Francis Henry Hill Guillemard

Francis Henry Hill Guillemard (12 September 1852 – 23 December 1933) was a reader of geography at Cambridge University, a traveller, writer and naturalist.

Guillemard was born in Eltham, Kent, the fifth son of Dr. I. G. Guillemard. The family had Huguenot origins and had settled in Poitou following persecution in the seventeenth century. He took an interest in natural history at an early age. He wrote on pigeons in the Boys' Weekly in 1866. He was unable to go to Rugby due to poor health between 1866 and 1868 after which he went to a cram school in Richmond. He attended natural history auctions regularly where he met Newton, Howard Saunders and other ornithologists of the period. He went to Gonvville and Caius College, Cambridge in 1870 receiving a BA in 1874 followed by a work at St. Bartholomew's Hospital before joining for medical studies. During his undergraduate days he made expeditions to the Orkneys to study birds. His medical thesis of 1881 was on Bilharzia. After receiving his medical degree, he worked briefly at but did not practice for long. He travelled through Lapland as an undergraduate and served in South Africa as a doctor during the first Boer War. He served as a naturalist on an expedition into Southeast Asia about which he wrote in his The Cruise of the Marchesa (1886) which became a popular travel book. He became a reader in geography at Cambridge in 1888. He wrote a book on Ferdinand Magellan and his travels in 1890.[1][2]