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[FIRST VOYAGE.] John HAWKESWORTH (1715-1773). An Account of the Voyages undertaken by the order of His Present Majesty for making Discoveries in the Southern Hemisphere, and successively performed by Commodore Byron, Captain Wallis, Captain Carteret and Captain Cook, in the Dolphin, the Swallow, and the Endeavour; drawn up From the Journals which were kept by several Commanders, And from the papers of Joseph Banks. London: W. Strahan and T. Cadell, 1773.
Details
[FLINDERS, Matthew (1774-1814)] – [COOK, James (1728-1779).]
[FIRST VOYAGE.] John HAWKESWORTH (1715-1773). An Account of the Voyages undertaken by the order of His Present Majesty for making Discoveries in the Southern Hemisphere, and successively performed by Commodore Byron, Captain Wallis, Captain Carteret and Captain Cook, in the Dolphin, the Swallow, and the Endeavour; drawn up From the Journals which were kept by several Commanders, And from the papers of Joseph Banks. London: W. Strahan and T. Cadell, 1773.
Matthew Flinders’s copy of Cook’s First Voyage, almost certainly taken with him aboard HMS Investigator on the first circumnavigation of Australia. With autograph annotations by Flinders correcting Cook’s geographical descriptions and providing a 17-word dictionary of the language spoken by native inhabitants.
As Flinders explains in his Voyage to Terra Australis (1814), ‘this voyage of captain Cook, whether considered in the extent of his discoveries and the accuracy with which they were traced, or in the labours of his scientific associates, far surpassed all that had gone before’ (VTA, p.lxxxii). However, he also explains the necessity of revisions to Cook’s geographical observations:
‘Time keepers were in their infancy in 1768, when captain Cook sailed upon his first voyage, and he was not then furnished with them; his longitude was therefore regulated only by occasional observations of lunar distances and some few of Jupiter's satellites […] Errors of greater or less magnitude were thence unavoidable’ (VTA, vol. I, p.vii).
It is therefore no surprise that the vast majority of Flinders’s autograph annotations in this volume are corrections to Cook’s published co-ordinates. The revisions occur on 50pp. in total across the three volumes, with the vast majority being found in volume III in which Cook describes the coasts of present-day New South Wales and Queensland. Further annotations occur on a folding chart of New Guinea and beside Cook’s description of a bird’s nest of ‘a most enormous size’, an example of which Flinders also discovered and which he proposes must belong to a bird ‘little inferior to the condor of the Andes’ (VTA, vol. I, p.64). An extraordinary annotation beside Cook’s table of the native vocabulary of New Holland lists an additional 17 words spoken by inhabitants of King George’s Sound and Port Jackson. Several of these terms, but not all of them, were incorporated into a table of native vocabulary published in his Voyage to Terra Australis, though some were printed with small differences in spelling.
This edition is the second and best edition of Cook's First Voyage 1768-1771, with the map of the Straits of Magellan, not generally issued with the first edition of the same year. Volume I contains the voyages of Byron, Carteret and Wallis, with the discovery of Tahiti, and volumes II-III contain Hawkesworth's edited account of Lieutenant Cook's voyage (he was only promoted to Captain on his return). It seems entirely likely that this set was one of the ‘books of voyages to the South Seas’ which furnished Flinders’s cabin aboard HMS Investigator, alongside the Encyclopaedia Britannica given to him by Sir Joseph Banks (see lot 102). Beddie 650; Hill 783.
3 volumes, quarto (295 x 228 mm). 50 engraved plates, maps and charts (of 52, lacking charts facing p.39 in vol. II and p.77 in vol. III), including the large folding map of the Straits of Magellan (occasional faint dampstaining, a few minor tears along plate folds, pencil marks on title of vol.i). Contemporary speckled calf, spines gilt (somewhat rubbed, vol. III with split along spine also affecting textblock internally, head-and tailcaps defective). Provenance: Matthew Flinders (1774-1814; pencil annotations in all volumes) – by descent to the present owners.
[FIRST VOYAGE.] John HAWKESWORTH (1715-1773). An Account of the Voyages undertaken by the order of His Present Majesty for making Discoveries in the Southern Hemisphere, and successively performed by Commodore Byron, Captain Wallis, Captain Carteret and Captain Cook, in the Dolphin, the Swallow, and the Endeavour; drawn up From the Journals which were kept by several Commanders, And from the papers of Joseph Banks. London: W. Strahan and T. Cadell, 1773.
Matthew Flinders’s copy of Cook’s First Voyage, almost certainly taken with him aboard HMS Investigator on the first circumnavigation of Australia. With autograph annotations by Flinders correcting Cook’s geographical descriptions and providing a 17-word dictionary of the language spoken by native inhabitants.
As Flinders explains in his Voyage to Terra Australis (1814), ‘this voyage of captain Cook, whether considered in the extent of his discoveries and the accuracy with which they were traced, or in the labours of his scientific associates, far surpassed all that had gone before’ (VTA, p.lxxxii). However, he also explains the necessity of revisions to Cook’s geographical observations:
‘Time keepers were in their infancy in 1768, when captain Cook sailed upon his first voyage, and he was not then furnished with them; his longitude was therefore regulated only by occasional observations of lunar distances and some few of Jupiter's satellites […] Errors of greater or less magnitude were thence unavoidable’ (VTA, vol. I, p.vii).
It is therefore no surprise that the vast majority of Flinders’s autograph annotations in this volume are corrections to Cook’s published co-ordinates. The revisions occur on 50pp. in total across the three volumes, with the vast majority being found in volume III in which Cook describes the coasts of present-day New South Wales and Queensland. Further annotations occur on a folding chart of New Guinea and beside Cook’s description of a bird’s nest of ‘a most enormous size’, an example of which Flinders also discovered and which he proposes must belong to a bird ‘little inferior to the condor of the Andes’ (VTA, vol. I, p.64). An extraordinary annotation beside Cook’s table of the native vocabulary of New Holland lists an additional 17 words spoken by inhabitants of King George’s Sound and Port Jackson. Several of these terms, but not all of them, were incorporated into a table of native vocabulary published in his Voyage to Terra Australis, though some were printed with small differences in spelling.
This edition is the second and best edition of Cook's First Voyage 1768-1771, with the map of the Straits of Magellan, not generally issued with the first edition of the same year. Volume I contains the voyages of Byron, Carteret and Wallis, with the discovery of Tahiti, and volumes II-III contain Hawkesworth's edited account of Lieutenant Cook's voyage (he was only promoted to Captain on his return). It seems entirely likely that this set was one of the ‘books of voyages to the South Seas’ which furnished Flinders’s cabin aboard HMS Investigator, alongside the Encyclopaedia Britannica given to him by Sir Joseph Banks (see lot 102). Beddie 650; Hill 783.
3 volumes, quarto (295 x 228 mm). 50 engraved plates, maps and charts (of 52, lacking charts facing p.39 in vol. II and p.77 in vol. III), including the large folding map of the Straits of Magellan (occasional faint dampstaining, a few minor tears along plate folds, pencil marks on title of vol.i). Contemporary speckled calf, spines gilt (somewhat rubbed, vol. III with split along spine also affecting textblock internally, head-and tailcaps defective). Provenance: Matthew Flinders (1774-1814; pencil annotations in all volumes) – by descent to the present owners.
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