Captain John Deschamps

Where Lyttleton had drawn the royal interior, Captain John Deschamps kept to the western coast. An Adjutant in the Royal Artillery, he arrived in 1828 and served a decade in garrison, and his Scenery and Reminiscences of Ceylon, published in London in 1845, gathers twelve hand-coloured lithographs drawn on stone by J. West Giles: the Fort of Colombo and the Galle Face Esplanade, Slave Island and the Buddhist temples, the Ferry at Bentotte and the Rock of Mulkirri. His is a soldier’s memoir in pictures, exact and affectionate: he drew what a garrison officer saw daily among the island’s people.