Page 5 - St Giles Catesby booklet MC StG 20210723 e-flip_Neat

Mark Catesby

Mark Catesby's fame rests on his masterpiece, the monumental
book The natural history of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama islands
that he published between 1729 and 1747 and illustrated with 220

hand-coloured plates depicting mainly plants and animals that he
encountered in North America. During those years, he lived and

worked within the parish of St Giles' Cripplegate.
Mark grew up in the east of England. His mother's family

lived in the Essex village of Castle Hedingham, while his father
owned property in, and was mayor of the Suffolk town of

Sudbury, about eight miles to the east. Mark was baptized in St
Nicholas Parish Church, Castle Hedingham, on 30 March 1683

and so it is very probable he was also born there. Very little else is
known about Mark's childhood – we do not know where he went

to school but he seems not to have attended university.
In 1712, Mark accompanied his married sister, Mrs

Elizabeth Cocke, and two of her children, to Williamsburg in
Virginia where her husband Dr William Cocke was living. Catesby

remained thereabouts for around seven years, returning to
England in 1719. Three years later, he went back to North
America, this time to Carolina, sponsored by a dozen eminent

gentlemen, many of them Fellows of the Royal Society of

London and including the Royal Governor of Carolina, Francis
Nicholson. Catesby's intention was to search for animals that he
could illustrate, as well as for plants that he could send to Britain

for his patrons' gardens. His explorations ended in the Bahama
Islands in 1725, and he came home the next year. For more than

20 years he painstakingly transferred his beautiful paintings of
North American plants, birds, fishes and other animals on to

printing plates and once they were printed he himself coloured
each of the etchings by hand.