ABSTRACT
In the mid-nineteenth century naturalists and botanists scoured the colonial world securing ‘natural history’ specimens to satisfy the imperial science project’s insatiable thirst for classifying and collecting. One contributor to this was the British ship HMS Rattlesnake which, during 1847 to 1849, led an expedition to survey Australia’s tropical north-east coasts, islands and reefs, and to assess the suitability of the newly encountered land for British settlement and expansion.
