‘A Desire of Preserving the Remembrance’: Visualizing the East India Company Voyage to Asia

This article explores the role of images and themes of visuality in representing East India Company voyages to Asia in the Age of Sail. The discussion draws extensively on the accounts of two travellers: James Forbes and Richard Rose. In addition to the sketches and drawings suffusing their accounts, both men employed the language and metaphors of vision and visuality in order to mediate their journeys. These strategies framed their experiences of the voyage to India, illuminating this important but frequently overlooked episode in the history of the Company and the British Empire more generally.