Smithsonian-Roosevelt African Expedition
Participants in the expedition. Smithsonian Institution Archives
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| Date | 1909–10 |
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| Participants |
Theodore Roosevelt; R. J. Cunninghame; Frederick Selous; Kermit Roosevelt; Edgar Alexander Mearns; Edmund Heller; John Alden Loring. |
The Smithsonian–Roosevelt African Expedition was an expedition to Africa led by Theodore Roosevelt and outfitted by the Smithsonian Institution. Its purpose was to collect specimens for the Smithsonian's new Natural History museum, now known as the National Museum of Natural History. The expedition collected around 11,400 animal specimens which took Smithsonian naturalists eight years to catalog.
The group, led by the legendary hunter-tracker R. J. Cunninghame, included scientists from the Smithsonian and was joined from time to time by Frederick Selous, the famous big game hunter and explorer. Among other items, Roosevelt brought with him four tons of salt for preserving animal hides, a lucky rabbit's foot given to him by boxer John L. Sullivan, a Holland & Holland double rifle in .500/450 donated by a group of 56 admiring Britons, a Winchester 1895 rifle in .405 Winchester, an Army (M1903) Springfield in .30-06 caliber stocked and sighted for him, a Fox No. 12 shotgun, and the famous Pigskin Library, a collection of classics bound in pig leather and transported in a single reinforced trunk. Participants on the Expedition included Roosevelt's son, Kermit, Edgar Alexander Mearns, Edmund Heller, and John Alden Loring.
The party set sail from New York City on the steamer Hamburg on March 23, 1909, shortly after the end of Roosevelt's presidency. The party landed in Mombasa, British East Africa (now Kenya), traveled to the Belgian Congo (now Democratic Republic of the Congo) before following the Nile to Khartoum in modern Sudan. Financed by Andrew Carnegie and by his own proposed writings, Roosevelt's party hunted for specimens for the Smithsonian Institution and for the American Museum of Natural History in New York.
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