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The earliest surviving account of the Tradescant collection was that
recorded by Peter Mundy, who ‘went to view some rarities att John Tradescans'
while on home leave from the East India Company in 1634. It is clear
from Mundy's account that the collection had already attained, by that
point, an encyclopaedic scope, for he praised it as a site ‘where a
Man might in one daye behold and collecte into one place more curiosities
than hee should see if hee spent all his life in Travell'.
Four years later, in 1638, a more detailed description of the collection
and its contents was recorded by a German traveller named Georg Christoph
Stirn. His account was as follows:
‘In the museum of Mr. John Tradescant are
the following things: first in the courtyard there lie two ribs of
a whale, also a very ingenious little boat of bark; then in the garden
all kinds of foreign plants, which are to be found in a special little
book which Mr. Tradescant has had printed about them. In the museum
itself we saw a salamander, a chameleon, a pelican, a remora, a lanhado
from Africa, a white partridge, a goose which has grown in Scotland
on a tree, a flying squirrel, another squirrel like a fish, all kinds
of bright colored birds from India, a number of things changed into
stone, amongst others a piece of human flesh on a bone, gourds, olives,
a piece of wood, an ape's head, a cheese, etc; all kinds of shells,
the hand of a mermaid, the hand of a mummy, a very natural wax hand
under glass, all kinds of precious stones, coins, a picture wrought
in feathers, a small piece of wood from the cross of Christ, pictures
in perspective of Henry IV and Louis XIII of France, who are shown,
as in nature, on a polished steel mirror when this is held against
the middle of the picture, a little box in which a landscape is seen
in perspective, pictures from the church of S. Sophia in Constantinople
copied by a Jew into a book, two cups of rinocerode, a cup of an E.
Indian alcedo which is a kind of unicorn, many Turkish and other foreign
shoes and boots, a sea parrot, a toad-fish, an elk's hoof with three
claws, a bat as large as a pigeon, a human bone weighing 42 lbs.,
Indian arrows such as are used by the executioners in the West Indies-
when a man is condemned to death, they lay open his back with them
and he dies of it, an instrument used by the Jews in circumcision,
some very light wood from Africa, the robe of the King of Virginia,
a few goblets of agate, a girdle such as the Turks wear in Jerusalem,
the passion of Christ carved very daintily on a plumstone, a large
magnet stone, a S. Francis in wax under glass, as also a S. Jerome,
the Pater Noster of Pope Gregory XV, pipes from the East and West
Indies, a stone found in the West Indies in the water, whereon are
graven Jesus, Mary and Joseph, a beautiful present from the Duke of
Buckingham, which was of gold and diamonds affixed to a feather by
which the four elements were signified, Isidor's MS of de natura hominis,
a scourge with which Charles V is said to have scourged himself, a
hat band of snake bones'.
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