THE WONDER DOWN UNDER: Almost immediately after landing in Tasmania (better known at the time as Van Diemen’s Land) on September 18, 1838, Gould and traveling companion John Gilbert set out exploring. One inhabitant they documented was the Tasmanian tiger, which often attacked the island’s domestic animals. “The destruction [by this species] has, as a matter of course, called forth the enmity of the settler, and hence in all cultivated districts the animal is nearly extirpated,” Gould wrote. The plate above was completed by zoological illustrator Henry Constantine Richter, though many of Gould’s works were principally illustrated by his wife, natural history artist Elizabeth Coxen.© RICHTER, HENRY CONSTANTINE (1821-1902)/PRIVATE COLLECTION/BRIDGEMAN IMAGESIn May 1838, John Gould, a British zoologist and staff taxidermist for the Zoological Society of London, set sail for Australia. His wife’s brothers had emigrated to the island continent nearly a decade earlier and had been sending Gould specimens of Australian birds, the vast majority of which were new to science. Having already published popular volumes on the birds of the Himalayas and of Europe, he immediately saw the value of a collection about Australian birdlife, but realized that working from dead specimens wasn’t going to cut it; he needed to see them in their natural habitat.
Along with his wife, his eldest son, a young nephew, zoological collector John Gilbert, and a couple of servants, Gould set off for Australia. Unlike many of his contemporaries, who were born into wealthy families and could undertake such expeditions without much concern for the financial consequences, “[Gould’s] Australia trip was an incredibly risky entrepreneurial enterprise,” says Jonathan Smith, a University of Michigan–Dearborn English professor who studies 19th-century literature and science. “It’s very clear from his correspondence that if he isn’t successful with this publication, there aren’t going to be any more John Gould bird folios.”
So once the family arrived that September, in addition to observing, collecting, and describing the fauna he found, Gould spent a good deal of time trying to acquire folio ...
