Frédéric Cailliaud

Frédéric Cailliaud (9 June 1787 – 1 May 1869) was a French naturalist, mineralogist and conchologist. He was born, and died, in Nantes.

He travelled in Egypt, Nubia, and Ethiopia, collecting minerals and making observations. He was a part of the military expedition that his patron Viceroy Muhammad Ali sent south to conquer the Kingdom of Sennar, but also marched further into Fazogli where Caillaud searched for outcroppings of gold while the commander Ismail, son of Muhammad Ali, enslaved locals and slaughtered all who resisted him. Although he failed to find any sizeable deposits of gold in the mountains along the modern Sudan-Ethiopia border, he did make a sufficiently detailed survey of the area to be published after he returned to France in 1827.