HOOKER’S COPY
DONALDSON, Florence.
Lepcha Land or six Weeks in the Sikhim Himalayas ... With a Map showing Route, and 106 Illustrations. Photographs by P. and F. Donaldson.
London, Sampson Low Marston & Company, 1900.
8vo, pp. xii, 213, [1]; with a frontispiece, 23 photographic plates, and a folding map, numerous lithographed and photographic illustrations in the text; a little light foxing to frontispiece and title, plate facing p. 92 loose; overall a very good copy in the original pictorial blue cloth, spine lettered in gilt, upper board lettered in black, top edge gilt; some wear to extremities and light marks to covers; ink inscription to front free endpaper ‘Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker GCSI Christmas 1900'.
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Lepcha Land or six Weeks in the Sikhim Himalayas ... With a Map showing Route, and 106 Illustrations. Photographs by P. and F. Donaldson.
First edition of Florence Donaldson’s account of the Lepcha (or Rong) people of the Himalayan state of Sikkim in India, our copy from the library of the botanist Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker, the first European permitted to trek through Sikkim.
Lepcha Land, ‘an account of what may best be described as a prolonged picnic in one of the byways of the Himalayas – where Time still walks on crutches’ (p. 5), is illustrated with photos taken by the author and her husband, likely the P. Donaldson who served as President of the Simla Municipality from April 1899 to April 1902. ‘The following pages – written at the request of friends – are only intended to describe a journey among new and interesting surroundings, undertaken in 1891 just after a fresh awakening on the part of the Indian Government to the political importance of Sikhim … Current events … and the probable parcelling out of Chinese territory, are likely to open the flood-gates of Western civilization. But when this comes to pass, “Lepcha Land” will be a misnomer and another primitive, patriarchal and peace-loving people will have died out’ (pp. 5–6).
‘There is one marvellous episode when on meeting some merchants on the road from Lhasa to Kalimpong she was faced with the ticklish social dilemma of how to tell a Tibetan one doesn’t think his yak-fat tea is quite the thing’ (Robinson, Wayward Women (1991), p. 208).
Provenance:
Inscribed (perhaps by the author?) to Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker (1817–1911), botanist and explorer, friend of Charles Darwin, and long-serving director of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew (the inscription is not in Hooker’s own hand). With Archibald Campbell, Hooker had been the first European permitted to trek through Sikkim, accompanied by several Lepchas whom he had hired to help dry and collect botanical samples.
During his four years in Sikkim and the Himalayas he collected some seven thousand plant species, including twenty-five species of Rhododendron previously unknown in Europe; while Hooker was still in India, his father published on his behalf the first part of his Rhododendrons of the Sikkim-Himalaya in 1849.
NLS, Mountaineering l083; Yakushi D144; not in Neate.
