In Chile, Hugh Cuming set up a business of sailmaking. There he met others with similar interests in natural history and began collecting shells and plants along the Pacific coast for shipment back to England. Around the mid-1820s, he sold his sailmaking business and commissioned a yacht designed for the sole purpose of collecting specimens for the British Museum and botanical gardens. In 1831, he returned to England with a shipload of animals, plants, and shells for various museums, gardens, and societies.

In 1835, Cuming set sail for the Philippines which were mostly unexplored by Europeans at the time. One of the plants he returned to England was named Dendrobium anosmum by John Lindley, also named by Reichenbach Dendrobium superbum. (See Plant of the Week, January 7, 2002)

From 1831 to his death in 1865, Cuming collected specimens from all over the South Pacific for scientific study. Hugh Cuming became known as a collector's collector. He died in England apparently of dropsy which he had suffered from earlier in life.

Merle A. Reinikka in A History of the Orchid (1995) reports that Hugh Cuming assembled 130,000 dried plant specimens, 30,000 conchological (seashell) species/varieties, hundreds of bird, reptile, and insect specimens, and hundreds of living orchids, thirty-three which were new to Western science.

There is one remarkable speculation concerning Cuming; he apparently was illiterate. Reinikka cites a close friend of Cuming's, E.L. Layard, "[H]e always dressed in black--I only knew him when he was like the larger of his two portraits--he gave it to me himself, and wrote his name on it in my presence. And this reminds me, I do not think he could do more than write his name. All his letters to me were written by his secretary, though signed by himself."