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. This volume on the zoology they encountered in the Arctic and the Pacific was published in 1839, compiled by John Richardson, the naturalist who had accompanied Franklin on his expedition. Richardson had published his own findings on the flora and fauna of the Canadian Arctic between 1829 and 1831 (RCINs 1057015-6). A companion volume on the botanical discoveries made by Lay and Collie was edited by the botanist William Jackson Hooker and published in 1841 (RCIN 1055232).