Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 20.djvu/418

Rh 400 R E N N E L L self to the laborious literary elucidation of geography, and to that enjoyment of the society of his friends to which he often refers in his corres]>ondence as the chief happiness to which he looked for- ward iii his retirement. His first publication after his return was A Chart of the Banks and Currents at the Lagullas in South Africa (1778), accompanied by a memoir. In the same year appeared A Description of the Roads in Bengal and Bahar, <t-c., printed by order of the Court of Directors. This is a small 12mo, and only a book of routes. In 1781 came out his B&igal Atlas, containing Maps of the Tfaatrc of War and Commerce on that side of Hindustan, compiled from the original Surveys, with Tables of Routes and Distances from Calcutta, through the principal Internal Navigations. This is in folio, and contains twenty-one maps, a work leaving far behind everything in Indian cartography published up to that date. In the same year Rennell read before the Royal Society, to which he had been elected March 8, " An Account of the Ganges and Burrampootur Rivers." These were preliminary flights. His great work on Indian geography was the Memoir of a Map of Hindustan ; and even this was of gradual growth. In its first form, as published in 1783, it contained only pp. xiv and 132. A second edition in 1785 had con- siderable additions. In 1788 a Memoir was issued altogether en- larged in scope, and of this again a second edition appeared in 1792, and a third, still enlarged, in 1793, which contains pp. cxli + 428 + 51, pp. 820 in all. The work, which thus went through five de- velopments in all, was that which especially established Rennell's reputation, though his knowledge and ability were appreciated in London from an early date after his return to Europe, and the con- tinued scries of works which he issued from time to time during some five and thirty years spread and augmented his fame as a geo- grapher. After a brief interval of extreme old age, the series was resumed in the publication of valuable posthumous works. But, to return to earlier days, Rennell speedily found a place in the most intelligent circles of society, counting among his friends, as years passed on, not only men of science and literature like Sir Joseph Banks, Sir Everard Home, Bishop Horsley, Sir George Staunton, Dr Robertson the historian, Dean Vincent, Mr Alexander Dalrymple, Mr William Marsden, &c., but also such men as Lord Mornington (afterwards the famous Marquis Wellesley), Lord Spencer (first lord of the Admiralty 1794-1801), and Lord Holland. His closest friends appear to have been Sir Joseph Banks, Lord Spencer, and Dr Gillies the historian, and in later years Captain (afterwards Sir Francis) Beaufort. In 1791 he received from the Royal Society, at the hands of the president Sir Joseph Banks, the Copley medal, assigned him for his geographical labours, and especially for his paper " On the Camel's Rate, as applied to Geographical Purposes." The follow- ing passage, perhaps not quite free from exaggeration, occurs in the president's address on this occasion : " 1 should rejoice could I say that Britons . . . could boast a general map of their island as well executed as the Major's delineation of Bengal and Bahar, a tract of countries considerably larger in extent than the whole of Great Britain and Ireland ; but it would be injustice to the Major's industry, were I not here to state that the districts he has perambulated and planned exceed probably in extent the whole tract of surveyed country to be found in the maps of the Euroi>ean kingdoms put together; while the accuracy of his particular surveys stands yet unrivalled by the most laborious performance of the best county maps this nation has hitherto been able to produce." In 1792 Rennell published TJic Marches of the British Army in the Peninsula of India during the Campaign of 1790-91, illustrated and explained by a map and other plates ; and in 1794 an 8vo pamphlet entitled War with France the only security of Britain, by an " Old Englishman. " Some years before this time Rennell had also turned his attention to African geography, in connexion with the African Association, of which he was one of the earliest members. Of this body, which was the progenitor, though not the immediate parent, of the Royal Geographical Society, 1 an account may be read in Mr Clements Markham's most interesting record of the fifty years' work of that society. The association was established in 1788, and sent out several travellers of note. Maps and geographical memoirs from Renuell's pen were issued on various occasions ; and especially were his African labours associated with the name and first journey of Mungo Park. Rennell published in all some five or six dissertations on African geography. And this branch of his work may account, after a fashion, for an odd confusion made in a public report of Livingstone's burial in Westminster Abbey. 2 The Philosophical Transactions, whose atmosphere in those days was not confined to the same rarefied altitudes as at present, con- tain occasional papers from Rennell's hand. We have mentioned the paper on " Camel's Rate " in 1791 ; in 1793 we have " Observations on a Current that often prevails to the westward of Scilly, and endangers the safety of ships" (the current in question has since been known by Rennell's name), in 1809 " On the Effect of Westerly Winds in raising the Level of the British Channel." In the 1 There was an intermediate body called the Raleigh Club, founded in 182C-27, which actually developed into the R. G. S. Rennell's great age doubtless pre- vented his joining the club. The society was founded the month after his death. ! " At Livingstone's feet lies the head of Major Reynell (sic), himself a noted African traveller." Times, April 20, 1874. Archseologia we find the following: in vol. xvii. p. 242, "Observations on the Topography of Ancient Babylon," and in vol. xxi. three dissertations: (1) p. 92, "On the Voyage and Place of Shipwreck of St Paul"; (2) p. 138, "Concerning the Identity of the Remains at Jerash, whether they are those of Gerasa or Pella " ; (3) p. 501, read May 1826, when the venerable author was in his eighty-fourth year, " Concerning the place where Julius Caesar landed in Britain." This does not, we believe, exhaust the list of his occasional writings, and he gave much incidental help to other writers who touched his own subjects, e.g., to Dean Vincent in his well-known work on the Commerce and Navigation of the Ancients. The detail of these minor works has carried us away from the chronological order of his productions. That which added most largely to the reputation acquired as the geographer of India was his book on the Geographical System of Herodotus, 4to, with eleven maps (1800). Another great task undertaken by him was a Treatise on the Comparative Geography of Western Asia. On this field he had formed a most comprehensive project, too vast indeed for the time of life at which he undertook it, when probably he had already reached threescore. Of this project his Herodotus was indeed itself a portion, and others were his separate publications of a Dis- sertation on the Topography of the Plain of Troy (4to, 1811), and of the Illustrations of the Expeditions of t Cyrus and the Retreat of the Ten Thousand, and an additional mass of matter, prepared with many years' labour, and left behind him in a very perfect state of transcription, was published after his death by his daughter, in 2 vols. 8vo, with an atlas (1831). Another posthumous work was An Investigation of the Currents of the Atlantic Ocean, and of those which prevail between the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic. For this work Rennell had examined and collated the logs of a vast number of the ships of war and Indiamen which had traversed those seas during thirty or forty years, re-com- puting observations, and reducing them to one general system. The results of this toil were left ready for the press, and were published in large charts, with a thin volume of text, under the editorship of Mr John Purdy, in 1832. The first contributions to the scientific knowledge of currents had been Rennell's papers on the Lagullas, and on the Scilly Currents, and the present work contained nearly all that existed in the generalization of such data till more than twenty years after his death. 3 "Major Rennell," says an account of him, in a work privately printed by a member of his wife's family, 4 "was of middle size, well proportioned, with a grave yet sweet expression on his coun- tenance, which is said to have conciliated the regard of all he spoke with." The existence of this happy faculty we have already noticed as deducible from his earlier history in India. The sweet gravity of which the. writer speaks is very recognizable in his portraits, alike in middle life and in extreme old age. 5 A contemporary, quoted in the work just referred to, said of him : " In his intercourse with his friends he possesses a remarkable flow of spirits, and abounds with interesting subjects of conversation ; at the same time, as to what relates to himself, he is one of the most diffident, unassuming men in the world." One of the obituary notices at the time of his death says that Rennell's "political and religious feelings are said to have operated in causing him to decline the acceptance of an invitation to become a member of the French National Institute." This can hardly have had any basis of fact. Rennell, in politics, was always attached to what would be called, in present language, the Liberal party; though his Liberalism, as we may gather from the title of his pamphlet of 1794, and from expressions used in the dedication to Earl Spencer of his Herodotus, had nothing of that character which loves to dis- parage those who are jealous for the greatness of England. As a matter of fact he was elected a foreign associate of the Institute during the peace of Amiens, in 1802, and accepted the honour with unmistakable cordiality and satisfaction, as his reply, which we have seen, testifies. In his eighty-third year a gold medal was awarded to Rennell by the Royal Society of Literature ; and, as his infirmities prevented his attendance at their place of meeting, a deputation, headed by the president, visited him for the purpose of presenting it at his own house in Nassau Street. When more than eighty-seven years of age Major Rennell slipped from a chair, and broke his thigh. He hardly ever left his lied afterwards, and died 29th March 1830. He was buried in the nave of Westminster Abbey on the 6th April. A tablet to his memory, with a bust, stands in the north-west angle of the nave. Mrs Rennell had died in 1810. Three children of the marriage 3 See Mr A. G. Findlay in the Jour. Roy. Geog. Soc., vol. xxlii. 4 Memorialt of the Thackeray Family, by the late Mrs liayne. s Among portraits we may mention one engraved by Cardon from a drawing by Scott, of which impressions were published in the European Magazine for 1802. and in both the posthumous editions of the Herodotus. There to another profile, engraved by Daniel after Dance, in a collection of portraits by these artists, and a medallion in porcelain executed at Paris, probably after liis ilc.-itli, and showing him In old age. There is also the bust by Baily in Westminster Abbey ; and an admirable wax relief of him in old age is in the possession of Major Rodd, his gnimlsdii.