sketcher and naturalist, was appointed conchologist to the United States Exploring Expedition under Charles Wilkes, an appointment reputedly made through the personal intervention of President Andrew Jackson and resented by Wilkes from the first: 'He was no man of science, had been a master of a vessel out of Boston and engaged in various other occupations of trade and merchandise. I took him very unwillingly’. In August 1838 Couthouy sailed in Wilkes’s ship the Vincennes ('where I could more readily control his peculiar disposition’), arriving at Sydney in November 1839.
The voyage was predictably acrimonious and Couthouy felt he was being obstructed in his work. Ordered to return home by Wilkes, he formally applied to leave the expedition on the grounds of ill health then continued as a passenger as far as Hawaii. James Dwight Dana replaced him as marine zoologist for the rest of the voyage. On the expedition’s return, the responsibility for editing the volume of Mollusca and Shells (1852) for Wilkes’s report, later published as Narrative of the United States Exploring Expedition , was given to Augustus A. Gould. Most of the 52 plates in the complementary Atlas (1856) were attributed to Joseph Drayton , some to Drayton and Couthouy jointly. Several of Couthouy’s drawings and descriptions were not used, even when he was describing type species. For instance, neither his watercolour of a holothurian (sea cucumber) made at Valparaiso in May 1839 nor his account of it was published and the animal remained unknown to science until 1868. Nor were many of the medusae, which Couthouy and Drayton had drawn and described, used by Louis Agassiz of Harvard University who was commissioned to report on the fish (but not necessarily the 'Gelly fish’) to whom all drawings and descriptions were sent. No official report on the fishes or the pelagic 'zoophytes’ ever appeared. Most of Couthouy’s sketches are now in the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington; few appear to be of Australian subjects.
- Writers:
- Staff Writer
- Date written:
- 1992
- Last updated:
- 2011
