William Bollaert was a noted English traveler, explorer, author, chemist, geographer, and ethnologist.

William Bollaert, noted English traveler, explorer, author, chemist, geographer, and ethnologist, exemplifies the second great wave of British exploration in the Americas. Trained as a chemist, he sailed around Cape Horn to Peru in 1826 and worked as an assayer in silver mining regions, surveying vast mining districts for the Peruvian government, crossing the Atacama desert, and reporting his findings to the Arequipa Mining Company in London. Returning to England in 1820, Bollaert published his discoveries but failed to win an academic appointment. In the following three decades he traveled to Portugal, to the new Republic of Texas (where he toured the countryside, joined the Texas navy, and made an official report of his observations to the British Admiralty), and back again to South America in 1854 to 1855, when he explored the land and made detailed assessments of the potential for British investments in railroads, mining, chemicals, and other profitable ventures. Bollaert published more than 80 reports and articles from his travels, a book on the Wars of Succession in post-Napoleonic Spain and Portugal, worked on a history of Texas (published posthumously in 1956), and in 1861 translated from the Spanish for the Hakluyt Society Pedro Simon's 16th century account of "The Expedition of Pedro de Ursua & Lope de Aguirre in search of El Dorado and Omagua in 1560-1561."

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