John Richardson (naturalist)

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

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

Franklin and Richardson returned to Canada between 1825 and 1827, again travelling overland to the Arctic Ocean. 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 Swainson, John Edward Gray and William Kirby.

Richardson was knighted in 1846. He travelled with John Rae on an unsuccessful search for Franklin in 1848-49, describing it in An Arctic Searching Expedition (1851). He retired to the Lake District in 1855, and is buried at Grasmere.

He also wrote accounts dealing with the natural history, and especially the ichthyology, of several other Arctic voyages, and was the author of Icones Piscium (1843), Catalogue of Apodal Fish in the British Museum (1856), the second edition of Yarrell's history of British Fishes (1860), and The Polar Regions (1861).