Biography

"The visit of the French to Akaroa in 1840, and the narrow escape from a colony of that nation being established on New Zealand soil, are matters of general history. Less well known is the fact that accompanying the expedition was an enthusiastic botanist." So writes the botanist Leonard Cockayne in New Zealand Plants and their Story (1910). The "enthusiastic botanist" was one Étienne Raoul, surgeon on board the French corvette L'Aube accompanying the Comte de Paris replete with a cargo of French settlers. Raoul was based at Akaroa on Banks Peninsula until January 1843, managing to gather a fine collection of plant specimens from there and the Bay of Islands in the north during this time.

Returning to France, Raoul worked on his specimens at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris and published an account of the new species he had found in the Annales des Sciences Naturelles in 1844, followed by the finely illustrated Choix de Plantes de la Nouvelle Zélande (1846), detailing 44 species. He named some of these species after people connected to the journey: Veronica lavaudiana Raoul (basionym of Hebe lavaudiana Anderson) after Captain Lavaud of L'Aube and Celmisia mackaui Raoul after the French naval minister, Admiral Baron de Mackau. The genus Raoulia Hook.f., meanwhile, was named in his honour by Joseph Hooker, who recorded Raoul's collections in his Flora Novae-Zelandiae. The most famous example of the genus is Raoulia eximia Hook.f., the vegetable sheep, though Raoul probably never saw the plant himself. Raoul also collected mosses, liverworts, seaweeds, fungi and lichens in New Zealand.

Raoul was born at Brest, the son of a French naval captain, and qualified as a surgeon in 1836. The following year he joined the Commission of African Exploration, which saw him treat the crew of La Malouine when they were struck by an epidemic off the coast of French West Africa (Senegal). For his efforts, he was made a Chevalier de la Legion d'Honneur in 1838. While attached to L'Aube in New Zealand he was also put to the test when crew members ate the poisonous berries of tutu (Coriaria arborea Linds.). He continued his medical work in France in the 1840s, achieving his doctorate in 1844 with a thesis on coronary disease, but was encouraged to travel overseas again, being sent to West Africa once more in 1846-1847. Charged with centralising healthcare for the French fleet, he nevertheless also found time to collect plants in the area. Back in France he wrote a guide to hygiene and medicine for commercial ships visiting West Africa, and was appointed professor of medicine at Brest in 1849. The skilled surgeon and naturalist died just a few years later, however, aged 37.

As well as the genus Raoulia, he is commemorated in the New Zealand plant species Plantago raoulii Decne., Hebe raoulii Cockayne & Allan and Danthonia raoulii Steud. Raoul Island in the Kermadec group is named after Étienne Raoul's uncle, Joseph Raoul, while Étienne's nephew, Édouard Francois Armand Raoul (1845-1898), co-authored the 1889 French edition of G.B. Hetley's Native Flowers of New Zealand.

Sources:
L. Cockayne, 1910, New Zealand Plants and their Story: 18
E.J. Godley, 1967, "A century of botany in Canterbury", Transactions of the Royal Society of New Zealand, 1(22): 244
F.B. Sampson, 1985, Early New Zealand Botanical Art: 58-60, 102
M.J.A. Simpson, 1976, "E.F.L. and E.F.A. Raoul", New Zealand Journal of Botany, 14: 199-202.