Forbes, James, 1749–1819, James Forbes letter, Island of St. Jago, 1765 May 16, copied between 1794 and 1800
- Call Number:
- Folio A 2023 69
- Holdings:
- [Request]
- Creator:
- Forbes, James, 1749–1819
- Title(s):
- James Forbes letter, Island of St. Jago, 1765 May 16
- Date:
- copied between 1794 and 1800
- Classification:
- Archives and Manuscripts
- Series:
- Series I: A voyage from England to Bombay with descriptions in Asia, Africa, and South America
- Part of Collection:
- volume 1, page 17-22
- Provenance:
- Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection
- Conditions Governing Access:
- The materials are open for research.
- Conditions Governing Use:
- The collection is the physical property of the Yale Center for British Art. Literary rights, including copyright, belong to the authors or their legal heirs and assigns. For further information, consult the Curator of Rare Books and Manuscripts.
- Scope and Content:
- In his first letter, James Forbes begins with an address to his sister. He accepts her request he relate the details of his journeys to her, with enthusiasm, and apologizes for his inevitable failures to due to his own youth and inexperience. He then turns to the day of his leaving—the 23rd of March—and describes his delayed departure from Britain. The following pages narrate the ship’s route as it passes by the Canary Islands, whose coasts Forbes describes as “hilly and romantic.” Unable to view the islands up close, Forbes regrets his inability to make anything more than hasty sketches. After passing Madeira, Forbes’s ship stops at St. Jago (now Santiago, Cape Verde) for water and supplies. At the time, St. Jago remained a Portuguese colonial possession; it played an important role in various trading routes, including whalers and slave ships from the Americas. The islands own sustenance remained deeply tied to the larger slave economy of the Portuguese empire, and it served as a testing ground for sugar cultivation and other crops that would expand throughout Portugal’s colonies. Many of these agricultural practices contributed to ecological imbalance—which, in turn, lay the foundation for an ensuing history of poverty and famines through the nineteenth century and beyond. Though unable to explore much of the island, Forbes provides some comments on his surroundings. He describes an island dense with fruit trees, with coconuts and plantains, where the sun’s rays make any movement in the open an unbearable task. The inhabitants, he writes, are “Europeans from Portugal, or Negroes from the Coast of Africa, or what is very common, a mixture of both in their Mulatto descendants; they all, both in person, dress, and manners, form a striking contrast to anything I have seen before.” Forbes notes the prevalence of enslaved people, “who cultivate planation’s of cotton, maize, sugar-canes and fruits,” and that “they are all of the Roman Catholic Religion; and their language a corrupt dialect of the Portuguese, mixed with that of the Coast of Guinea.” Forbes concludes with a description of various plants and fruits—notable maize and plantains—before leaving with his ship for the Cape of Good Hope. Portions of this text appear in <title>Oriental Memoirs</title>, volume 1. Bibliography: Rodrigues, Isabel P.B. Fêo. “From Silence to Silence: The Hidden Story of a Beef Stew in Cape Verde.” <title>Anthropological Quarterly</title> vol. 81 no. 2 (Spring 2008): 343-376.
- Physical Description:
- 6 pages
- Genre:
- Correspondence , Botanical illustrations, Ornithological illustrations, Travel sketches, Maps, Watercolors (paintings), Drawings (visual works), Engravings (prints), and Portraits
- Subject Terms:
- Forbes, James, 1749-1819. Descriptive letters and drawingsForbes, James, 1749-1819. Oriental memoirs
- Associated Places:
- EnglandItalyScotlandWales
- Associated People/Groups:
- East India CompanyForbes, James, 1749-1819
- Finding Aid Title:
- James Forbes archive
- Collection PDF:
- https://ead-pdfs.library.yale.edu/11734.pdf
- Archival Object:
- https://archives.yale.edu/repositories/3/archival_objects/3199243
- Metadata Cloud URL:
- https://metadata-api.library.yale.edu/metadatacloud/api/aspace/repositories/3/archival_objects/3199243?mediaType=json&include-notes=1&include-all-subjects=1