Report on the Zoological Collections made in the Indo-Pacific Ocean during the Voyage of H.M.S. ‘Alert’ 1881-82

1884

Expedition Reports Q115 A552 1881.

London: British Museum

The voyage of HMS Alert (1878-1882) was a surveying expedition that explored the waters in and around Patagonia, Polynesia, and the eastern and northern coasts of Australia. British Navy surgeon and naturalist, Richard Coppinger, accompanied the expedition team. He collected specimens ‘whenever the requirements of the survey brought the vessel into regions whose zoology was… imperfectly known’ (Coppinger, 1884). Alert spent four months near Thursday Island, situated 30 kilometres off the tip of Northern Queensland in the Torres Strait. It is unclear how Coppinger came to be in possession of these skull specimens. The reports state that specimen A is ‘the skull of the last chief of the island of Nagheer’.