Rennell, JAMES

Rennell, JAMES, geographer, was born near Chudleigh, in Devonshire, 3d December 1742, and served first in the navy and then as an officer of engineers in the East India Company's army, rising to be major. As surveyor-general of Bengal he prepared a Chart of the Banks and Currents at the Lagulhas (1778); and, having retired (1782), he wrote various works on India, including Memoirs of a Map of Hindustan (1783). In 1788 he was elected an F.R.S., in 1792 published a Memoir of the Geography of Africa, and in 1798 he aided Mungo Park in the arrangement of his travels, illustrating them by a map. Perhaps his most famous work was his Geographical System of Herodotus Examined and Explained (1800). In 1814 appeared his Topography of the Plain of Troy, and in 1816 Illustrations of the Expedition of Cyprus. After his death—at London on the 29th March 1830—there were published An Investigation of the Atlantic Currents and those between the Atlantic and Indian Oceans (1832) and The Comparative Geography of Western Asia (1831). See the monograph on him by Clements Markham (1895).