Dr. Victoria Dickenson has written an essay, which you can read here, about the posthumous fate of René Gabriel de Rabié’s collection of natural history specimens and drawings from Saint Domingue.
After de Rabié’s death in 1785, his daughter engaged a specialist to inventory the collection, which included mineral specimens, shells, framed butterflies, and even a specimen of a three-toed sloth, among other items. Although the collection of physical objects has disappeared, the watercolour drawings made by de Rabié in Saint Domingue have been preserved and are now at McGill. De Rabié’s daughter tried, to no avail, to sell the drawings to the state in 1811. She or her son later had the collection bound into four albums, but it would be a century until they were acquired, through a British antiquarian bookseller, by Dr. Casey Wood for the Blacker Wood Library in 1930.
Hidden Hands in Colonial Natural Histories 