Reverend James Cordiner

The Reverend James Cordiner was born at Banff in 1775, a son of Charles Cordiner, the Episcopal minister of that town, and was educated at Banff and at King’s College in the University of Aberdeen before he took orders and sailed for the East.

The earliest original drawings executed on Ceylon under British rule by a British artist are the work of a clergyman, the Reverend James Cordiner, chaplain to the British garrison, who arrived in 1800 among the first administrators to follow the assumption of the maritime provinces from the Dutch in 1796. His A Description of Ceylon, published in 1807 with twenty-three aquatint plates, was the first British book on Ceylon to be illustrated from drawings made on the island itself. The plates are the production of a skilled amateur rather than a professional, and disclose the attentive eye of a clergyman in place of the hand of a trained artist; they possess nonetheless the value of the first-hand and the immediate, having been made at the very inception of the island’s transformation under British rule.

At Colombo he served as chaplain to the 51st Foot and as principal of the schools that Governor Frederick North was then founding across the island, an office that carried him on the tours his book records: a circuit of the island in 1800, the expedition to Kandy in 1803, and a journey to the temple at Ramisseram in 1804. He returned to Scotland about 1804 and settled at Aberdeen, where he was afterwards minister of St Paul’s chapel. A Description of Ceylon appeared there in two quarto volumes, issued by Longman, Hurst, Rees and Orme of London together with A. Brown of Aberdeen, with twenty-five engravings in all after his own drawings, the plates supplemented by two folding maps. Cordiner died at Aberdeen on 13 January 1836.