Talk:Francis Buchanan-Hamilton

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Francis Buchanan-Hamilton is a biography of the surgeon and surveyor Francis Buchanan-Hamilton (1762–1829), born Francis Buchanan and from 1818 Francis Hamilton, written for the cannabis in his surveys and his herbarium. Accession pages store him as F. Buchanan-Hamilton; the specimen table reaches them through the redirect F. Buchanan-Hamilton.

Data verification

Dates and career follow David Prain's life of 1905 in the Annals of the Royal Botanic Garden, Calcutta, checked against the Dictionary of National Biography. Specimen details come from the sheet images and the holders' catalogues. Discuss conflicts and corrections here.

Discussion

Sources compared

Prain (1905) and the Dictionary of National Biography (vol. 7, 1886, with its 1904 errata) agree on birth, the Edinburgh degree, entry into the Company's service in 1794, the Ava, Mysore and Nepal journeys, the Bengal survey and the Calcutta garden. They differ on the points below. Where the article uses one of them it gives both sources or follows the one whose evidence is stated:

• Naval service: the DNB has him serve as surgeon of a man-of-war after 1783. Prain had the naval records for 1783–1794 searched, found no such service, and argued for voyages on East Indiamen.
• Chiefship of the Buchanans: the DNB dates the success of the claim to 1826, Prain to 1828, citing a service of heirs of July 1828.
• Age at death: the DNB says he died in his 67th year, Prain in his 68th. Both give 15 June 1829. Born on 15 February 1762, he was 67 when he died, which is his 68th year.
• The start of the Bengal survey: his orders named Rangpur as the first district; Prain shows that he began with Dinajpur late in 1807.
• Martin's Eastern India: the errata on the Wikisource transcription of the DNB give its date as 1888. The title pages of all three volumes read 1838.

The online copy of Prain's text is an OCR layer with columns run together in many places. Every date and name taken from it was checked against the page images of the same scan (pp. i, vii, viii, xvi, xvii, xxxi and xxxvi among them).

The Kew sheet of Wallich 4665 A

Lot A of entry 4665 in Wallich's list reads H Ham.- Sudallapur & HBC, that is, Hamilton's herbarium, Sudallapur and the Calcutta garden. Kew's sheet of the lot carries two specimens with separate catalogue numbers:

• K001039631 (GBIF 1051241889): slip Cannabis sativa ♂, 4665, pencil a, Botanical garden 21 Jany 1815.
• K001039632 (GBIF 1051241909): slip Cannabis sativa spontanea, 4665, pencil B, Sadullahpur 5 Jany 1809.

The garden slip carries the same date as the Edinburgh sheet Buchanan-Hamilton 2182 (1815) (H. B. 21 Janry 1815), and both are male. Buchanan's Bengal specimens went in two sets, one to East India House and one to Edinburgh, so the two sheets may be parts of one gathering. The labels do not say so, and the article does not claim it.

Sadullahpur is not settled. Martin's volume for Rangpur has a division (thana) Sadullahpoor, and the same volume's account of Purnea names a market-place Sadullahpoor on the old Bhagirathi near Gaur. Prain has him surveying Rangpur from early 1808 until the rains of 1809 and Purnea in the cold season of 1809–10, so a date of 5 January 1809 falls in the Rangpur season. The slip itself names no district. Neither Kew specimen has an accession page.

Cannabis in his writings

Sources: An Account of the Kingdom of Nepal (1819), pp. 226 and 231–232, in the Internet Archive copy, with the same pages checked in a second scan; Martin's three volumes of Eastern India (1838), for their passages on hemp, Cannabis, gangja, siddhi, bhang and charas. Passages not used: Bhagalpur (vol. 2, p. 213: 13 bigahs of hemp avowed for intoxication) and Rangpur (vol. 3, p. 495: the plant a common weed, siddhi little used).

Not read: A Journey from Madras through the Countries of Mysore, Canara, and Malabar (1807); the separate Geographical, Statistical, and Historical Description of the District, or Zila, of Dinajpur (1833); and the editions of his district journals for Bihar, Patna, Gaya and Shahabad printed in the 20th century. Martin abridged and rearranged the manuscript reports; no comparison with the manuscripts has been made here.

Further reading not used

• Marika Vicziany (1986), "Imperialism, botany and statistics in early nineteenth-century India: the surveys of Francis Buchanan (1762–1829)", Modern Asian Studies 20 (4): 625–660, doi:10.1017/S0026749X00013676.
• Salila Kulshreshtha (2026), "Francis Buchanan and collecting knowledge in nineteenth century India", South Asian Studies 42 (1): 72–92, doi:10.1080/02666030.2026.2652690.
• David J. Mabberley (2004), "Hamilton, Francis (née Buchanan: 1762–1829)", in The Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century British Scientists.

These were identified from their bibliographic records only.

Portrait

No portrait of him was found on Wikimedia Commons or Wikidata. The lead image is the Edinburgh sheet E00248803.