Henry Smeathman

Henry Smeathman (1742–1786) was an English naturalist.

In 1771 John Fothergill along with two other members of the Royal Society, Sir Joseph Banks and Marmaduke Tunstall, sponsored Smeathman to spend four years in and around the Sierra Leone penininsula studying its natural history.^[1] According to John C. Lettsome, Smeathman married first the daughter of King Tom and later the daughter of King James Cleveland; however on both these occasions his spouse died.^[2] Smeathman supplemented this work with a further four years spent in the Caribbean.

Andreas Berlin, one of the apostles of Linnaeus, was among Smeathman's associates.

Texts

• Smeathman H. (1781) Some account of the termites, which are found in hot Climates. Phil. Trans. Roy. Soc. 71: 139-192,
• Smeathman H. (1785?) Elocution and polite literature
• Smeathman H. (1786) Plan of a Settlement to be made near Sierra Leone, on the Grain Coast of Africa

References

Bibliography

• Braidwood, Stephen (1994). Black Poor and White Philanthropists: London's Blacks and the Foundation of the Sierra Leone Settlement 1786 - 1791. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. ISBN 978-0-85323-377-0. 

External links

• Douglas, Starr. "Smeathman, Henry". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/93969.  (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)