Sir Thomas Stamford Bingley Raffles, the name and face of British colonial history in South-East Asia, has been described as an ‘icon of imperial mythology' (Barnard 2019). Raffles ‘founded’ modern Singapore in 1819 (Huang 2018) while working as Lieutenant-Governor of Bencoolen (= Bengkulu, Sumatra, Indonesia) (1818–24) for the East India Company. This followed ten years of postings in Penang (= Pinang, Malaysia), Malacca (= Melaka, Malaysia) and Java (= Jawa, Indonesia). Like many colonial officers, Raffles was an enthusiastic collector of natural history specimens and kept menageries at his various residences. However, his life in South-East Asia was also punctuated with personal tragedy. Raffles lost his first wife, four of his children and several close friends, including his natural history collectors, to sickness. These problems culminated in the sinking of the Fame in 1824, the East Indiaman which was to have transported himself, Lady Sophia Raffles and his collections to England, following his resignation from the East India Company (Glendinning 2012).

As far as is known, Raffles did not collect many birds, instead he mostly commissioned drawings of the birds he encountered during his postings (Sharpe 1906). Arguably the most important zoological work attributed to Raffles was the ‘Descriptive catalogue of a zoological collection made in the island of Sumatra and its vicinity’, which was read in two parts under his name at the Linnean Society (Raffles 1821, 1822). However, the manuscript was almost exclusively the work of Dr William Jack (Raffles' physician and naturalist, who died in 1822), based on collections made by Pierre-Médard Diard and Alfred Duvaucel (French zoologists in the service of Raffles; Weiler 2019) and Dr Joseph Arnold (also Raffles' physician and naturalist, who had died in 1818) (Bastin 1990). The paper was hastily assembled to avoid being scooped by the French zoologists (Raffles 1821) and was further edited in London prior to publication, with names from the preceding paper on Javan birds by Horsfield (1821) and new names nominally attributed to Raffles being added. The specimens, which included the types of the new names, and associated drawings had been sent to London in 1820 and deposited in the East India Company Museum (Noltie 2009). After dividing triplicates between them, and concealing other valuable specimens, some birds collected by Diard and Duvaucel while in Raffles' service were sent from Sumatra to the Paris museum (Weiler 2019, MNHN & Chagnoux 2020). It is unclear whether specimens retained by Diard and Duvaucel would have featured in Raffles' catalogue, but it seems likely that the manuscript would have been prepared before the collection was divided. Duvaucel, without Diard, made further collections on Sumatra after they had both left Raffles’ service in 1820 (Weiler 2019, MNHN & Chagnoux 2020).

Raffles continued to assemble collections in Singapore (Noltie 2009) and Sumatra, and commissioned more than 2,000 drawings, according to a letter by Raffles quoted by Sophia Raffles (1830). These were all lost with the sinking of the Fame on 2 February 1824. During the two months prior to securing fresh passage on the Mariner, Raffles partially re-built his collection and commissioned new drawings, including 44 of birds by J. Briois, which are now held in the British Library (in the Natural History Drawings [NHD] collection; Noltie 2009). Raffles knew the social capital of exotic curiosities; his collections and account of Java (Raffles 1817) had earned him a knighthood. On his return to England, Raffles was elected a Fellow of the Linnean Society and set about lobbying for the establishment of the Zoological Society of London (ZSL).

Lord Edward Smith Stanley, who became 13th Earl of Derby in 1834, was an archetype of the imperial elite. He travelled little himself, but with access to incredible wealth as heir to the Knowsley estate in north-west England, and a network of contacts and agents worldwide, assembled a menagerie and private museum at Knowsley Hall comprising exotic animals from across the empire and beyond (see Fisher & Jackson 2002). Stanley was the Member of Parliament for Preston and Lancashire from 1796, before joining the House of Lords in 1834 (Crosby 2002), and a member of the Linnean Society's Zoological Club.

Although Raffles and Stanley do not appear to have been close—no written correspondence between them is known—Raffles considered Stanley someone of ‘weight’, and both were founding members (subscribers) of the ZSL (Bastin 1970). During his campaign to be the Zoological Society's founding president, Raffles gave 21 of his Sumatran birds to Stanley. Raffles was elected the first president of ZSL in February 1826, a position Stanley himself would hold from 1831 until his death.

Stanley listed the birds ‘given to me by Sir Stamford Raffles' in his unpublished manuscript entitled the ‘General index of the birds in my collection at Knowsley' in 1825 (Fig. 1). Raffles died on 5 July 1826 and his remaining zoological material was donated to the ZSL Museum by Sophia Raffles in April 1827 (Wheeler 1997, Noltie 2009). Sophia Raffles subsequently published a memoir (Raffles 1830) to which a catalogue of Raffles’ collections was appended—specimens in the East India Company Museum listed by Thomas Horsfield, and those in the ZSL Museum by the society's secretary, Nicholas Aylward Vigors (Tweeddale 1877, Wheeler 1997). Stanley added notes, which clearly originate from his reading of this appendix, to his own manuscript catalogue (Fig. 1).

ZSL began to dispose of its collection in the early 1850s. The British Museum had its pick of specimens and, in addition to the type material, selected 383 mounted birds and 100 relaxed skins (Wheeler 1997) which became part of the national collection in 1855 (Sharpe 1906). The remaining ZSL collection, which may have included some of Raffles' birds, was dispersed across provincial museums, dealers and private collectors (Wheeler 1997). Unfortunately, due to lack of adequate documentation most of these specimens are now effectively ‘lost'. Further Raffles material arrived at the British Museum following the closure of the East India Company Museum in 1880. Therefore, other than a few notable exceptions, e.g. a gibbon Hylobates agilis and a pangolin Manis javanica at University College Cork (Wheeler 1997) and Malayan Tapir Tapirus indicus and Dugong Dugong dugon skeletons at National Museums Scotland, Edinburgh (Noltie 2009), all of Raffles’ known surviving collections are now at the Natural History Museum, Tring (NHMUK). On Stanley's death in 1851, most of his collections passed to the people of Liverpool, founding what is now the World Museum, National Museums Liverpool (NML).

Figure 1.

An entry in Lord Stanley's ‘General index of the birds in my collection at Knowsley' for 1825, specimens ‘given to me by Sir Stamford Raffles’ (© National Museums Liverpool [World Museum Liverpool])

The 11 extant specimens at NML (World Museum, National Museums Liverpool 2021; Fig. 2) all appear to be relaxed mounts and could have been mounted prior to being given to Stanley, perhaps even in Sumatra, although Stanley employed a taxidermist (Fisher & Jackson 2002). The gamebirds have clipped wings, so may have been transported live, similar to pheasants aboard Fame (Bastin 1990, quoting Raffles). There are no original labels but ‘copied from mount' is written on some labels, and one specimen has a collection date of ‘1824'. The location given on all labels is ‘Sumatra'. It therefore appears probable that these specimens formed part of Raffles’ post-Fame collection, inferring that they were collected between 2 February and 10 April 1824. This would also narrow the specific localities to within the vicinities of Bengkulu and Padang.

In view of the approaching 200th anniversaries of the sinking of Fame, the founding of the Zoological Society of London, and Raffles' death, there is likely to be renewed interest in Raffles' extant collections. Below I record the birds given by Raffles to Stanley, annotated with links to: the names and types from the ‘descriptive catalogue' of a zoological collection from Sumatra (Raffles 1822); Raffles' post-Fame zoological drawings; and Vigors' catalogue of Raffles’ specimens in the ZSL Museum (Raffles 1830).

The specimens are listed and numbered in the same order they appear in Stanley's ‘General index’ of 1825, followed by their number in square brackets (if applicable) in the stock books of Thomas Moore, who completed an unpublished register of Stanley's collections that were bequeathed to Liverpool in 1851, building on the work of Stanley's previous curator, Louis Fraser, in 1848–50 (Largen 1987).

Figure 2.

Specimens from Sumatra given by Sir Stamford Raffles to Lord Stanley in 1825 and extant in the collection of World Museum, National Museums Liverpool. From left: Thick-billed Green Pigeon Treron curvirostra curvirostra (NML D3636); Pink-necked Green Pigeon Treron vernans (NML D3641a); Crested Partridge Rollulus rouloul (NML D512g); Long-billed Partridge Rhizothera longirostris (female NML D2212b, male NML D2212); Crestless Fireback Lophura erythropthalma (NML D1583); Lesser Whistling Duck Dendrocygna javanica (NML D843b); Ferruginous Partridge Caloperdix oculeus ocellatus (male NML D2179a, female NML D2179); Oriental Pratincole Glareola maldivarum (NML D3192b); Buff-rumped Woodpecker Meiglyptes tristis grammithorax (NML D3791) (© National Museums Liverpool [World Museum Liverpool])

Concluding remarks

Since Raffles left Sumatra almost 200 years ago, the island has suffered rampant deforestation, which has intensified to unprecedented levels in the last 30 years with the expansion of oil palm Elaeis guineensis plantations (Margono et al. 2012). In addition to the profound impacts of habitat loss, the island's wild birds are vulnerable to trappers supplying the lucrative pet trade (Harris et al. 2016). Raffles' ‘descriptive catalogue' (Raffles 1821, 1822) was recognised as the first systematic account of the avifauna of Sumatra (Tweeddale 1877) and provides the earliest records of birds on the island in the European literature. The contribution of local people, and their indigenous knowledge, to Raffles' catalogue, collections and drawings is uncredited and largely overlooked, but must have been vital. Raffles and Jack had organised a congress of local nobles to share their knowledge of, and names for, the native fauna (Noltie 2009). Consequently, Malay and Sumatran species names feature prominently both in the ‘descriptive catalogue' (including in Jawi script) and the ZSL Museum catalogue, drawing additional attention to this critical contribution. Further linking the written accounts in the catalogues of Raffles’ collections with extant specimens and drawings would be a highly worthwhile project, especially in light of the approaching anniversaries associated with South-East Asia's most prominent colonialist.