The RGS-IBG Collections contain a remarkable series of six illustrated albums compiled by a naval surgeon, John Linton Palmer.

Reproduced in the gallery are twelve continuous pages selected from the fourth volume, these pages including 32 sketches from his voyages to the Pacific North-West Coast of America and Alaska on HMS Portland and HMS Amphitrite, in 1851-3.

Also included in the gallery are eleven sketches of Rapa Nui (Easter Island), on board HMS Topaze, in 1868; and twenty-six sketches of other Pacific islands and ports from various dates.

Linton Palmer’s naval career involved a number of tours of duty in the Pacific on board a number of different ships between 1850 and 1868. His copiously annotated albums include sketches made in Pitcairn Island, Rapa Nui, Tahiti, China, Chile, Panama, Vancouver Island and the Bering Strait.

Like many naval surgeons, he developed an interest in natural history and ethnography. After his visit with HMS Topaze to Rapa Nui, which had resulted in the removal of a large statue known as Hoa Hakananai’a, presented to the British Museum, Linton Palmer presented a paper to the RGS.

As a British naval officer, Linton Palmer was far from a disinterested observer. Yet his sketches of North-West Coast Indian and Inuit peoples, and their artefacts, reveals a highly developed interest in the detail of material cultures in the process of rapid change.

The pages from Linton Palmer’s albums bear comparison to the published plates from the expeditionary reports of a previous generation, such as those of Freycinet or Duperrey: indeed, these may have been his models.

These striking visual images also reflect interactions and exchange with local communities. We cannot know exactly what transpired within these moments, we do know they took place, and that like every exchange there were at least two sides to the bargain.

The complete collection comprises six albums, in which a total of 408 images made during various voyages were subsequently affixed. The evidence suggests the albums were made up by Linton Palmer himself, probably in the early 1870s.

The whole collection is available for consultation in the Foyle Reading Room.

Source
F. Driver & L. Jones, Hidden histories of exploration (London, 2009).

Further reading
J. L. Palmer, ‘A visit to Easter Island, or Rapa-Nui’, Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society 14 (1869 - 1870) 108-120.

J. A. van Tilburg, ‘Remote possibilities: Hoa Hakananai’a and HMS Topaze on Rapa Nui’, British Museum Research Publication 158 (2006).

B. Smith, European Vision and the South Pacific (second edn., New Haven, 1985)

N. Thomas and D. Losche (eds) Double Vision: Art Histories and Colonial Histories in the Pacific (Cambridge, 1999).

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