Raffles’ Ark Redrawn is a fully illustrated catalogue of the 123 colourful natural history drawings of the Raffles Family Collection, acquired by the British Library in 2007. The national history drawings catalogued in this volume make up an important, but previously almost unstudied, part.

In February 1824 Sir Stamford Raffles and his wife Sophia set sail for Britain on the Fame, with the collections made during his six years on the Indonesia island of Sumatra.  These included two to three thousand drawings, priceless Malay manuscripts and living animals including a tiger specially tamed for the voyage – a ‘veritable Noah’s Ark’. Tragically the ship caught fire with the loss of all the collections.  During the ten weeks until the next boat sailed a Chinese and a French artist managed to replace about 80 of the drawings that, with earlier drawings, including some made on the Malaysian island of Penang for the East India Company surgeon William Hunter, form the core of the collection.

The collection represents a remarkable snapshot of the colourful flora and fauna of Sumatra, some of it unknown to Western science when these drawings were made, but to which Raffles responded both emotionally and in a spirit of enquiry.