Digital Book :
Observations on the expediency of Shipbuilding at Bombay, for the service of His Majesty, and of the East India Company.
By William Taylor Money
Printed for Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme & Brown, London - 1811

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First and only edition of a detailed series of arguments promoting the use of Indian teak for shipbuilding, by William Money (1769-1834), superintendent of the Bombay Marine Board from 1803 to 1810 and later director of the British East India Company. He argues that teak is superior to oak for ships sailing in warm waters because it resists worm damage and notes that it is abundantly available on India’s western Malabar coast, while there was a great scarcity of English Oak. He therefore suggests the British East India Company have ships built in India, avoiding the expense of shipping the wood to the London shipyards. He includes the frontispiece portrait of Jamsetjee Bomanjee (1756-1821) who built the first British Royal Navy ship to ordered to be built abroad, the 1810 Minden. He signs the dedication, to Jacob Bosanquet, chairman of the board of the British East India Company, from Bombay, 1 November 1811. The appendices give long extracts from seven recent letters (from 1802 to 1810) concerning ship building in India from 1735 to the present.

The portrait of Bomanjee (ca. 1754-1821) was drawn by Edward Nash in Bombay ca. 1809 and stipple-engraved by William Haines (1778-1848) in London. The oil painting at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich is said to have been painted posthumously based on the present engraving.

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