OBJECT OF THE MONTH DECEMBER 2024

It’s officially winter, drawing our minds towards one of the coldest places on earth, the Arctic Circle. Our Object of the Month for December is this selection of Arctic plant specimens from 1821 to 1823, collected by none other than Captain George Francis Lyon.

Born in Chester in 1796, Captain Lyons was an English naval officer and explorer, who became famous for his travel journals of his voyages to Libya and the Arctic. His journals and pencil drawings proved useful to future Arctic explorers in the nineteenth century.

The Arctic Circle was first discovered by Greek sailor Pytheas in the fourth century BCE, followed by the Vikings in the ninth century when they settled in Iceland, visiting Greenland and Svalbard as they established trade routes. 

In the sixteenth century, English and Dutch explorers went in search of Northwest and Northeast Passages to rival trade routes established by Portugal, with Oliver Brunel establishing the Russian port of Archangel in 1565. William Barents famously rediscovered Svalbard in 1596, and by the beginning of the seventeenth century, Russian explorers established their own fur trade route on the Taz River in western Siberia.

The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw increasing interest in claiming territory and trade routes in the Arctic, leading to many more European naval expeditions. In 1648, Semyon Dezhnyov was the first European to sail through the Bering Strait. Subsequently, Peter the Great of Russia commissioned Danish officer Vitus Bering to explore the area further in the 1720s. British explorer Captain James Cook made it as far as Cape North (now Schmidt) in 1778, prompting further competition between the European nations.

Lyons led two naval expeditions to the Arctic, in 1821 in command of the HMS Hecla, and in 1824 on the HMS Griper. Lyon’s superior officer was Sir William Parry, on the sister ship HMS Fury. On their first voyage, the furthest point they reached was the perpetually frozen strait between Foxe Basin and the Gulf of Boothia, subsequently named the Fury and Hecla Strait after this expedition.

It was during this first adventure that Lyons collected these plant specimens. Among the plants he documented are:

Lyon’s second expedition was less successful, as stormy weather and icy conditions in Hudson Bay caused damage to HMS Griper and Fury, with the latter abandoned at the Prince Regent Inlet. Lyon’s naval reputation in Britain suffered, and he never held another command as a result.

Nonetheless, Lyons became an honorary Doctor of Civil Laws from the University of Oxford in 1825, and then a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1827. He died aged just 36 on 8th October 1832, while sailing on a mail boat from Buenos Aires in Argentina to Britain.

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