In 1825, Frederick William Beechey was commissioned to lead an expedition in the Pacific with the intention to navigate the Bering Strait and explore the northern coast of Alaska. Sailing with the ship HMS Blossom, Beechey’s expedition was a companion to the second overland expedition of Sir John Franklin (see RCINs 1057015-6). Where Franklin and his party would travel westward from the Atlantic, Beechey was to sail east to meet them, thereby proving that the Northwest Passage was navigable. In the end, Franklin and Beechey missed one another by only 140 miles, the former being forced to turn back due to fog and ice.

On Blossom’s return to Britain in 1828, the discoveries made by the expedition’s naturalists, George Tradescant Lay and Alexander Collie were prepared for publication by the prominent botanist William Jackson Hooker, then professor of botany at Glasgow University. The resulting book, The Botany of Captain Beechey’s Voyage, published in 1841, not only described plants found in the Arctic but also others encountered during Blossom’s time in the Pacific, including several from San Francisco Bay in California, the Hawaiian Archipelago and the Bonin Islands (now part of Japan).