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Published by Golden Cockerel Press, London, 1944
Seller: Hordern House Rare Books, Surry Hills, NSW, Australia
First Edition
Folio, 218, [219, colophon] pp. With a folding map, 12 wood-engravings by Peter Barker-Mill. Original olive buckram, with gilt lettered & decorated brown leather title label on spine, upper board decorated in gilt, a very good copy as issued. First Edition in English, limited to 350 numbered copies on Arnold's mould-made paper. An eyewitness account of a three-year voyage with Captain Cook, previously unpublished in English. The first English translation of Sparrman's complete narrative of Cook's second voyage, which had originally been published in Sweden in 1802-1818. .
Published by chez Buisson, Paris, 1787
Seller: Hordern House Rare Books, Surry Hills, NSW, Australia
First Edition
Condition: Good copy. Two volumes, quarto, with a folding map and 16 engraved plates, some folding; contemporary mottled calf. Cook's second voyage and travels in South Africa, by the famous Swedish naturalist. This is the first edition in French, the most profusely illustrated of the early editions of the book. This is an example of the quarto version (an octavo version appeared simultaneously). Sparrman, professor of zoology at Uppsala University, was in South Africa when Cook's second voyage called there in 1772; Forster engaged him to accompany the expedition as assistant naturalist. Though much of his book is a narrative of travels in Africa with emphasis on its flora and fauna (and a remarkable series of plates on termites and their habitations), he includes an interesting account of his voyage with Cook in the first volume - as Hocken notes, 'Hairbreadth escape from collision of the two ships, not mentioned elsewhere. Shocking details as to the food on board. Described the plants which Georg Forster drew. Both interesting and amusing.'. Sparrman published an expanded Swedish version of his account of the voyage in 1802 (with a second volume in 1818), but this account in its various versions was the only eighteenth-century text by this member of the second voyage. .