Views of natives, landscapes, and ethnographic objects of the Northwest Coast of America, Pacific Islands, China, and South America. Half of the drawings are fully rendered watercolors, others are rough sketches with detailed notes on coloring, dates of anchorages, and occasionally events on board ship or shore. Ten watercolors are of Native Americans of the Northwest Coast, eight of them signed by Bacstrom and fully executed after his return. There are ten views of the Northwest Coast of America, including Nootka Sound and Queen Charlotte's Island, and Native American villages at Norfolk Sound and Fitzhugh Sound. There are two maps of Queen Charlotte's Island, six watercolors of canoes from the Northwest Coast and the Pacific Islands, and four drawings of Native American and Pacific island ethnographic objects and There are eighteen watercolor sketches and drawings of the coast of South America and the islands in the Pacific, including Hawaii and Staaten Island near Cape Horn. Other drawings include ten watercolors of Chinese men and women, a pencil drawing of a Chinese junk, and a watercolor of an American tea plant. The drawings are accompanied by a highly finished watercolor of the Greenland Whale Fishery not made during the voyage, and a manuscript catalog of "some accurate and characteristic original drawings" made on the voyage with prices; not all of the drawings listed correspond to drawings present in the collection
Description:
Bacstrom, a protégé of Sir Joseph Banks, served as surgeon on a private fur-trading ship which sailed around Cape Horn to the South Seas, Nootka Sound, the East Indies, and the Cape. Bacstrom left the ship at Nootka Sound and later served as surgeon on several ships, visiting China, India, the Cape, and the Americas., Accompanied by a container list., Manuscript captions., and View a digital version in the Beinecke Library's Digital Images Online database
Subject (Geographic):
Northwest, Pacific, Hawaii, China, Islands of the Pacific, Queen Charlotte Islands (B.C.), South America, and Greenland
Subject (Topic):
Indians of North America, Social life and customs, Clothing and dress, and Whaling