The Phantom Naturalist: What do we know about the nineteenth-century natural history collector Alfred Crossley?

Born in Halifax, UK, in 1839, and shipwrecked on Madagascar as a youth, Alfred Crossley had returned to the island by 1869 and in the ensuing eight years made hugely important collections of mammals, birds, butterflies, and other natural history specimens. Many of these are now in major museums in the UK and Europe (including numerous holotypes), but unknown quantities went to private collectors and are now lost. Unfortunately, Crossley’s original documentation has also disappeared; and apart from his collections themselves he left few traces of his journeyings, which included Cameroon and Mauritius (at least) as well as Madagascar. This article gathers everything that is currently known about the collector and his travels in order to reconstitute his collecting itineraries, to determine his specimen localities, to understand why and how he left so few traces, and to correct some previously published misperceptions. It also attempts to shed light on Crossley’s mysterious death in Madagascar in 1877.