Te Bibilia moa ra, ... [Bible in Tahitian].

£5,000 · Offered by Maggs Bros Ltd

The lavish inscription reads: “Presented to John MacGillivray Esq. of H.M.S. Herald Naturalist attached to the Surveying Mission to the South Seas by the Revd E. Prout Home Secretary of The London Missionary Society 8th June 1852.” John MacGillivray (1821-1867) was born in Aberdeen. His father was the ornithologist William MacGillivray and John James Audubon was a family friend and visitor to the home. It’s hardly a surprise that he followed in their footsteps. He served as the naturalist on three important Pacific surveying voyages - the HMS Fly , on HMS Rattlesnake (of which he wrote the official account), and finally the HMS Herald . No less than Joseph Dalton Hooker and John Gould recommended MacGillivray for the position of naturalist on the Herald voyage. He had made important collections on his first two voyages, which now reside at the Liverpool Museum and Natural History Museum, and “ also showed a considerable talent for communicating with the native peoples he encountered on his voyages ; his notebooks contain several vocabularies and grammars of native languages” (ODNB). This gift would’ve been a valuable addition to his travelling library as he continued to study the languages of the South Pacific . It’s also worth noting that on Aneityum (the southernmost island of Vanuata) MacGillivray found that about two thirds of the population were Christians. The Herald expedition was essentially a continuation of the Rattlesnake ‘s, this time focused on the Fiji Islands a

• Year: 1847

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