Item of the term
Lent term 2012
HADDON LIBRARY IMAGE COLLECTION
By Aidan Baker, Librarian, Haddon Library,
University of Cambridge
 |
 |
| "Surinam planter, in morning dress (Also showing negress slave)" |
"A negro rebel on sentry duty" |
These images are from Voyage à Surinam, et dans l'intérieur de la Guiane... a French translation of Narrative, of a five years' expedition, against the revolted negroes of Surinam, in Guiana ... from the year 1772, to 1777 : elucidating the history of that country, and describing its productions … by John Gabriel Stedman. The French version is dated "An VII de la République" (i.e 1798-9).
John Stedman (1744-1797) was an extraordinarily combative individual, often in conflict with authority figures. He said his childhood was chock-full of misadventures and abrasive encounters of every description. His own attitude towards slavery was complex. He fought in expeditions against rebel slaves, but his published account of the expeditions made him popular with radical and anti-slavery activists.
Some of Stedman's images were engraved for printing by William Blake. For the French edition, they were re-engraved by Pierre François Tardieu. Stedman's way of working was to make notes and sketches on the spot, using whatever material was to hand – including ammunition cartridges and bleached bone. If he were alive today, I think he'd be a Twitter enthusiast. All his mixed feelings about slavery, and all the efforts of his eighteenth-century publisher to make his text weaker still, cannot lessen the immediacy, and sometimes horror, of his images.
A modern edition of Stedman's authentic text is Narrative of a Five Years Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam, by John Gabriel Stedman, edited and with an introduction and notes by Richard Price and Sally Price (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988; iUniverse, 2010). The facts about Stedman, cited above, are taken from the introduction to that edition.
Voyage à Surinam was presented to the Haddon Library of Archaeology and Anthropology by Louis Clarke, who was curator of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology from 1922 to 1937. The illustrations got into DSpace@Cambridge via an incarnation as slides. They were among some five hundred images that Prof. Alan Macfarlane had photographed in the 1980s – by Janet Hall, photographer in the then Department of Social Anthropology – from some of the oldest books in the Haddon. The slides were for use in lectures illustrating changing anthropological paradigms, visual anthropology, and the history of technology.
Prof. Macfarlane's own experiments with communication technologies, and their application to anthropology, have since led him from slides to videodiscs to web. See his own website at http://www.alanmacfarlane.com/ and his presence elsewhere in DSpace@Cambridge! He generously supported the project of digitising the slides. The work was done in Nepal, by members of the Digital Himalaya project; we thank Dr Mark Turin for facilitating this.
The point of the Haddon Library's DSpace@Cambridge engagement, I thought when the idea was first mooted, could be a practical one: to publicise the library's holdings to new readers, and perhaps to publishers in search of illustrations. The Haddon's DSpace@Cambridge presence furnished matter for our presentation to the University's Alumni Weekend 2011 – and it had the effect, as our Alumni Weekend and Festival of Ideas presentations unfailingly do, of opening my own eyes to riches, in the Haddon's collection, that had escaped me. I am amazed and somewhat humbled to be thus reminded, every year, of how much more there is to know about the library I manage.
Aidan Baker