Joseph Eudelin de Jonville

Joseph Marie Eudelin Mervé de Jonville was born at Cairo on 2 September 1756, and came, by a course the records leave largely unlit, into the service of the British administration that took Ceylon from the Dutch.

Joseph Eudelin de Jonville, a Frenchman who had entered British employ, accompanied Frederick North, the first British Governor of Ceylon, to the island in 1798, and served as its first Surveyor General from 1800 to 1805. Engaged at the outset to survey the cinnamon lands, he was charged by North to inquire also into the natural history, the customs and the languages of the country; and in the seven years he passed upon the island he measured and mapped, and drew and painted, compiling a substantial French manuscript together with a body of natural-history drawings, among them a series of studies of the hornbill; the drawings were dispatched to London and are preserved today in the British Library. The first hand to draw Ceylon for the new British administration, fittingly, belonged to a Frenchman.

His appointment as Surveyor General took effect on 2 August 1800, and his survey work carried him inland with Major-General Hay MacDowall to the court of Kandy. The French manuscript, entitled ‘Quelques notions sur l’île de Ceylan’, he submitted in 1801, though it went unprinted in his lifetime; an English rendering was published only long afterwards. The hornbill drawings that survive are four pencil studies of the beaks of different species, two of the great pied hornbill, one of the Malabar pied and one of the rhinoceros hornbill, each carrying a scale in inches for the exact measure of the bird; though unsigned, they travel with a letter written by de Jonville in French to the orientalist William Marsden, describing the hornbill of the island, and it is on that letter that their attribution rests. They are held today in the natural-history holdings of the British Library’s Visual Arts collections. De Jonville died in London on 21 January 1837.