List of Exhibits

6.18 MARRIAGE CONTRACT BETWEEN ISMAT MEHSEPAN AND MIRZA ABDUL HUSSAN KHAN

Vellum, pigments and gold leaf, 299 x 378mm

1873

The first two-and-a-half pages of this Persianlegal document quote extracts from the Koran.

The marriage contract itself authorises the Imam to join together the bride and groom in marriage and itemises a dowry of 6000 tomans to be paid by the bride’s father to the husband.

The last two pages consist of twenty-four blank decorative medallions in which would be inscribed the names and dates of birth of the couple’s children.

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6.19 BEADED GARMENT OF THE PATAMONA INDIANS

Plant fibres, glass and shell beads, 500 x 300mm

Circa 1890

The Patamona people largely live in the highland forests of Guyana. Today it is estimated that there about 6,000 Patamona living chiefly as hunters and farmers in the more remote regions of that country.

Christopher Columbus was the first European reputed to have laid eyes on Guyana, in 1498. From the sixteenth century it became a busy Dutch trading post, with the new settlers initially happy to treat the original inhabitants as commercial partners. Relations, which began as cordial, soured as the Guyanese were exploited financially and then worsened into outright ill-treatment. Many Guyanese, such as the Patamona, moved up into the hills. To replace them as workers, the Dutch and British settlers brought in African slaves and, later, indentured Indian and Asian labourers to work their farms. In 1796 conflict between the Dutch and British governments over territorial sovereignty was ended and the British claimed Guyana as a colony for the crown. Guyana gained independence in 1966 and is today the only English-speaking country in South America.

The Jesuits who worked in Guyana from the mid-nineteenth century were mostly fromthe English (now British) Province. As missionaries, doctors, hospital workers and teachers, they established a strong foothold in the country, carrying out valuable work among the Amerindian population, who held them in high regard. The Jesuits founded and ran two hundred primary schools and three secondary schools, in addition to numerous mission stations.

This beaded garment or body ornament dates from the 1890s and is part of a significant collection of artefacts from Guyana held at Stonyhurst. These were acquired in part by Jesuit missionaries, but also by the explorer and naturalist Charles Waterton (1782-1865) who attended Stonyhurst as a pupil in 1795 and who owned estates in Guyana, visiting them regularly from 1811. Waterton is credited with discovering, during his time in Guyana, curare – a blackish-brown resinous bitter substance, extracted from various plants found in South America, and used by Indians to poison their arrows, and known by them as wourali. Waterton’s scientific experiments with the substance helped to lay the foundations of modern anaes thetics. Indeed the correct technique for using curare in modern anaesthesia wasdeveloped in the 1960s by the Liverpoolborn and Ampleforth-educated Thomas Cecil

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