS Assistance, the flagship of the last government-backed Franklin search mission in 1852. In addition to his duties as surgeon, he also served as acting lieutenant in charge of one of the sledging search parties. (J.D. Hooker, “David Lyall, M.D.” Journal of Botany, British and Foreign 33 (1895): 210 [x]).

After serving in the Baltic during the Crimean War, he was appointed to HMS Plumper, surveying the sea boundary between the United States and British Columbia in the Pacific. From there he was transferred in 1858 to the land boundary survey, covering the area between the Pacific coast and the Rocky Mountains. After a few years his health suffered, and he was invalided home in late 1861. (Hooker, “David Lyall, M.D.,” 211; letter from Lyall to J.D. Hooker, October 18th, 1861 [x]).

Lieutenant Samuel Anderson of the Royal Engineers, who worked with Lyall on the land boundary survey, described him as “a very experienced man,” adding, “In addition to having been in every ordinary portion of the world, he has been on an Arctic expedition and an Antarctic expedition, and though not a very talkative man, we get curious yarns from him sometimes”. (Quoted in A. Lyall, “David Lyall (1817-1895): Botanical Explorer of Antarctica, New Zealand, the Arctic, and North America,” The Linnean 26 (2010): 38 [x]).

William Jackson Hooker, the director of the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew, supported Lyall throughout his post-Antarctic career, arranging appointments for him to HMS Acheron in 1847 (so that he could study New Zealand’s plants) and HMS Fisgard in 1862 (a sinecure appoinment that meant he could work on arranging and describing his North American collections at Kew). Lyall named his youngest child, William Hooker Lyall, after him. (Hooker, “David Lyall, M.D.,” 211; A. Lyall, “David Lyall (1817-1895),” 41).

He published two papers over the course of his career: a description the flora of the Pacific Northwest and the Rocky Mountains, and one of the first European descriptions of a kakapo (“Account of the Botanical Collections made by David Lyall, MD, RN, FLS, Surgeon and Naturalist to the North American Boundary Commission”, Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society 7 (1864): 124-44 [x]; “On the Habits of Strigops habroptilus or Kakapo”, Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London 20 (1852) 31-33 [x]).

The inscription on his gravestone is a riff on Tennyson’s memorial to Sir John Franklin in Westminster Abbey: “Not here: the cold earth has thy bones, but thou/Heroic Sailor Soul/Art passing on thine happier voyage now/Towards no earthly pole”. (A. Lyall, “David Lyall (1817-1895),” 42).

[handfuloftime]

Left: Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker, 1864. Right: David Lyall, 1862.

"Capt. Crozier wishes me particularly to tell you that all the botanical collections of the Terror were made by Lyall," Joseph Dalton Hooker wrote to his father, the eminent botanist Sir William Jackson Hooker, in December 1843 from the Falkland Islands, where James Clark Ross's expedition was preparing for a third voyage towards Antarctica. "The latter often walks with me & though no Botanist, endeavours to make good collections, in which I am glad to hear you say he has succeeded."

Hooker and David Lyall, the assistant surgeons of HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, were two of the youngest members of the Antarctic expedition: both turned twenty-two in June 1839, a few months before the expedition left England, and were serving in their first appointment on a Royal Navy ship. Hooker, who had originally hoped to be the expedition’s naturalist, had begun attending his father’s lectures at Glasgow University when he was seven, and saw the expedition as an opportunity to discover new plants in previously unexplored regions. Lyall had less of a scientific background: after leaving an arts course at an Aberdeen college without finishing the degree, he obtained a surgeon’s license from the Royal College of Surgeons in Edinburgh (though he would not be awarded an MD until 1844) and served on a Greenland whaling ship before joining the navy in June 1839. It appears to have been the Antarctic expedition, and his association with Hooker in particular, that first interested Lyall in botany. Writing up the first volume of his Flora Antarctica in 1844, Hooker praised "my zealous friend and co-operator, Dr. David Lyall," and named an entire genus after him (Lyallia, a cushion plant endemic to the Kerguelen Islands).

The two surgeons’ professional paths diverged after the expedition returned to England in 1843. With the exception of a pair of sinecure appointments while he worked to publish the expedition’s botanical results, Hooker had little further involvement with the navy. He went on to a brilliant career as a botanist, developing a close friendship with Charles Darwin and succeeding his father as the director of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew in 1865. Lyall continued as a naval surgeon, though he retained a keen interest in botany. Through Hooker's father's patronage, he was appointed surgeon on HMS Acheron's survey of the New Zealand coast from 1847 to 1851, giving him an opportunity to closely study the island's plants. He also collected a wide-ranging herbarium while working on an official survey of the land border between the United States and British Columbia, which took him from the Pacific Ocean to the Rocky Mountains between 1857 and 1862.

Hooker and Lyall remained friends and correspondents until Lyall’s death from complications following a broken arm in 1895, aged 77. Hooker, who wrote obituaries for him in two different journals, noted that they had been the last two surviving officers of the Antarctic expedition. He spent the last years of his life offering advice to a new generation of Antarctic explorers, and died in December 1911, aged 94.

Sources: Letter from Joseph Dalton Hooker to William Jackson Hooker, December 5th, 1842. https://jdhooker.kew.org/p/jdh/asset/1920

Joseph Dalton Hooker. The Botany of the Antarctic Voyage of H.M. Discovery Ships Erebus and Terror in the Years 1839-1843 Under the Command of Captain Sir James Clark Ross. 3 vols. London: Reeve, 1847-60.

———. “David Lyall, M.D.” Journal of Botany, British and Foreign 33 (1895): 209-11.

———. “Dr. David Lyall.” The Geographical Journal 5, No. 6 (June 1895): 602-03.

Leonard Huxley. The Life and Letters of Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker. 2 vols. London: John Murray, 1918.

Andrew Lyall. “David Lyall (1817-1895): Botanical explorer of Antarctica, New Zealand, the Arctic and North America”. The Linnean 26, No. 2 (2010): 23-48.

Images: Ernest Edwards. “Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker”. 1864, albumen print. National Portrait Gallery, London, United Kingdom. (x)

Maull & Polyblank. “Dr. David Lyall”. 1862, photograph. The Linnean Society of London, London, United Kingdom. (x)