Robert Cushman Murphy
Ornithologist · 1887–1973
Who is Robert Cushman Murphy?
Robert Cushman Murphy was an American ornithologist who became Lamont Curator of Birds at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. In 1912, shortly before his marriage, he signed on to the whaling brig Daisy, nominally as an assistant navigator but in practice as its naturalist, on a year-long voyage to the South Atlantic. The Daisy spent nearly four months at South Georgia, working the waters around the Bay of Isles and Possession Bay from late 1912 into 1913, during which Murphy collected specimens of penguins, albatrosses, and other seabirds later deposited at the American Museum of Natural History. He kept a detailed diary in the form of letters to his fiancee, Grace, which he published more than three decades later as Logbook for Grace: Whaling Brig Daisy, 1912-1913 (1947), now regarded as one of the most vivid firsthand accounts of South Georgia's wildlife and landscape from the early twentieth century. His South Georgia fieldwork fed directly into his landmark scientific work, Oceanic Birds of South America (1936), and established him as a pioneering researcher of the island's seabird colonies, particularly its albatrosses.
Sources: Robert Cushman Murphy, Logbook for Grace: Whaling Brig Daisy, 1912-1913 (Macmillan, 1947) · Robert Cushman Murphy, Oceanic Birds of South America (American Museum of Natural History, 1936) · Stony Brook University Special Collections, "Robert Cushman Murphy Collection"