Robert cushman murphy biography of william

Robert Cushman Murphy (April 29, – March 20, ) was an American ornithologist and Lamont Curator of birds at the American Museum of Natural History.

They had three children. After graduation, Murphy signed on the whaling brig Daisy Benjamin D Cleveland, master as assistant navigator. The Daisy was perhaps the last of the old free-for-all New England sailing vessels, taking whatever whales and seals its crew could find at sea or ashore. Murphy had a boat of his own and for most of the time a work tent ashore, but he always returned to the ship at night.

He rowed alone to Albatross Island and with sealers to distant beaches, witnessing the indiscriminate and illegal killing of female and young elephant seals. He described the 11 month cruise in Logbook for Grace , dedicated to the newly-wed wife he had left at home, and later published photographs taken during the voyage in A Dead Whale or a Stove Boat The field work and collection of sea birds Murphy made during the voyage of the Daisy set his career in the direction it would follow for the rest of his life, firstly at the Brooklyn Museum and then at the American Museum of Natural History.

Generous endowments from wealthy business men enabled the AMNH to charter vessels, keep professional collectors like Rollo Beck at sea and buy up the Rothschild and other collections when they came on the market, creating the foremost collection of sea birds in the world. Murphy's expeditions to the guano islands of Peru and his many publications were crowned by his two volumes of The Oceanic Birds of South America , widely recognised as the founding work of sea bird science.

Courtesy of The Auk - a quarterly journal of ornithology obituary January In , 58 years after the Daisy , Murphy returned to South Georgia and three years later died on 20 March When well over 70 he was in the Antarctic on the government icebreaker Glacier at the invitation of the National Science Foundation.

Murphy, Robert Cushman (United States ) ornithology.

Several years later he visited the same area and set foot on South Georgia for the first time in 58 years. When over 80 he attended the Pacific Science Congress in Australia and travelled the length and breadth of that continent by all means of conveyance. He lectured to the Linnaean Society about the trip about a month before his death and was in his office thereafter.

Thus, his sudden death caused as much shock as though he had been decades younger.