THE descendants of a lowly servant from Victorian Britain are being sought to share the proceeds from a rare art collection worth up to £5 million.

Some 138 years after James Cullen Colquhoun died penniless in San Francisco, having failed to make his fortune in the New World, it seems that his legacy will finally have a happy ending.

Simon Carey, owner of arguably the world’s finest collection of North American Indian artefacts, is offering up to “tens of thousands of pounds” to anybody who can prove that they are descended from Mr Colquhoun, who travelled to British Columbia with his great-grandfather in the 1850s.

Mr Carey, 77, great-grandson of the Rev Robert Dundas, is expected to make up to $10 million (£5.3 million) when the Dundas Collection is auctioned at Sotheby’s in New York in October. Boasting more than 80 artefacts, it was acquired by Dundas during his time as a clergyman in Canada.

It has been heralded as the world’s finest private collection of American Indian artefacts, with several items described by Sotheby’s as masterpieces.

But in an extraordinary gesture, Mr Carey said yesterday that he wanted to “honour” Colquhoun’s memory as a loyal family servant by giving money to his descendants. He said that Colquhoun was held in great fondness when he worked in the Dundas household in Edinburgh in the mid-19th century.

He told The Times: “It would be wonderful if we were able to find relatives of James Cullen Colquhoun. They were devoted family servants. I have been trying to find what happened to him. If there were any direct descendants I would love to give money to them.”

He added: “I would rather keep the amount vague. I think £5,000 would be a bit mean, but perhaps we could offer tens of thousands of pounds.”

Mr Carey’s appeal is likely to elicit a flurry of claims from across Britain, the US and Canada. There are hundreds of Colquhouns in Britain, with 83 listed in the Edinburgh area alone and several dozen more in London and the South East.

Official records show that by the late 19th century there were at least seven Colquhouns in San Francisco, including a Robert Dundas Colquhoun, born in British Columbia in 1860. Some 34 Colquhouns are listed as living in California.

In early 1859 James Cullen Colquhoun quit his job in the Edinburgh household of William Pitt Dundas, the Registrar-General for Scotland and Robert Dundas’s father, and travelled to Canada. He worked in a gold mine in the Fraser Valley, British Columbia, before setting up a guesthouse with his wife on Vancouver Island.

When the venture collapsed Dundas, who also went to Canada in 1859, helped Colquhoun to find a series of jobs before he moved to San Francisco.

While Colquhoun’s career appeared on an unstoppable downward spiral, in October 1863 Dundas embarked on a trip that was to secure his own legacy. He travelled to Metlakatla, a Christian settlement of Tsimshian Indian converts near Prince Rupert, where he bought more than 80 artefacts from his friend, Edmund Verney, a British naval officer. “I was anxious to obtain some of the medicine men’s implements and tools, and succeeded in getting some small ictas (things),” he wrote.

It was customary for Indian converts to renounce their old beliefs by giving their sacred possessions to missionaries. Dundas’s artefacts are believed to have come from a local chief whom, he said, “had to give up everything by his conversion to Christianity . . . forsaking all things to follow Christ”.

The items included a highly unusual North West Coast shaman’s mask, expected to sell at Sotheby’s for more than £500,000, and several elaborately decorated “slave killer” clubs, apparently used to bludgeon to death human sacrifices, tipped to fetch as much as £800,000. It also included a finely carved “clan hat” in the shape of a crouching frog and a shaman’s mask, which is expected to sell for up to £300,000.

After Dundas’s death in 1904, the artefacts languished in a box in the Dundas family house outside Edinburgh. They were passed to Mr Carey in 1948, when he rescued them from being thrown away by his mother. Until recently they were displayed in his house in Hampstead, North London, but are now in storage.

The sale is likely to provoke fierce opposition from native Americans, who say that such collections should be handed back to their communities.

Mr Carey has tried in vain to find a museum prepared to buy the collection but says he has been thwarted by bureaucracy. “We’re hoping one might finally be prepared to make a decision now that time is running out,” he said.

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