“Rhinoceros shot by the late Captain Speer in Assam, 1862.” From Kinloch, A.A.A., 1904. Indian rhinoceros shooting: pp. 59-66 in Aflalo, F.G The sportsman’s book for India. London, Horace Marshall and Son.
Captain Wilfred Dakin Speer (1835-1867) of Thames Dittion, was an officer in the 1st Middlesex Regiment in the United Kingdom. He had joined Charles Darwin (1809-1882) in 1858 on a petition regarding the administration of the natural history collection of the British Museum (Darwin et al. 1858). Speer went on an adventurous sporting exhibition from September 1859 to May 1862 to India, crossing the Himalayas into Tibet, returning “with a number of most interesting photographic views of the places he had visited” (Anon. 1870). He went on a second journey from November 1864 to June 1865.
A photograph “Rhinoceros shot by late Captain Speer in Assam, 1862” (fig. 1) was published in part 5 of the Sports of the World edited by Frederick George Aflalo (1870-1918) in January 1903 illustrating Kinloch (1903:164).
If the dates are correct, meaning that the photograph was taken in the first months of 1862, this photograph of a dead rhino in the wild is earlier than that attributed to Chapman in Botswana
