Blossom Expedition

The Museum’s first scientific expedition took a team of scientists on a cross-Atlantic adventure. In the fall of 1923, a team of 16 men, sponsored by Mrs. Elizabeth B. Blossom, embarked on one of the most ambitious and successful collection missions in Museum history. Charged with establishing a significant ornithological collection for the Museum, The crew of the schooner Blossom traveled 20,000 miles and collected around 13,000 specimens from Africa, South America, and the islands of the South Atlantic.

Weathering stormy seas, drenched equipment, spoiled food supplies, and intense bouts of seasickness, the expedition team spent a little over two years exploring areas of the Cape Verde Islands, Dakar, Gambia, Saint Helena, Ascension Island, Trinidad, and Rio de Janeiro. At an estimated cost of $125,000, the crew amassed the Museum’s first substantial vertebrate zoology collection while capturing film footage and 4,000 photographs of their adventure.

"The voyage of 31 months was over; we had reached the end of our 20,000-mile trail, with nearly 13,000 natural history specimens, many thousands of photographs, and notebooks bulging with stories of the interesting creatures of distant isles and seas." — Capt. George Finlay Simmons