WITH A CHAPTER ON THE CULTIVATION OF TEA
HATHORN, James George.
A hand-book of Darjeeling; with brief notes on the culture and manufacture of tea, and rules for the sale of unassessed waste lands etc. issued by notification of the government of Bengal, 30th August 1862. With maps printed on cloth and colored …
Calcutta, R.C. Lepage & Co., 1863.
16mo, pp. [6], 175, [1], [16 (advertisements)]; with 3 large folding engraved partly coloured maps on cloth (‘The route to Darjeeling’, ‘The station of Darjeeling 1862’, and ‘The Hope Town Spur’); creasing to a few corners, a little foxing to maps; very good in original light brown pebbled cloth, covers stamped in blind, upper cover lettered in gilt ‘Handbook of Darjeeling’; a little splitting to joints, neat repairs to spine ends, a little discolouring; some pencil notes to rear endpapers.
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A hand-book of Darjeeling; with brief notes on the culture and manufacture of tea, and rules for the sale of unassessed waste lands etc. issued by notification of the government of Bengal, 30th August 1862. With maps printed on cloth and colored …
Scarce first edition of this guide to Darjeeling by Hathorn (1826–1868), a Captain in the Bengal and then Royal Artillery.
The wide-ranging contents cover, inter alia: the journey from Calcutta to Darjeeling; a geographical and political description of British Sikkim; a description of Darjeeling including its hotels, schools and shops, its climate and weather, its convalescent depot and mission, and its natural history; the settlement of Hope Town; the culture and manufacture of tea (pp. 118–135) and the experimental cultivation of the quinine plant; the hill tribes of Sikkim; and a charming month-by-month ‘Gardener’s calendar for Darjeeling’.
While the table of contents calls for four maps (including one of British Sikkim), most of the few extant copies contain, like ours, only three.
OCLC shows only one copy in the UK (British Library), and four in the US (Brown, Harvard, NYPL, and University of Pennsylvania).
