Person

McCormick, Robert (1800 - 1890)

Born
22 July 1800
Runham, Norfolk, United Kingdom
Died
28 October 1890
Wimbledon, Surrey, United Kingdom
Occupation
Geologist, Naval officer and Surgeon

Summary

Robert McCormick, a naval officer, was appointed Surgeon in HMS Erebus on the British Antarctic Expedition. Prior to this he had participated in two Arctic expeditions and was briefly on HMS Beagle. For the Expedition he was responsible for collecting zoological and geological specimens. On its return to London, these collections were deposited in the British Museum. In addition, McCormick's personal geological collection from the Expedition was bequeathed to the British Museum (Natural History) in 1890. Unlike the Expedition's botanical specimens, McCormick's geological collections received little attention for nearly 50 years. He was placed on the Navy's retired list in 1865, and is commemorated in Cape McCormick in Victoria Land, Antarctica.

Skip to

Details

Chronology

1822
Education - Qualified in medicine, Guy's and St Thomas's Hospitals, London
1827
Career position - Assistant Surgeon, HMS Hecla expedition to Spitsbergen under W. E. Parry
December 1831 - April 1832
Career position - Surgeon-Naturalist, HMS Beagle
19 September 1839 - 4 September 1843
Career position - Surgeon, HMS Erebus, British Antarctic Expedition
1865
Career event - Placed on the retired list of the Royal Navy

Related Cultural Objects

Related Events

Published resources

Books

  • Knight, John, The magnetism of Antarctica: the Ross Expedition 1839 - 1843 (Dunbeath, U.K.: Whittles Publishing, 2023), 232 pp. Details
  • McCormick, R., Voyages of discovery in the Arctic and Antarctic seas, and around the world, vol. 1-2 (London: Longman, 1884). Details

Journal Articles

  • Jones, A. G. E., 'Robert M'Cormick, Deputy Inspector-General Royal Navy', Great circle, 4 (1982), 84-91. Details
  • Keevil, J. J., 'Robert McCormick, R.N.: the stormy petrel of naval medicine', Journal of the Royal Naval Medical Service, 29 (1943), 36-62. Details
  • McCormick, R., 'Geological remarks on Kerguelen's Land', Tasmanian journal of natural science, 1 (1841), 27-34. Details
  • Stone, Philip, 'Robert McCormick's geological collections from Antarctica and the Southern Ocean, 1839 - 1843', Archives of natural history, 47 (1) (2020), 147-65. Details

See also

  • George, Alex S., Australian botanist's companion (Kardinya, W.A.: Four Gables Press, 2009), 671 pp. Details
  • Palin, Michael, Erebus: the story of a ship (London: Arrow Books, 2018), 334 pp. Details

Helen Cohn

Created: 30 November 2021

EOAS ID: biogs/P006834b.htm

This Edition: 2026 February - 1926 Centenaries
Kooyang - Gariwerd calendar - Late summer: late January to late March - season of eels
Reference: https://www.bom.gov.au/resources/indigenous-weather-knowledge/indigenous-seasonal-calendars/gariwerd-calendar#bom-anchor-list__item-kooyang-season-of-eels

Publisher: Swinburne University of Technology.

Except where otherwise noted, content on this site is
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
What do we mean by this?

The Encyclopedia of Australian Science and Innovation uses the Online Heritage Resource Manager (OHRM), a relational data curation and web publication system developed by the eScholarship Research Centre and its predecessors at the University of Melbourne 1999-2020. The OHRM has been maintained by Gavan McCarthy since 2020.

Cite this page: https://www.eoas.info/biogs/P006834b.htm

For earlier editions see the Internet Archive at: https://web.archive.org/web/*/www.eoas.info

"... the rengitj, as a visible mark or imprint on the land, is characterised as a place of origin, the repository of all names, as well as a kind of mapped visual expression of the connection between people and places which is to be carried out in the temporal sequence of the journey." Fanca Tamisari (1998) 'Body, Vision and Movement: In the footprints of the ancestors'. Oceania 68(4) p260