| LC control no. | nr 93023763 |
|---|---|
| Descriptive conventions | rda |
| Personal name heading | Masson, Francis, 1741-1805 |
| Associated country | Great Britain Scotland England South Africa Canada |
| Birth date | 1741-08 |
| Death date | 1805-12-23 |
| Place of birth | Aberdeen (Scotland) |
| Place of death | Montréal (Québec) |
| Field of activity | Plant collecting Botanical illustration Stapelia |
| Affiliation | Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew |
| Profession or occupation | Plant collectors Botanists Illustrators |
| Special note | Data provided by the ESTC/BL |
| Found in | His Stapeliæ novæ: or, a collection of several new species of that genus, 1796-: t.p. (Francis Masson) To the King (compelled to leave the Cape of Good Hope due to an expected invasion; by His Majesty's command, attached to the Royal Gardens at Kew for the past 24 years as a collector of exotic plants) Preface (sent to the Cape of Good Hope in 1772 to collect seeds and plants for the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, remained for two and a half years; sent there a second time in 1786 and remained nearly ten years; hereby sharing the figures contained in this work to the public) pages 9-24 (botanical descriptions, in Latin) DNB (Masson, Francis, 1741-ca. Christmas 1805; gardener and botanist) Undiscovered Scotland (website), viewed July 12, 2023 (Francis Masson; born in Aberdeen, August 1741; died 23 December 1805; Kew Gardens' first plant hunter; at age 19 in 1760 he travelled to London to become an under-gardener at Kew Gardens; in 1772 he was seen as knowledgeable enough to stand in for plant collector and botanist Joseph Banks on Captain Cook's second voyage of exploration on board HMS Resolution, which set sail from Britain on 13 May 1772 and arrived in South Africa on 30 October 1772; by the time he returned to Kew in 1775, he had sent back over 500 previously unknown plant species; over the following three years he mounted plant collecting expeditions to Madeira, the Canary Islands, the Azores and the Antilles, and was held as a French prisoner on the island of Grenada in 1779; returned to South Africa in the 1780s-1790s and afterwards published his only book, Stapeliae Novae; in 1797 he sailed for North America, arriving in New York in December; he spent the next 7 years collecting plants in the Great Lakes area of Canada; died in Montreal on December 23, 1805; he had discovered over 1700 new species of plants; the genus Massonia is named after him) <https://www.undiscoveredscotland.co.uk/usbiography/m/francismasson.html> |
| Associated language | eng lat |
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