Evelyn Cheesman

Lucy Evelyn Cheesman (8 October 1881 – 15 April 1969) was a British entomologist and traveller. Between 1924 and 1952, Cheesman went on eight solo expeditions in the South Pacific, and collected over 70,000 specimens, which she accompanied with sketches and notes. These are now part of the collections of the Natural History Museum in London. Cheesman published extensively about her work and travels. In 1955, she was appointed an OBE for her services to science.

Biography Early life Lucy Evelyn Cheesman was one of five children of Florence Maud Tassell and Robert Cheesman, born 8 October 1881. in Gumley, Leicestershire, but did not find it congenial work. She taught herself French and German by travelling in both countries. Interested in the natural world, Cheesman was unable to train for a career as a veterinary surgeon because the Royal Veterinary College did not accept women students in 1906.

During World War I, she worked as a civil servant at the Admiralty, where her German was useful in identifying businesses that were German sympathizers, for the Neutral and Enemy Trade Index (NETI).

Zoo, expeditions, museum After the war she met Harold Maxwell-Lefroy, professor of entomology at Imperial College of Science and honorary curator of the insect house at the London Zoological Gardens, and studied entomology.

In 1924 she was invited to join a zoological expedition to the Marquesas and Galapagos Islands on the St. George sailing yacht, serving as an entomologist alongside Anglo-Irish explorer and entomologist Cynthia Longfield. The expedition was a private one, a mix of scientists and tourists with divergent aims and interests. Cheesman considered the expedition to be disorganised, and left it at Tahiti, along with Cyril Crossland. She was able to continue exploring and gathering specimens on her own with the help of £100 from her brother Percy, who sent her money after he heard rumours about the expedition's possible financial instability. She treated indigenous populations with respect, learning from them, and was known in the islands as ‘the woman who walks’ and ‘the lady of the mountains’. and was granted a civil list pension in the same year for her contributions to entomology, giving her some financial security. Their entries are listed next to each other in the Dictionary of British and Irish botanists and horticulturalists. She also named the genus Buysmania after Maarten Buysman, who collected insect specimens on Java.

Amphibians and reptiles She also collected reptiles and amphibians, and several New Guinea species were named in her honour:

Platymantis cheesmanae Parker, 1940 – Cyclops Range ground frog (Ceratobatrachidae) Barygenys cheesmanae Parker, 1936 – Mt. Tafa burrowing frog (Microhylidae) Cophixalus cheesmanae Parker, 1934 – Cheesman's hill-forest frog (Microhylidae) Nyctimystes cheesmani or Litoria cheesmani (Tyler, 1964) – Cheesman's big-eyed treefrog (Hylidae) Lipinia cheesmanae Parker, 1940 – Cheesman's lipinia, Cheesman's moth skink (Scincidae)

The tree frog is interesting in that the herpetologist who described it, has used the masculine genitive ending 'i' instead of the feminine 'ae', showing an assumption that the collector must have been a man.

Orchids

In 2013, Cheesman was credited as the discoverer of one of the very few blue-flowered epiphytic orchids known to exist, Dendrobium azureum. Records showed that she had collected the specimen on 17 June 1938 on the summit of Mt. Nok, an extinct volcano on the remote island of Waigeo, off New Guinea. Cheesman describes collecting the orchids in her book Six-legged Snakes in New Guinea:

Her blue orchid specimens were identified as a new species in 2013, by André Schuiteman, senior researcher in orchids at Kew. No other collected specimens are known to have been found, and it is unknown whether the species still exists.