Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society Hong Kong Branch
ORASHKB and author
Vol. 1 (1961)
ISSN 1991-7295
58
Among the eighteenth century travel books must be mentioned two first editions of interest although not relating to the Far East. The earlier is James Cook's A Voyage towards the South Pole, and Round the World of 1777, unfortunately the second volume only. And the second is Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa by Mungo Park, published in 1799.
There is a 1771 edition of A voyage to China and the East Indies, by Peter Osbeck which includes An Account of the Chinese Husbandry, by Captain Charles Gustavus Eckeberg and A Faunula and Flora Sinensis. The first volume contains ten engraved plates of plants found in China. In the second volume is printed a letter from Charles Linné [Linnaeus] to Peter Osbeck which says:-
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I have read your excellent books with pleasure and surprize. You, Sir, have every where travelled with the light of science: you have named every thing so precisely, that it may be comprehended by the learned world; and have discovered and settled both the genera and species. For this reason, I seem myself to have travelled with you, and to have examined every object you saw with my own eyes.
One other eighteenth century account of travels and exploration in the Far East should be noticed: A Philosophical and Political History of the Settlements and Trade of the Europeans in the East and West Indies by the Abbé Raynal, 1784. It may be salutary to notice the bitter attacks which the Abbé makes on English administration in India and elsewhere. Books like Ellis' Embassy and Timkowski's Travels have been too often described to warrant inclusion here.
The Hundred Wonders of the World, and of the Three Kingdoms of Nature of 1824 published under the pseudonym of the Rev. C. C. Clarke, has a picture of the Porcelain Tower at Nankin, China, as a frontispiece. It is sad to think that this wonder no longer stands; it was destroyed during the T'ai-p'ing Rebellion. Processes of time, not war, have destroyed two of London's institutions listed as 'wonders', the Linwood Gallery of Leicester Square and Bullock's Museum, Piccadilly. It is strange to think that in their day they were compared with the British Museum and the Louvre of Paris.
Elements of political economy by James Mill appears in a first edition of 1821. James was the father of John Stuart Mill for whom he obtained a clerkship in the East India Company after he himself had been given a high position following the publication in 1818 of his History of British India.
Among the illustrated books in the collection there is an 1828 edition of Flora Javae by Carolo Ludovico Blume with remarkable colour plates.