Forbes, James, 1749–1819, James Forbes letter, Baroche, 1775 June 4, copied between 1794 and 1800
- Call Number:
- Folio A 2023 69
- Holdings:
- [Request]
- Creator:
- Forbes, James, 1749–1819
- Title(s):
- James Forbes letter, Baroche, 1775 June 4
- 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 7, page 263-266
- 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:
- Forbes continues his description of the march through Gujurat with several brief remarks on the countryside, its crops—the best cotton in India—and the arrival of reinforcements to aid the English forces. Much of the letter focuses, however, on a small village, and on Forbes’s own idealized vision of rural life in this region of India. After giving a small overview of one village passed by the army, he writes, “in peaceful times, if any people in India leads happy lives, I think it must be the peasants of Guzerat; for in this luxuriant soil they certainly cannot want any necessary of life.” This peaceful life is broken up by the cruel Maratha forces. Forbes describes the bad luck that befalls any town in the path of a military campaign, before turning his eye to his own companions: “I would not have you imagine our troops have any share in these cruelties; far from it—but it is not in the power of an English Commander to restrain the licentious behavior of an undisciplined Mahratta army.” Even the Maratha allied with the English cannot be trusted to leave the populace in peace. Portions of this text appear in <title>Oriental Memoirs</title>, volume 2, chapter 18.
- Physical Description:
- 4 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/3199732
- Metadata Cloud URL:
- https://metadata-api.library.yale.edu/metadatacloud/api/aspace/repositories/3/archival_objects/3199732?mediaType=json&include-notes=1&include-all-subjects=1