Forbes, James, 1749-1819, James Forbes letter, Thain-Telow, 1775 June 14, copied between 1794 and 1800
- Call Number:
- Folio A 2023 69
- Holdings:
- [Request]
- Creator:
- Forbes, James, 1749-1819
- Title(s):
- James Forbes letter, Thain-Telow, 1775 June 14
- 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 295-298
- 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 next letter comes not from the army’s winter quarters, as he had hoped, but from yet another encampment during their march. His primary focus here is not, however, the continued pursuit of their enemy, but rather an entirely different, but (it seems) equally dangerous phenomenon: the monsoon. Forbes begins his description of the monsoon in a tone of utter despair. He writes that he “never saw anything more awful” than the entirety of the army caught in this horrific downpour, in the middle of the night. He quotes James Thomson’s (1700-1748) “The Seasons,” before continuing to assert that “no language of mine can describe the wreck of this large encampment, thus in a moment blown to pieces, and covered with water; the cries of aged men helpless women, terrified with the piercing shrieks of their expiring children…” As to Forbes’s own situation, he remained in the tent of the colonel, who had been taken to another village due to his fever. Forbes recounts a night spent standing on a chair to avoid the rising water, only to have the tent collapse on his head, bringing him perilously close to both suffocation and drowning. After some struggle, he manages to make it to the same village where the colonel was recovering, eventually joining him, “among snakes, scorpions, and centipedes,” in a “wretched hovel” for the remainder of the night. Portions of this text appear in <title>Oriental Memoirs</title>, volume two, chapter 19.
- 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/3199737
- Metadata Cloud URL:
- https://metadata-api.library.yale.edu/metadatacloud/api/aspace/repositories/3/archival_objects/3199737?mediaType=json&include-notes=1&include-all-subjects=1