James Anderson (1812-1867) was involved in a Land Arctic Searching Expedition organized by the Hudson Bay Company to solve the mystery of
Franklin's Expedition, where both the
HMS Erebus and
HMS Terror disappeared while attempting to find the Northwest Passage. His collections from the Great Fish and Mackenzie Rivers in the Northwest Territories form the earliest of the McGill Herbarium Arctic collections.
Dr. David Lyall (1817-1985), the Royal Navy surgeon on the HMS Erebus and HMS Terror during a voyage to Antarctica (1839-1843), was also a natural historian with an interest in botany. Sixty duplicates from his collections in Fiji and the Falkland Islands are housed at the McGill Herbarium.
