THE BAHAMA ISLANDS 187 



volume appeared in 1731, the second in 1743. Linnaeus based some of his 

 species on Catesby's drawings. 



No more botanical work seems to have been attempted in the Bahamas 

 until Emperor Joseph II of Austria sent Franz Joseph Maerter, who was 

 Professor of Natural History in Vienna, with several assistants in 1783 to 

 collect plants and animals in America. Landing in Philadelphia, the party 

 travelled through the eastern United States to Florida. From there Maerter, 

 with two companions. Boos and Schopf, went to New Providence in March, 

 1784. Maerter remained but two weeks, but Schopf collected there for three 

 months and Boos until September 9 of the same year. From New Providence 

 these two men made excursions to several of the Out-islands. Of the collec- 

 tions made by this party, some specimens are in the K. K. Hofmuseum in 

 Vienna and some in Brussels. A few years later Andre Michaux, the well- 

 known French explorer and naturalist, went from the southern United States 

 to the Bahama Islands in 1789. There he collected about 863 trees and 

 shrubs and a number of seeds, most of which were carried alive to France and 

 there planted. 



A long period of over forty years now elapsed before another botanist 

 explored the Islands. In 1830 a man named Swainson visited the Bahamas 

 and remained there until 1843. Little is known regarding Swainson, not 

 even his first name. He did some collecting on New Providence, but most of 

 his plants are labeled from the Out-islands. His herbarium was taken to 

 Kew, where it was worked over by Grisebach, who incorporated a large number 

 of the species in his " Flora of the British West Indies." " 



Sixteen years later Justus Adalrik Hjalmarson, who had been living for 

 a number of years in St. Thomas and Porto Eico, visited Grand Turk Island 

 in May, 1858, where he collected for fourteen days. His plants were included 

 in Grisebach's flora.^ They are now divided between the Kew herbarium, 

 Grisebach's herbarium in Gottingen, and Krug and Urban's herbarium in 

 Berlin. The following year William Cooper, an American, collected in New 

 Providence. His plants (about 150 sheets) are now in the herbarium of the 

 New York Botanical Garden. At about this time Henrik Johannes Krebs, 

 who had also spent most of his life on St. Thomas, paid a short visit to 

 New Providence and collected a few plants which are now in the Botanical 

 Museum in Copenhagen. 



^ Flora of the British West Indian Islands. London, 1861. 



