Abstract
In the churchyard of St Mary’s, Rotherhithe, stands the substantial tomb of Lee Boo, the first Palauan Islander to visit Britain, who died of smallpox at the home of Captain Henry Wilson in Paradise Row, Rotherhithe, on 27 December 1784. The tomb and its inscription, composed by no less a figure than Brook Watson, the merchant and celebrated subject of John Singleton Copley’s recent (1778) painting Watson and the Shark, were erected at the expense of ‘the Honourable United East India Company’, as the inscription states:
as a Testimony of Esteem for the humane and kind Treatment
afforded by his Father to the Crew of their Ship
the Antelope, Captain Wilson,
which was wrecked off that Island
in the Night of the 9th of August 1783.
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Notes
The story of Lee Boo is told in Daniel J. Peacock (1987), Lee Boo of Belau: A Prince in London, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press; the epitaph is transcribed on p. 119.
On the history of Mai in London, see Michelle Hetherington (2001), Cook and Omai: the Cult of the South Seas, Canberra: National Library of Australia;
Harriet Guest (2007), Empire, Barbarism, and Civilisation: James Cook, William Hodges, and the Return to the Pacific, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.
For an overview of non-Western visitors to eighteenth-century Britain, see Jocelyn Hackforth-Jones (ed.) (2007), Between Worlds: Voyagers to Britain 1700–1850, London: National Portrait Gallery.
Nicholas Thomas (2002), ‘The Pelew Islands in British Culture’, in George Keate, An Account of the Pelew Islands, ed. Karen L. Nero and Nicholas Thomas, assistant ed. Jennifer Newall, London and New York: Leicester University Press, p. 27.
On this subject generally, see Howard T. Fry (1970), Alexander Dalrymple (1737–1808) and the Expansion of British Trade, London: Frank Cass, published for the Royal Commonwealth Society, pp. 150–65 et passim.
Thomas, ‘Pelew Islands in British Culture’, p. 28. Bernard Smith (1985), European Vision and the South Pacific, New Haven: Yale University Press.
This has been the subject of considerable scholarship: for a summary, see Nicholas Thomas (2003), Discoveries: The Voyages of Captain Cook, London: Allen Lane, pp. 152–7.
The literature on this subject is too vast to include here. For useful accounts of the relation of commerce and commercial ideology to art, aesthetics and eighteenth-century visual culture in general, see David H. Solkin (1993), Painting for Money: The Visual Arts and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century England, New Haven and London: Yale University Press;
David Bindman (2002), Ape to Apollo: Aesthetics and the Idea of Race in the Eighteenth Century, London: Reaktion Books;
Matthew Craske (1997), Art in Europe 1700–1830: A History of the Visual Arts in an Era of Unprecedented Urban Economic Growth, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
George Forster (2000 [1777]), A Voyage Round the World, ed. Nicholas Thomas and Oliver Berghof, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, vol. 2, p. 505.
On the impeachment of Warren Hastings, see P. J. Marshall (1965), The Impeachment of Warren Hastings, Oxford: Oxford University Press; and within the wider context of East India Company corruption, see
Nicholas B. Dirks (2006), The Scandal of Empire: India and the Creation of Imperial Britain, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
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Quilley, G. (2015). ‘A proper set of views’: The British East India Company and the Eighteenth-Century Visualization of South-East Asia. In: Damodaran, V., Winterbottom, A., Lester, A. (eds) The East India Company and the Natural World. Palgrave Studies in World Environmental History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137427274_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137427274_9
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