Katie Birkwood, Rare Books and Special Collections Librarian, writes: This book, an account of a journey to Borneo and other locations in modern Indonesia via the Canary Islands and the Cape of Good Hope, was written by a captain in the East India Company. It features the earliest known European illustration of an orangutan, a native species of Borneo.
This copy of the book was owned by George Edwards (1694–1773), a significant character from the history of the Royal College of Physicians (RCP). Edwards was a noted naturalist and ornithologist: the author and illustrator of the four-volume A natural history of uncommon birds (1743–51) and the three-volume Gleanings of natural history(1758–64). He was made ‘Bedell’ of the RCP in 1733: a role comparable to a beadle, with responsibility for college property, security and administration. As part of this role, he also took on responsibility for the college library, styling himself Library Keeper for nearly 30 years.
Edwards’ ownership is shown by the presence of his engraved bookplate on a flyleaf at the start of the book, and – more excitingly – through his annotations in two locations: on the title page and on the illustration of an ‘Oran-ootan’ (i.e. the orangutan). The text of Edwards’ annotations demonstrate that he used the book as part of his research for one of his two masterworks, Gleanings of natural history.
Edwards gave the RCP a hand-coloured copy of Gleanings, and it is now one of the treasures of the library. However, up until now, there has been little documentation preserved on the printed resources Edwards used to create his Gleanings. He was routinely employed to draw the animal specimens (both living and dead) of learned collectors in 18th-century London, but it has hitherto been unknown what he did if such a specimen was not available for consultation, or if he wanted to supplement the information that he could glean from it.
As shown by this new acquisition, his research included comparing different printed illustrations: in this case, noting that Beeckman’s illustration resembles another work of colonial natural history, Pieter van der Aa’s Icones arborum, fruticum, et herbarum exoticarum, c1720 (then as now shelved in the RCP library). Edwards wrote:
‘This Animal seams to be the same with one figurd by Peter Vander Aa, Bookseller of Leiden which he calls Orang-autang se[e] his Book of Figures in the Library of the College of Physitians Lond[on] under Letter F2 242’
Acquiring Beeckman’s book with its tangible evidence of Edwards’ research practices enables us better to understand the history of the RCP library, and to illustrate the links between 18th-century naturalism and European colonialism in Asia.
