Colonial Private Diaries and their Potential for Reconstructing Historical Climate in Bombay, 1799–1828

Abstract

As Richard Grove and others have shown, the servants of the East India Company carried a preoccupation with the recording and classification of natural environments.1 This is particularly true of weather and climate. During the early-mid nineteenth century the East India Company established the first systematic meteorological observatories in several territories under their control, including (in chronological order of opening) Madras, Calcutta, St Helena, Bombay and Singapore. However, the tradition of recording meteorological observations extended back significantly further than this, with weather chronologies of a shorter duration available in numerous archives around the world. These derive from medical observations, travel writings, military records, ships’ logs and a variety of personal diaries and correspondences. New territories were assessed for their suitability for European habitation. Likewise, travel ‘tours’ to new trading regions incorporated meteorological readings to assess the likely crop yields and their responses to droughts and floods.2 East India Company naturalists corresponding about a series of global droughts in the 1790s arguably discovered El Niño teleconnections some 130 years before Gilbert Walker first defined the Southern Oscillation.3