Rhino Power

‘22d June, 1664. One Tomson, a Jesuit, showed me

such a collection of rarities, sent from the Jesuits of

Japan and China to their Order at Paris, as a present to

be reserved in their repository, but brought to London

by the East India ships for them, as in my life I had

not seen. The chief things were, rhinoceros's horns;

glorious vests, wrought and embroidered on cloth of

gold, but with such lively colors, that for splendor and

vividness we have nothing in Europe that approaches it;

a girdle studded with agates and rubies of great value

and size; knives, of so keen an edge as one could not

touch them, nor was the metal of our color, but more

pale and livid; fans, like those our ladies use, but much

larger, and with long handles curiously carved and

filled with Chinese characters ; a sort of paper very broad,

thin, and fine, like abortive parchment, and exquisitely

polished, of an amber yellow, exceedingly glorious and

pretty to look on, and seeming to be like that which my

Lord Verulam describes in his Nova Atlantis…’

The rhino was a curiosity in the 17^th century, when John Evelyn penned his diary.  It was a better know beast in the 19th when Sir Walter Scott included it in “The Talisman”.

‘The Saracen came on at the speedy gallop of an Arab horseman, managing his steed more by his limbs and the inflection of his body than by any use of the reins, which hung loose in his left hand; so that he was enabled to wield the light, round buckler of the skin of the rhinoceros, ornamented with silver loops, which he wore on his arm, swinging it as if he meant to oppose its slender circle to the formidable thrust of the Western lance...’