.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
It is likely that this box was specially commissioned by Richard Walter (1717–1785) as a memento of his circumnavigation with George Anson on HMS Centurion and anticipates the 'rage for shells', one of the most fashionable of the collecting crazes for natural curiosities that ran through intellectual circles in polite English society during the age of Enlightenment. Walter served as chaplain to the voyage and was credited with co-writing and editing Anson's official account of the expedition, published in 1748 and hailed as 'a masterpiece of descriptive travel that became the most popular book of maritime adventure of the time' (Hill 1817).
The coat-of-arms engraved on the cover are recorded as those of Walter in W.B. Bannerman, ed., The Visitations of the County of Surrey, made and taken in the years 1530, 1572 and 1623, London, 1899, p.231. The same arms, without a crest, are engraved on the chalice, paten and alms dish at the church of Great Staughton, Huntingdonshire inscribed with a dedication from Christopher Walter (d.1752), brother of Richard Walter. A brass on the south wall of the Chancel is 'dedicated by his descendants to the memory of the Revd. Richard Walters, M.A., some time Fellow of Sidney Sussex College Cambridge, Chaplain of Portsmouth Dockyard (1745-1785), Chaplain of H.M.S. Centurion in Commodore Anson's Expedition, and author of the well-known "Voyage Round the World"'. Walter lies buried in the vault at Great Staughton along with his wife and other members of the family. The maker's mark on the present lot is unidentified but recorded by Arthur Grimwade in his London Goldsmiths 1697-1837: Their Marks & Lives (London, 1990) on a snuffbox of 1740 (pp.269-70, no. 3788a).
One of the landmark 18th-century English circumnavigations that laid the groundwork for Cook's later voyages of exploration in the Pacific, Anson's armed expedition was tasked with plundering Spanish trading territories and disrupting supplies of wealth from the Pacific coast of South America following the outbreak of war between Britain and Spain in 1739. Battered by storms around Cape Horn and with many men lost to scurvy, Anson's expedition nearly foundered but, in June 1743, he achieved a single but substantial victory, capturing the Spanish galleon Nuestra Señora de Covadonga off the coast of the Philippines carrying 1,313,843 pieces of eight and 35,682 ounces of virgin silver and making his fortune in the process.
The coat-of-arms engraved on the cover are recorded as those of Walter in W.B. Bannerman, ed., The Visitations of the County of Surrey, made and taken in the years 1530, 1572 and 1623, London, 1899, p.231. The same arms, without a crest, are engraved on the chalice, paten and alms dish at the church of Great Staughton, Huntingdonshire inscribed with a dedication from Christopher Walter (d.1752), brother of Richard Walter. A brass on the south wall of the Chancel is 'dedicated by his descendants to the memory of the Revd. Richard Walters, M.A., some time Fellow of Sidney Sussex College Cambridge, Chaplain of Portsmouth Dockyard (1745-1785), Chaplain of H.M.S. Centurion in Commodore Anson's Expedition, and author of the well-known "Voyage Round the World"'. Walter lies buried in the vault at Great Staughton along with his wife and other members of the family. The maker's mark on the present lot is unidentified but recorded by Arthur Grimwade in his London Goldsmiths 1697-1837: Their Marks & Lives (London, 1990) on a snuffbox of 1740 (pp.269-70, no. 3788a).
One of the landmark 18th-century English circumnavigations that laid the groundwork for Cook's later voyages of exploration in the Pacific, Anson's armed expedition was tasked with plundering Spanish trading territories and disrupting supplies of wealth from the Pacific coast of South America following the outbreak of war between Britain and Spain in 1739. Battered by storms around Cape Horn and with many men lost to scurvy, Anson's expedition nearly foundered but, in June 1743, he achieved a single but substantial victory, capturing the Spanish galleon Nuestra Señora de Covadonga off the coast of the Philippines carrying 1,313,843 pieces of eight and 35,682 ounces of virgin silver and making his fortune in the process.