AT OUR recent Heritage Network meeting we discussed next year’s exhibitions when the theme will be jubilees, anniversaries and so on.

1215 was a document, Magna Carta, 1315 was a rebellion that passed through and destroyed parts of Haydock, 1415 was a battle, Agincourt, 1815, was Waterloo, and in 1915 the Pals were still in action.

I was reminded that also in 1815, Thomas Nuttall started another expedition. I think he is the only person who became famous and then chose to live in St Helens.

Time for some revision. In 1810 he was living in the USA, still very much an unexplored continent. He travelled to the Great Lakes and in 1811 joined the Astor Expedition, led by William Price Hunt, up the Missouri River.

Nuttall was accompanied by the English botanist John Bradbury, who was collecting plants on behalf of Liverpool botanical gardens.

Nuttall and Bradbury left the party at the trading post with the Arikara Indians in South Dakota, and continued upriver. In August they returned to the Arikara post and joined Manuel Lisa’s group on a return to St. Louis.

Although Lewis and Clark had travelled this way previously, many of their specimens had been lost. Therefore many of the plants collected by Nuttall were unknown to science. The imminent war between Britain and America caused him to return to London.

In 1815 he returned to America and after spending some more time collecting, he published The Genera of North American Plants in 1818. From 1818 to 1820 he travelled along the Arkansas and Red Rivers, returning to Philadelphia and publishing his Journal of Travels into the Arkansas Territory during the year 1819. In 1825 he became curator of the botanical gardens at Harvard University. He published his Manual of the Ornithology of the United States and of Canada (1832 and 1834).

In 1834 he set off west again with an expedition. They travelled through Kansas, Wyoming and Utah, and then down the Snake River to the Columbia. Nuttall then sailed to the Hawaiian Islands in December. He returned in 1835 and spent the year botanising in the Pacific Northwest. On his return trip he stopped off in San Diego, where he met Richard Henry Dana, Jr.. The character of ‘old curious’ in Dana’s book Two Years Before the Mast is based on Nuttall.

From 1836 until 1841 Nuttall worked at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. During this time he made contributions to the Flora of North America being prepared by Asa Gray and John Torrey. The death of his uncle then required Nuttall to return to England. By terms of his uncle’s will, to inherit Nutgrove Hall, Nuttall had to remain in England for nine months of each year. His North American Sylva: Trees not described by F. A. Michaux, was finished just before he left the US in December, 1841. He died in St Helens,and is buried in Christ Church in Eccleston.

On a personal note, Thomas once visited a friend in Milledgeville in Georgia. Although he had a horse, he walked most of the way because he was looking out for strange plants and flowers.