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Robert Raymond.

A Dialogue between Robert Raymond and a Black Man by the Name of Sambo, a Native of the Island of Antigua, and other manuscript poems and essays.

Various places, 1774-circa 1824
[4], 67, 126 manuscript pages. 4to, 8 x 6 inches, stiff vellum over boards, bowed, moderate staining and wear; moderate wear to contents, a few sections coming disbound.

Robert Raymond (circa 1751-circa 1824), the author of this volume, is something of a mystery.  He is best known to history through his illustrated manuscript diary which brought $245,000 at a Christie's auction in 2016. From that volume, we know that he served in the British navy from at least 1767 to 1783, reaching the rank of warrant officer. From this volume we can glean that he was apprenticed to a South Carolina sea captain at age 15, joined the navy, spent his final years as a resident of the Greenwich Naval Hospital, and that he was approximately 73 years old circa 1824. 

In this volume, the main point of Americana interest is "A Dialogue between Robert Raymond and a Black Man by the Name of Sambo, a Native of the Island of Antigua," filling 67 pages before the main body of the volume. At its commencement, Raymond was with the HMS Chatham. It recounts a series of conversations in 1774 with a formerly enslaved man named Sambo in the Antigua village of Falmouth, who had formerly labored on the plantation of John Horsford, "till a good bokra gentleman come to my massa & tell him he will bye my freedom." He now sold produce at the market, made straw hats, and performed as a musician: "I make bangy too with callabash & put string & make he play music, so when we leave off work we get some our Black people & make dance" (pages 3-4). The encouragement of Sambo's Christian faith is a recurring theme, as well as Sambo's own religious conversations with his friend Toney and others. Interspersed are occasional biographical sections recounting Raymond's life and travels. Raymond's service aboard a slave ship seems to be described on page 36: "I been on board a coast of Guinea ship, after her men been press'd on board a man of war, & she have passenger on board, one of the King of Bona's sons. He very rich man . . . he come over to England to get learning; he love gambling too much." He also  recounts leaving his parents at age 15 and going as an apprentice to South Carolina, where he was bound to a sadistic ship captain named Thomas Turner, then absconding to join the navy aboard the HMS Lively (pages 58-63). 

The other main section of the volume is "A Short and Simple Description of the Royal Hospital at Greenwich," by Raymond, a long description of the home for retired British sailors, pages 1-121, with long digressions based on conversations with the pensioners such as "A Few Observations & Reflections on the Ocean" (page 63) and "A Short Description of the Milky Way" (page 104). On page 114-115 he notes: "would I not begin life again, nor do I regret that at the age of seventy three I do find it is almost gone." On page 2 he names Sir Richard G. Keats as the head of the hospital, a position to which he was named in 1821 and held until his death in 1834. 

The three full-page illustrations include: an ink and watercolor frontispiece of a three-masted sailing vessel flying the Union Jack and Blue Ensign flags; a watercolor of a one-legged man reading under a tree, titled "A Greenwich Pensioner Meditating" (facing page 58); and an ink and wash titled "A Curious Piece of Antiquity" (a copy of a drawing by a naval pensioner, facing page 62). 

Numerous poems are included, some of them apparently original works by Raymond such as "The Sailor's Prayer" which opens the volume. The volume closes with the poem "The Orphan Boy's Tale" by Amelia Opie, first published in 1801; Raymond's own poem "The Mariner Looking Upward in a Storm"; and his metaphorical "Letter Written by a Sailor to his Friend." 

Provenance: historian and collector Thomas Charles "Tom" Cambridge of Tobago (1906-1967); dealer Mark Pereira (1955-2022) of Aquarela Galleries in Trinidad; sold to the consignor in 1983. A microfilm of the volume was created by Tom Cambridge circa 1960, and is held by the University of Florida, where it is inaccurately described as "A sailor's log of his voyages through the West Indies." It is cited as entry 1444 in Ingram's "Manuscript Sources for the History of the West Indies" as "really not a log in the formal sense of the word but a narrative account of his experiences in Antigua and elsewhere in the West Indies"; there the date is given as circa 1824.

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