The lavish inscription reads: "Presented to John MacGillivray Esq. of H.M.S. Herald Naturalist attached to the Surveying Mission to the South Seas by the Revd E. Prout Home Secretary of The London Missionary Society 8th June 1852."
John MacGillivray (1821-1867) was born in Aberdeen. His father was the ornithologist William MacGillivray and John James Audubon was a family friend and visitor to the home. It's hardly a surprise that he followed in their footsteps. He served as the naturalist on three important Pacific surveying voyages - the HMS Fly, on HMS Rattlesnake (of which he wrote the official account), and finally the HMS Herald.
No less than Joseph Dalton Hooker and John Gould recommended MacGillivray for the position of naturalist on the Herald voyage. He had made important collections on his first two voyages, which now reside at the Liverpool Museum and Natural History Museum, and "also showed a considerable talent for communicating with the native peoples he encountered on his voyages; his notebooks contain several vocabularies and grammars of native languages" (ODNB). This gift would've been a valuable addition to his travelling library as he continued to study the languages of the South Pacific. It's also worth noting that on Aneityum (the southernmost island of Vanuata) MacGillivray found that about two thirds of the population were Christians.
The Herald expedition was essentially a continuation of the Rattlesnake's, this time focused on the Fiji Islands and parts of the Australian coastline. Alas, it proved less successful for MacGillivray. "For the first three years of the Herald's voyage MacGillivray does at least appear to have been a reliable collector, sending back a steady supply of specimens. However, in the last few months of the ship's stay in Australian waters he began drinking, fell foul of the captain, Captain Denham, and was dismissed from the ship in Sydney in 1855. MacGillivray had spent an unparalleled twelve years living almost continuously in the cramped conditions of the Royal Navy ships of the day, and in the last few months on the Herald there had been long tedious spells of routine surveying work with few opportunities for shore collecting. It is perhaps understandable that he had had enough."
Provenance: presentation inscription to John MacGillivray; bookplate of Lieut Commander Andrew David, who published an account of the voyage in 1995: The Voyage of HMS Herald to Australia and the South-west Pacific 1852-1861 under the command of Captain Henry Mangles Denham.
David, A., The Voyage of HMS Herald to Australia and the South-west Pacific 1852-1861 under the command of Captain Henry Mangles Denham. (Melbourne, 1995).
