John Richardson (naturalist)

John Richardson (naturalist)
Born	5 November 1787 Dumfries
Died	5 June 1865 (1865-06-06) (aged 77) Lake District
Residence	Lake District
Citizenship	British
Nationality	Scottish
Fields	surgeon naturalist
Alma mater	Edinburgh University
Notable awards	Royal Medal (1856)
Author abbrev. (botany)	Richardson

Sir John Richardson (5 November 1787 – 5 June 1865) was a Scottish naval surgeon, naturalist and arctic explorer.

Richardson was born at Dumfries. He studied medicine at Edinburgh University, and became a surgeon in the navy in 1807. He traveled with John Franklin in search of the Northwest Passage on the Coppermine Expedition of 1819–1822. Richardson wrote the sections on geology, botany and ichthyology for the official account of the expedition.

Franklin and Richardson returned to Canada in 1825 and went overland by fur trade routes to the mouth of the Mackenzie River. Franklin was to go as far west as possible and Richardson was to go east to the mouth of the Coppermine River. These were the only known points on the central coast and had been reached in 1793 and 1771 respectively. He had with him two specially-built boats which were more ocean-worthy than the voyageur canoes used by Franklin on his previous expedition. They gave their names to the Dolphin and Union Strait near the end of his route.

His journey was successful and he reached his furthest east the same day that Franklin reached his furthest west (16 August 1826). He abandoned his boats at Bloody Falls and trekked overland to Fort Franklin which he reached three weeks before Franklin. Together they had surveyed 1,878 miles of previously unmapped coast. The natural history discoveries of this expedition were so great that they had to be recorded in two separate works, the Flora Boreali-Americana (1833–40), written by William Jackson Hooker, and the Fauna Boreali-Americana (1829–37), written by Richardson, William John Swainson, John Edward Gray and William Kirby.

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