More than a hundred European scientific expeditions went to the Canary Islands during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Many were on their way to more distant destinations — but others were there to map and study the natural history of the islands themselves, and led to many scientific discoveries of general importance.

The original reports of these expeditions, physically scattered around the world, are now being brought together courtesy of a major European Commission-funded digital project known as ECHO (European Cultural Heritage Online).

Some of the works have already been widely seen. The 1856 expedition of Charles Piazzi-Smith, for example, was recorded in his popular work An Astronomer's Experiment (1858), held in several libraries in Spain and Britain. Piazzi-Smith made astronomical observations at different altitudes on El Teide, Tenerife's highest peak, showing for the first time that more stars can be seen at the top of a mountain.

By contrast, the work of the Norwegian botanist Christen Smith, who accompanied German volcanologist Leopold von Buch in his 1814 expedition, was thought to be lost, as Smith continued on to the Congo where he died. But his manuscripts and diaries, describing some 600 different plants, about 50 of which were new to science at the time, were recently found in a library in Oslo.

The picture shows illustrations of volcanoes taken from Atlas des Isles Canaries (1836) by von Buch, who developed his theory of volcanoes in the Canaries.

http://humboldt.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de