Thomas Pennant to George Paton

26 July 1774

ID: 0164 [see the .xml file] [download the xml file]
Identifier: NLS ADV. MSS. 29.5.5 (2 vols.) i, 90-91
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Cite: 'Thomas Pennant to George Paton 26 July 1774' in Curious Travellers Digital Editions [editions.curioustravellers.ac.uk/doc/0164]

Dear Sir

Your favors of the 11th & 18th inst. are before. Many thanks for the seal &c. you say nothing of the 10s d6. & 5 – 3d. long since sent to you. I shall be glad to know by Christmas the number of persons who wish to have the plates of the 1st Ed. in octavo size none can be had afterwards.1 I have Adair. I am glad you have the Forres pillar. accounts of the building of Blair Castle if any in yr library will be welcome. The Price of such of my plates as for example; Iona, view in arran &c are 5 guineas. none of my engravers charged less for the views.

Col. Roy has behaved to me with great politeness & has been very communicative. I believe it is not at present in his power to give any more of his maps away. I have seen it more than once & very fine it is.2

Next week I sail for the isle of Man.3

I am Dear Sir yr faithful H. Servt

Tho. Pennant.

July 26th. 1774.

If Mr Macgovan will trust his Antiquity to London next Christmas I will get it drawn.4

Editorial notes
1. Apparently a reference to the separate purchase of plates from Pennant's Tour in Scotland and Voyage to the Hebrides 1772 (Chester: 1774). Two of the available plates are mentioned later in the letter.
2. Gwyn Walters suggests that the maps Pennant refers to here are engraved proofs of William Roy's 'Mappa Britanniae Septentrionalis', later published in his Military Antiquities of the Romans in North Britain (1793), plate I. However Walters also suggests that Pennant's second reference, apparently to a single map, might correspond to Roy's 'original protraction' for the much larger Military Survey of Scotland, 1747-1755. See Gwyn Walters, 'Thomas Pennant's Map of Scotland, 1777: Study in Sources, and an Introduction to George Paton's Role in the History of Scottish Cartography' in Imago Mundi, vol. 28 (1976), 121-128, (p.123).
3. In his Literary Life (1793), p.22, Pennant writes of his voyage to the Isle of Mann in 1774: I kept a journal, and was favored with ample materials from the gentlemen of the island, most of which were unaccountably lost about a year after, and my design of giving an account of that island to the public was frustrated.
4. Likely a reference to an object described in Pennant's Tour in Scotland 1772 Part II (London: 1776), p.241: Among others in the cabinet of Mr. John Macgouan, discovered near this city, is an elegant brass image of beautiful Naiad, with a little Satyr in one arm. See also Pennant's letters to Paton on 7 March and 29 August 1775, and Paton's reply of 4 April.