Sir, The provenance of the collection of North West Coast artefacts made by my great-grandfather, the Rev Robert James Dundas, will be documented when the catalogue for the auction sale at Sotheby’s in New York in October is published.
The bulk of the Dundas Collection was not bought from a British naval officer as you reported (May 22); the only naval officer involved was Lieutenant-Commander Edmund Verney, who took my great-grandfather in his gunboat to Metlakatla, British Columbia, where William Duncan, the missionary, laid out an assortment of objects which had been handed over to him by various chiefs and shamans on their conversion to Christianity. He laid them out one Monday morning for them to divide.
If the Dundas Collection is to be acquired by a museum as I hope and is not to be split up at the auction sale it is important that there are no doubts over how it was acquired for curators and collectors. My great-grandfather would have liked it to go to the Royal Scottish Museum in Edinburgh, to which I offered it some time ago, and I hope we can find a generous Scot to make this possible.
As to the suggestion that I want to give “tens of thousands of pounds” to descendants of John Cullen Colquhoun, a family servant to whom my great-grandfather was devoted, it was only a direct descendant I had in mind. That same offer also applies to two native Indians: the youth whom he baptised in 1863 and to whom he gave his name and the daughter of the chief to whom most of the items had belonged.
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SIMON CAREY
London NW3