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 (1817-1885), 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. Ogden Taylor (BSc Environment 2026 ) uncovers the story of these specimens through an interactive map he made while undertaking an undergraduate research project at the McGill Herbarium in Winter, 2025.