anteros_lmc | Eat your heart out Stephen Maturin!

Over the weekend, while looking for a reference to something completely unrelated, I came across this fabulous snippet in the 1809 Sporting Magazine.

A beautiful male tiger, a tigercat, several sheep from the Cape of Good Hope, a land and sea tortoise, together with many other oriental quadrupeds, brought home by Sir Edward Pellew, were landed lately, at the Custom-house Quay, Plymouth.

A tiger??!

nodbear reliably informed me that the tiger was a white one and a gift for George III and pointed me towards a letter from Lord Mulgrave at the Admiralty which reads as follows

Lord Mulgrave has been desired by Vice-Admiral Sir Edward Pellew to mention at a proper opportunity to your Majesty that the Vice Admiral has brought from India, a Royal tiger, perfectly white (the second of that description that has ever been seen in India) in the humble hope that your majesty, in consideration of the extraordinary rarity of the animals, may graciously condescend to receive him as a humble tribute of duty from Sir Edward Pellew.

His Majesty graciously accepted the "tyger" and sent it to the Tower. Poor beast.

The tortoise was more fortunate.

esmerelda_t informs me, possibly somewhat less reliably, that it was presented to Mr Kennedy as a gift from Lord Hornblower when the latter was a humble captain. Mr Kennedy was delighted by such an exotic gift. Unfortunately he let Horatio name it, and therefore the poor creature is saddled with the name Indefatigable. The tortoise now spends its time infuriating Bartholomew because it knows lots of incriminating stories about Lord Hornblower's navy days but refuses to tell.

Sadly we have no idea what happened to the several sheep. I suspect Bartholomew knows but he's not telling!

References

1. Aspinall, A. ed. (1970) The Later Correspondence of George III, Volume Five. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
2. Sporting Magazine, Vol 34, (1809), Rogerson & Tuxford.

Cross posted to