On March 4, 1851, James Richardson died, closing a life that had been shaped by travel into some of the most demanding terrain then known to British explorers. He had been born in Lincolnshire in 1806, and the distance between that English county and the Saharan interior measures something of the arc his life eventually traced.

A citizen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, Richardson worked as an explorer whose attention came to rest on the Saharan desert and the Sahel region that borders it. He conducted expeditions into that territory, pressing into the broad transitional zone of the Sahel where conditions tested the limits of what overland travel could sustain. These journeys into the Saharan and Sahel regions were what he was known for, and they defined the character of his working years. He used the English language in his work, and his career as an explorer placed him among those Britons who directed their energies outward, toward landscapes far removed from the country of their birth.

Richardson died in 1851, having devoted himself to exploration of the Sahel and the Saharan interior. He was born in Lincolnshire and died a citizen of the United Kingdom, his life bounded by those two facts but filled, in between, with expeditions into the Saharan desert and the Sahel region for which he became known.