East India Company surgeon, surveyor and botanist. Dr. Francis Buchanan, later Hamilton or Hamilton-Buchanan, published works on the geography, flora and fauna of India, where he lived and explored from the end of the 18th century until 1815.

Hamilton was born at Branziet near Bardowie, Stirlingshire. After qualifying in medicine in 1783 at the University of Edinburgh (during which time he studied botany under John Hope), he became a medical officer with the East India Company, spending time in Asia in 1785, 1788-1789 and 1791. He was finally employed as assistant surgeon in Bengal (1794-1815), giving him the opportunity to explore large parts of the Indian subcontinent, where he hoped to collect plants. His first major collections were made in Burma (Myanmar) in 1795, where he accompanied Captain Michael Symes on a political mission to Ava. In 1800 he was commissioned to survey South India following the British victory in the Fourth Anglo-Mysore War, and later made a further, wide-ranging survey of all the areas under the jurisdiction of the British East India Company. This task took him some seven years from 1807 and covered not only topography and natural resources but also aspects of local culture, religion and history and archaeology.

Travelling through Burma and the Andaman Islands (1795), Chittagong (1798), Nepal (1800-1803), North Bengal and Bihar (1807-1809), Hamilton made detailed observations and prepared extensive reports. His resulting publications include the three-volume A Journey from Madras through the Countries of Mysore, Canara and Malabar (1807) and An account of the fishes found in the river Ganges and its branches (1822), describing more than a hundred new species of fish. He also published An Account of the Kingdom of Nepal (1819) following an appointment to the British embassy in Kathmandu, and a series of historically important treatises based on his surveys, as well as papers in scientific journals.

Hamilton was keenly interested in the natural history of the Asian land in which he spent so many years. While serving as surgeon to Lord Wellesley, Governor General of India, he managed a menagerie which later became the Calcutta Alipore Zoo. This he abandoned in 1805, however, when he sailed to England with Wellesley. Hamilton collected watercolour paintings of plants and animals by local artists and gathered a wealth of plant specimens during his travels. He sent many of these to his friend from his Edinburgh days, John Smith, who drew on them for his Exotic Botany.

In 1806 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society before being promoted to surgeon and re-dispatched to India to begin his survey of Bengal. Hamilton was appointed Superintendent of the Calcutta Botanical Garden in 1814, succeeding William Roxburgh, but did not enjoy the position for very long. Retiring from his career in India he returned to Britain in 1816, thereafter living at Leny House near Callander and devoting himself to completing his natural history manuscripts. Having deposited his Bengali specimens with the East India Company in 1815, he managed to retrieve them in 1820 in order to work on them. He spent several years making commentaries on Rheede's Hortus indicus malabaricus and Rumphius' Herbarium amboinense.

It was in 1818 that Hamilton changed his name from Buchanan when his brother died and he succeeded to the estate of his mother, Elizabeth Hamilton. Once back on home ground he must have had endless tales to share with his former acquaintances, not least an anecdote about his notes taken at John Hope's lectures while he was a student. Apparently he had lent them to a shipmate on the way to India, who subsequently lost them at Satyamangalam in Mysore. Somehow the notes came into the hands of the kingdom's leader, Tippu Sultan (the 'Tiger of Mysore'), and they were found bound in Tippu's library after the fall of Mysore, and returned to Buchanan by a British major.

Hamilton married late in life and had one son. He died at his home, Leny House, where he had cultivated many unusual plants in the garden. His specimens from Burma and Chittagong went to the British Museum via Joseph Banks, while plants collected in Mysore and Nepal were deposited at the Linnean Society (LINN) via John Smith. The Burmese tree Buchaniana Spr. was named in his honour.

Sources:
D. Mabberley, 1977, "Francis Hamilton's Commentaries with Particular Reference to Meliaceae", Taxon, 26(5/6): 525-527
D. Prain, 1905, "A sketch of the life of Francis Hamilton (once Buchanan), some time superintendent of the honourable company's botanic gardens at Calcutta", Annals of the Royal Botanic Garden of Calcutta, 10(2), i-lxxv
K. Prior, 2004, "Hamilton, Francis, of Buchanan (1762-1829)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online edn:
http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/3836, accessed 7 September 2010
K.K. Sinha, 1993, "Francis Buchanan (Hamilton): physician, botanist and surveyor", Proceedings of the Royal College of Physicians Edinburgh, 23(1): 36-42.