‘A proper set of views’: The British East India Company and the Eighteenth-Century Visualization of South-East Asia

Abstract

In the churchyard of St Mary’s, Rotherhithe, stands the substantial tomb of Lee Boo, the first Palauan Islander to visit Britain, who died of smallpox at the home of Captain Henry Wilson in Paradise Row, Rotherhithe, on 27 December 1784. The tomb and its inscription, composed by no less a figure than Brook Watson, the merchant and celebrated subject of John Singleton Copley’s recent (1778) painting Watson and the Shark, were erected at the expense of ‘the Honourable United East India Company’, as the inscription states: as a Testimony of Esteem for the humane and kind Treatmentafforded by his Father to the Crew of their Shipthe Antelope, Captain Wilson,which was wrecked off that Islandin the Night of the 9th of August 1783.