Daddy Urquhart [and] Jack Miller / The White Booby caught at the Cape of Good Hope

One side of this sheet features a watercolour of two men playing backgammon on board the ‘Queen’, 90 guns. They are identified in the inscriptions as ‘Daddy Urquhart’ (on the left) and ‘Jack Miller’ (on the right), referring to Master John Urquhart and Lieutenant John Miller. The former joined the ‘Queen’ on 17 June 1794 after the ship’s previous Master, William Mitchell, was killed at the Battle of the Glorious First of June. The latter served in the ship from December 1792 until December 1796, starting at sixth lieutenant and later rising to fifth lieutenant. Dialogue between the two men is inscribed on the image. Urquhart says ‘Hoot Mon!’. ‘Hoot’ was a Scots language exclamation, usually used to express annoyance, disgust or incredulity; ‘mon’ is a Scots dialect variation of ‘man’. Miller responds with the exclamation ‘Sink a Dutchman’. There are bottles and glasses on the table between them. One of the bottles is inscribed ‘Cold Cally’. The drawing is the work of naval officer Aiskew Paffard Hollis (1764–1844), who served alongside Urquhart and Miller in the ‘Queen’. On the other side of the sheet is a graphite sketch of a bird’s head, inscribed “The White Booby caught at the Cape of Good Hope”. The species depicted may be a Cape gannet (Morus capensis). This drawing was probably made between 1796 and 1798, when Hollis was serving at the Cape of Good Hope, initially in the ‘Chichester’ and later in the ‘Tremendous’. For other examples of Hollis’s work, see PAH4885 and ZBB0352–84.