Forbes, James, 1749-1819, James Forbes letter, Turcaseer, 1779 May 29, copied between 1794 and 1800
- Call Number:
- Folio A 2023 69
- Holdings:
- [Request]
- Creator:
- Forbes, James, 1749-1819
- Title(s):
- James Forbes letter, Turcaseer, 1779 May 29
- 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 10, page 145-152
- 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 sixty-sixth letter, Forbes writes of his hunting excursion into the “an unfrequented wild.” He speaks repeatedly of how this land is the wildest he has ever seen. Accordingly, he describes how his hunting party lives “almost in the patriarchal style,” that is, nomadically, moving about as their search for game demands. Forbes spends the majority of this letter describing the fauna of the region. Compared to the wild boar, for instance, “I never saw anything more fierce.” He likewise describes an abundance of snakes, noting again the veneration with which the local inhabitants view them, and acknowledging that few ancient civilzations did not think “there was something divine in serpents.” Insects are a particular fascination: Forbes describes several individual insects, including the “Rhinoceros-Cicada,…covered with an extraordinary coat of mail,” and swarms of (presumably) locusts, which can become “instruments of divine vengeance” to the farmer. He quotes from Exodus, referencing the plagues brought upon Egypt. Forbes mentions the inhabitants of this region only once, saying: “the only human inhabitants are Bheels, a cast of robbers & plunderers, almost as barbarous as the beasts that range these woody regions.” Otherwise, he spends the remainder of the letter discussing the ducks found on the Nerbudda (Narmada), the beauty of partridges, various aromatic plants—including the acacia, used by the Chinese for yellow dye—and a type of caterpillar, whose marvelous transformation Forbes embellishes with a quotation from Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man. Forbes closes with a return to the hunting narrative, describing the exploits of his companions: “they shot one of the latter [elk], but not being then at leisure to take it away, from their eagerness for more royal sport, on their return they found it devoured by Tygers.” This is, Forbes concludes, the wildest country he’s been in: “Nature, in her savage state, here reigns triumphant, for the few human inhabitants to be met with in this extensive solitude are nearly as ferocious as the animals.” Portions of this text appear in <title>Oriental Memoirs</title>, volume 2, chapter 22.
- Physical Description:
- 8 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/3199892
- Metadata Cloud URL:
- https://metadata-api.library.yale.edu/metadatacloud/api/aspace/repositories/3/archival_objects/3199892?mediaType=json&include-notes=1&include-all-subjects=1