ORIENTAL FIELD SPORTS 1819. Vols. I & II.

The field sports – hunting, shooting and fishing – that they enjoyed at home were also essential to the expatriate lifestyle of the gentlemen who ran the British Empire. The abundant opportunities for hunting big game and other exotic species meant that many well-known sportsmen made their reputations on the plains and in hills of India, Burma and Ceylon.
These two volumes cover hunting in the East, particularly India, at the beginning of the 19th Century. An outstanding feature of the books are the many superb colour illustrations taken from lithographs by the well-known animal artist Samuel Howitt. The text, by the military sportsman Captain Thomas Williamson, is of interest both to natural historians as well as to hunters, containing as it does the natural history and the hunting of the elephant, rhinoceros, tiger, leopard, bear, deer, buffalo, wolf, wild hog, jackal, wild dog, and the civet.
The field sports celebrated in these books may have gone out of fashion in our ‘politically correct’ age, but these memoirs and the many coloured plates are an item for the collector to treasure.