Plant Hunting Expeditions of David Fairchild to The Bahamas

Abstract

The plant hunting expeditions made by David Fairchild on board the research boat Utowana represented some of the most important contributions in the history of plant exploration. These expeditions targeted all the continents except Australia and Antarctica and provided germplasm for the United States Department of Agriculture. As part of our current research to document the details and outputs of David Fairchild’s plant hunting expeditions, in this paper we present an account pertinent to the three trips that he made to The Bahamas. Two of these trips were on board the Utowana and were part of larger expeditions that David Fairchild undertook to the West Indies, Central America and the Guianas between December 1931 and April 1933. No plant material was collected on the third trip when David Fairchild and his wife flew to Nassau in April 1939. We believe that the main focus of this last trip was to meet with Anne Archbold to make arrangements for the Cheng Ho expedition to the East Indies. This Asian endeavor was the only major expedition undertaken by David Fairchild to collect plant material for Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden (FTBG). During the Bahamian expedition eleven islands/cays were visited, 94 germplasm accessions (73 species) were collected, and 132 photographs were taken. Our research has been largely based on documents and photographs that belonged to David Fairchild and that are deposited at the Library and Archives of FTBG. “The more than ten years that I spent in the office that Fairchild founded for our Department of Agriculture made me a great admirer of Dr. Fairchild and to appreciate even more the work that he, Wilson Popenoe, and others in the Division had done for our country. Among their accomplishments was the encouragement or establishment as a crop or industry the date, fig, avocado, mango, pistachio, and other lesser known crops. These explorers were also concerned with introducing germ plasm, or breeding stock, for the improvement of traditional field crops, vegetables, and fruit plants, as well as the introduction and establishment of ornamental and other economic plants such as bamboos and Meyer’s Zoysia grass.” [Donovan Correll, from his unpublished autobiography “Notes from a Singing Plant Explorer," January 1983 (Korber et al., 2013)].