James Gay Sawkins

James Gay Sawkins (1806 – July 20, 1878) was a British artist, geologist, copper miner, and illustrator. He was a member of the Geological Society of London who joined and led research during England's West Indian Geological Surveys of the islands of Trinidad and Jamaica. He also worked in the mining industries of Jamaica, Peru, Hawaii, and Australia.

Circa 1849, Sawkins testified against Navy general Joseph Warren Revere in a Naval Court of Inquiry due to Revere's possible affair with his wife, Octavia "Rosa" Sawkins. For example, in 2021, Sawkins's 1869 research was used by wildlife ecologist Dr. Susan Koenig to persuade NEPA to protect the Jamaican Cockpit Country from bauxite mining.

In 2011, Nicholas Mirzoeff stated that "Sawkins's careful anthropological style...concentrated on observation rather than moral commentary." The Honolulu Museum of Art, Mission House Museum (Honolulu, Hawaii) and the National Library of Australia (Canberra) are among the public collections holding works by James Gay Sawkins.

Personal life Sawkins was born in 1806 in Southampton, England. He was a native of Yeovil, a town in Somerset, England. At the age of 14, he moved to Baltimore, Maryland, with his family, The couple had two daughters. Despite the belief that his wife died some time before 1849, Nevertheless, this marriage would later complicate his allegations against Revere.

Some time before 1849, Sawkins married Octavia "Rosa" Sawkins, a British teacher from Nassau, New Providence. The couple exhibited unusual behavior which bordered on psychological abuse. Gold rush hopeful Andrew S. Church described his candid 1849 observation of the Sawkins couple in his 1901 Memoirs:

Career

Illustrations From 1830 to 1835, Sawkins lived in Mexico, earning his wealth as a painter while researching mineral resources of the country.

In 1847, Sawkins taught art lessons and sold portraits and Mexican landscapes in Charlotte Amalie, the capital city of the island of St. Thomas. According to visual theorist Nicholas Mirzoeff, Sawkins's artworks inspired Camille Pissarro, a French painter born in St. Thomas. During this time, he created a portrait of Tongatapu "Queen Charlotte", a.k.a. Sālote Lupepauʻu.

In 1857, the Colonial Office in London set up the West Indian Geological Survey, a geology research team. The first area of interest was the island of Trinidad. The Director of the group was George Parks Wall, assisted by James Gay Sawkins, an American working as a copper miner in Jamaica. Wall resigned in 1859 following the completion of the Trinidad research. Sawkins must still have been interested, as he signed up for the next archaeological survey: Jamaica. The group would be led by 22-year-old English geologist Lucas Barrett. The results were not satisfactory to British geologist Roderick Murchison. As a result, Murchison refused to elect the leader of the next survey, which indirectly meant he would not promote Sawkins. Paleontologist Stephen Donovan claims, "It is perhaps inevitable that Sawkins should feel some disappointment, a sense of frustration, perhaps bitterness against the authorities who had failed to promote him, and had put a very young man [Lucas Barrett] over him." In 1871, he published Geological Observations of British Guiana (today known as Guyana) in the Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society of London. in Turnham Green in London, England. A brief biography was published in the Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society of London as well as Frank Cundall's 1914 Catalogue of the Portraits in the Jamaica History Gallery of the Institute of Jamaica. '' Cundall stated,[Sawkins] spent nearly fifty years wandering over the face of the earth and will be remembered for his "Reports on the Geology of Jamaica," published in 1869...The mineralogical specimens which he collected are in the museum of the Institute of Jamaica.

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