Joseph Dalton Hooker: man of Himalayan Journal

Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker (1817 - 1911) is remembered as an eminent Victorian botanist and one of Charles Darwin's chief collaborators. Many know of his plant collecting expedition in the Himalayas, but few are aware of his voyage to Antarctica and visits to Syria, Lebanon, Morocco, the Rockies and California. In addition to his botanical skills, he was also an amateur artist who obsessively sketched landscape, flora and occasionally, people and buildings. Son of Sir William Jackson Hooker, also a botanist who researched the flora of Scotland and Iceland, and subsequently (1841) becoming the first director of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, Sir Joseph become the second director at Kew.

Apart from his letters home and Himalayan Journals, Sir Joseph is also the author of "Genera Plantarum" a monumental work on the flora of New Zealand, Antarctica and India. 

An outstanding scientific traveller:
It was chance that brought Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker to India. After his journey to the Antarctica he began searching for an area near the tropics for his next study. The choice could well have been the Andes and if that happened we would have lost out on a unique and rare classic.

Sir Joseph traversed the Central and eastern Himalayas in 1848, a time when no traveller or naturalist, however bedazzled by it's mystique, had ventured forth. Even today, more than a hundred years later, ther is dearth of literature on the region.

Mindful and adventuresome, the author paid acute attention to detail. The journals are much more that exhaustive notes of botanical interest, they are packed with appealing anecdotes and significant sociological insights, all sprinkled with a pich of humour.

Beginning with a quaint palkee-ride from Calcutta, Hooker escorts us through the jungles of Behar and Birhboom, across the river Teesta and up the lofty mountain peaks in Tibet. His journals tell stories of acorns, bikh poison and conch shells, of rhubarb, syenite and Tibetan toys.

They tell of times and lives gone by, for us to relive them in our imagination and hand over in words to the generation after us. (from "Himalayan Journals - Notes of a Naturalist" by J.D. Hooker, 1854)

consulted and shared thankfully from:

# Himalayan Journal - Notes of a Naturalist by J.D. Hooker) 1854

# picture credit: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Joseph_Dalton_Hooker_profile.jpg