Christen Smith: The Botanist Who Wanted to Map Africa's Plants

On October seventeenth, seventeen eighty-five, Christen Smith was born in Sogndal, Norway. He was a physician and botanist, and his academic field was tropical botany and ethnography.

Smith was one of Norway's first internationally recognized scientists. Already at the age of 25, he was appointed professor of botany at the University of Oslo. His great passion was to explore and document new plant species. In eighteen sixteen, he was invited to join a major British expedition to the Congo River in Africa, led by the famous explorer James Kingston Tuckey. Smith's task was to collect and describe the region's unknown flora. During the arduous expedition, he collected over 800 plant species, many completely new to science. Tragically, this was also his final journey. Both Smith and most of the other expedition members fell ill, likely from malaria or yellow fever, and he died in the Congo in eighteen sixteen, only 30 years old. Although his life was short, his systematic work and plant collections laid the foundation for Scandinavian tropical botany.