British army major who collected plants while stationed in British colonies. After joining the army in 1811, Daniel Bolton served as a Lieutenant in the Peninsular War under the Duke of Wellington from 1813-1814, then in Belgium and France. From about 1818 he was stationed in Canada, working on the Rideau Canal among other projects.

Rising through the ranks to Captain, Major and Lieutenant-Colonel over the next two decades, in 1846 Bolton was posted to Auckland, New Zealand. Arriving in 1847, when the settlement was barely seven years old, he joined Governor Grey, Bishop Selwyn and the Colonial Secretary and botanist Dr. Andrew Sinclair. Among his duties in the colony were organising aspects of the building of the Kerikeri to Okaihou road and inspecting the Ross Harbour settlement on Auckland Island.

With Sinclair's encouragement Bolton collected plant specimens, which he sent to William Hooker at Kew, his first consignment arriving in 1852. Some of these collections were made in the subantarctic Auckland Islands (in 1849-1850), the first to be made since 1840. Joseph Hooker gives a special mention to Bolton (among a handful of other collectors) in the introduction to the first part of his Flora Novae-Zelandiae (1853), and cites 19 of his specimens from Auckland Island in the first part of his Handbook of the New Zealand Flora (1863), though it is questionable whether all of them actually came from Auckland Island.

Bolton left New Zealand in 1853 to follow Governor Grey to the Cape Colony. He travelled via Sydney and Melbourne to England before arriving in South Africa in May 1855. Based in Grahamstown, he wrote to William Hooker again and sent packages of succulent specimens. He died in 1860 after suffering sunstroke which occurred while he was riding, probably collecting specimens.

Sources:
E.J. Godley, 2003, "Biographical Notes (52): Daniel Bolton (c. 1793-1860)", New Zealand Botanical Society Newsletter, 74(December): 14.