Edwin Rose (University of Cambridge)
On the 26th May 1779, in the town of St Peter and St Paul on the Kamchatka Peninsular, the German-born governor of the region, Magnus von Behm (1726–1779), was entrusted with papers that he promised to deliver to the British ambassador when he next visited St Petersburg. The papers given to Behm included detailed reports of the northern extremities of the Pacific, the journals of Captain James Cook, and news of the latter’s death on 14 February 1779. Behm left Petropavlovsk, Kamchatka, in June 1779 and travelled the length of the Russian Empire; over 6000 miles by dog sledge and horse-drawn carriage, arriving in St Petersburg in early 1780. He then placed the documents into the hands of James Harris (1746–1820) 1st Earl of Malmsbury, who communicated them to the Admiralty board in London. Writing to John Montague, the Earl of Sandwich (1718–1792) and First Lord of the Admiralty, the lawyer, antiquary and natural historian Daines Barrington (1727/8–1800) presented ‘his respectfull compliments to Lord Sandwich & returns his best thanks for the agreeable intelligence his lordship was so good as to send…with regard to Capt. Cook’s Discoveries.’[1]
Thomas Pennant’s consistent correspondence with Barrington was just one line of enquiry bringing him news from across the globe. Before notices of Cook’s death in Hawai’i on 14th February 1779 were published in London newspapers, letters detailing these events were already arriving at Downing Hall. Connections in London and North America were central to Pennant’s accumulation of information on the wider world, and were fundamental to the content of his Arctic Zoology, a book published in two major editions in 1784–85 and 1792 (with several additional supplements). The name Arctic Zoology was a political decision. Writing in the advertisement of the 1784 volume, Pennant commented that:
this Work was designed as a sketch of the Zoology of North America. I thought I had a right to the attempt, at a time I had the honour of calling myself a fellow-subject with that respectable part of our former great empire; but when the fatal and humiliating hour arrived, which deprived Britain of power, strength, and glory, I felt the mortification which must strike every feeling individual at losing his little share in the boast of ruling over half of the New World.[2]
Rather than giving up on the project, Pennant expanded his geographical scope to create an all-encompassing ‘Arctic Zoology’. In this, he surveyed the polar regions, extending from Siberia and the Kamchatka peninsula though to Iceland and parts of North America, including Hudson’s Bay and Alaska. Throughout this endeavour, Pennant assembled data to trace broad patterns in the distribution of fauna, and often flora, recording changes in the distribution of species across different latitudes. In so doing, Pennant created an early biogeographical account, mapping broad changes in arctic flora and fauna by combining numerous local accounts received from correspondents, the specimens they sent, and articles published in newspapers and journals — whilst also consulting so-called ‘national floras and faunas’.[3]
Pennant’s global network included correspondents such as the widely-travelled ‘apostles’ of Linnaeus, like Anders Sparrman (1748–1820) and Carl Peter Thunberg (1743–1828), who journeyed to Africa and Japan; Johan Christian Fabricius (1745–1808), a Kiel-based entomologist; Sir Joseph Banks who, in addition to travelling with Cook to the Pacific led an expedition to Iceland in 1772; Samuel Hearne (1745–1792) famed as the first European to travel overland across Northern Canada; and ‘that liberal patron of science, my respected friend the Honourable Daines Barrington’.[4] These collaborative contributions could be substantial: Samuel Ӧedmann (1750–1829), for instance, compiled for Pennant an extensive series of manuscript accounts, each of which amounted to between twenty and thirty pages, on the natural history and geology of Sweden, and provided information Pennant used to update the copies of Arctic Zoology kept in his personal library at Downing Hall.[5] These books, that remain in their original publishers’ boards with quarter leather spines, were designed to be updated by Pennant, his son David Pennant (1763–1841), and several amanuenses.[6] In addition to the insertion of numerous flyleaves designed to accommodate notes, Pennant used these volumes to store correspondence, newspaper clippings and illustrations extracted from books and journals. Extracted information was then added to the wide margins with directions for the printers to insert the additions into the text blocks being set for new editions. Many of these notes reflect on chains of communication encompassing large tracts of the known world.
A New Acquisition for the National Library of Wales
It was at 5:56pm, scrolling on my phone whilst in line at Auckland Airport, that I spotted an interesting online listing: a copy of Arctic Zoology bound in gilt vellum, containing numerous notes and small insertions (often cut from printed natural history publications) in addition to a few original drawings. After immediately recognising the binding style and the handwriting samples as that of Thomas Pennant’s son, David, who assisted with Pennant’s natural history work, I forwarded the details to Prof. Mary-Ann Constantine at CAWCS, PI on the ‘Curious Travellers’ project (who, given the time difference, received my message at 4:46am the following day). by the time I arrived in Los Angeles I was delighted to see that my email had been forwarded to Timothy Cutts, Rare Book Librarian at the National Library of Wales who, after making sure this was the Downing Hall copy of Arctic Zoology (1792), was able to secure it for the library by the time my plane touched down at Heathrow a couple of days later.
In addition to the handwriting, the binding provided an important clue towards the provenance. For many of the fine examples of the books kept in the ‘gentleman’s library’ at Downing Hall, Pennant commissioned a fine vellum binding with gold tooling, almost an identical match to his own copies of the History of Quadrupeds (1781) and The Literary Life of the Late Thomas Pennant (1793) — the latter now digitised by the National Library of Wales. In addition, it became clear that this was a copy of Arctic Zoology from the Downing Hall Library sold by Christies on Monday 4 July 1938. Fine copies of Pennant’s own works, many of which he and his family extra-illustrated, in addition to his monumental Outlines of the Globe in 23 volumes, occupied the spaces at Downing where Pennant entertained his numerous guests and provided essential tools for Pennant’s own working practices, solidifying his reputation as a gentleman and scholar in eighteenth-century society. The acquisition of this copy of Arctic Zoology by the National Library of Wales provides a valuable addition to our knowledge of Pennant’s engagement with his own library, and elucidates his practice of gathering and distributing information from across the globe.
[1] Barrington to Sandwich, 13 December 1779, National Library of Australia, NLA MS 7218/2.
[2] Pennant, Arctic Zoology (London, 1784), 1: ‘advertisement’, pp. 1-2.
[3] For ‘national floras’ and ‘national faunas’ that are compiled from catalogues and classifications of all the species of plants or animals found within a specific geographical area, see Janet Browne, The Secular Ark: Studies in the History of Biogeography (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1983), pp. 32–57
[4] For outlines of Pennant’s networks of correspondents see Edwin D. Rose, Reading the World: British Practices of Natural History 1760–1820(Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2025), chapters 1 and 4.
[5] See: ‘Samuel Ordmann, from Wermdon near Stockholm and, after 1794-6,Upsala, to the same [Thomas Pennant] at Downing and unaddressed, sending him information about Sweden, its natural history, museums, population, etc.,’ Warwickshire County Records Office, CR2017/TP18/1-9
[6] These volumes are now held by the Natural History Museum, London, and National Library of Wales.