Anton Rolandsson Martin

Anton Rolandsson Martin

Anton Rolandsson Martin (3 August 1729 at Mündi manor (Müntenhoff) near Paide, Estonia – 30 January 1785 in Åbo) was a Swedish botanist.^[1]

He was son of Roland Martin, who later became an appeals court judge, and was born when the family was visiting friends in current Estonia. In the mid-1730s, the family moved to Åbo in present-day Finland, as the father received a position as secretary at the appeals court (hovrätt) there. Martin was enrolled at Royal Academy of Åbo in 1745, where he spent time as musician and a music teacher, while at the same time doing botanical excursions and discovering several plants previously unknown in Finland.

He worked as a tutor in Stockholm 1753–1756. After coming into contact with Pehr Wargentin, the permanent secretary of Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, and presenting some papers to the academy, he was enrolled as an apprentice student at the academy in 1756. He also enrolled at Uppsala University 1756, and received a bachelor's degree in medicine in Uppsala 1761.

In Uppsala, Carl Linnaeus was teaching, and he was sufficiently impressed with Martin to select him to travel with a whaling ship to collect specimen from the Arctic region and become a pioneering Arctic researcher. In April 1758, Martin left Gothenburg on a whaling ship belonging to the Swedish Greenland Company. The three-month trip went as far north as the 80th parallel, encountered difficult weather conditions, and Martin was only ashore for a few hours, on some small islands to the west of Spitsbergen. The trip did however produce valuable weather observations, and collections of sea-living animals and birds. In 1760, he did a trip to Norway's west coast, and did collections of sea-living animals using Bergen as a base. He also studied causes of leper and migrations of herring.

In 1761, after his degree in medicine, he moved to Stockholm intending to finish his education and at the same time practice as a physician. In the autumn he became ill, and after months of pain he was forced have his right leg amputated after it had been attacked by gangrene. He thereafter abandoned his plans for a higher degree, and in 1763 went to Finland, where he lived on small means in different cities but from 1770 in Åbo, receiving some financial support from friends. He continued to make scientific observations and experiments, in particular relating to physiology.

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