An Historical Account Of All The Voyages Round The World, Performed By English Navigators; Including Those Lately Undertaken By Order of his Present Majesty. The Whole Faithfully Extracted from the Journals of the Voyagers. Drake ... Cavendish ...
Cowley ... Dampier ... Cooke ... Rogers ... Clipperton and Shelvocke ... Anson ... Byron ... Wallis ... Carteret ... And Cook, 1768 - 1771, Together With That of Sydney Parkinson, Draftsman to Joseph Banks, Esq; who circumnavigated the Globe with Capt. Cook, in his Majesty’s Ship the Endeavor. And The Voyage of Mons. Bougainville round the World, Performed by Order of the French King. Illustrated with Maps, Charts, and Historical Prints. In Four Volumes. To which is added, An Appendix. Containing the Journal of a Voyage to the North Pole, by the Hon. Commodore Phipps, and Captain Lutwidge ... London: Printed for F. Newbery, the Corner of St. Paul’s Church-yard. MDCCLXXXIV [1774].
This is a complete set of the first edition. It was edited by David Henry for Newbery and published between 1773 and 1774, and all four volumes are present to make this a first edition set. Henry originally produced four volumes describing these great voyages of discovery, then added a fifth in 1775 and a sixth in 1786, and usually just the first four volumes are counted to be considered a set. (See WorldCat.)
The four volumes have seven raised bands, instead of the usual five, with burgundy and black labels with gilt titles, brown boards, and the bookplate of Edward John Mitton on the blank endpapers. There are maps and charts and numerous engravings, and Volume One has a fifty-page introduction, a five-page list of subscribers, a leaf with directions to the binder, a frontis of Sir Francis Drake, and 480 pages of text. Volume Two has 440 pages of text, Volume Three has 470 pages of text and a fold-out chart of the track of the Dolphin, the Tamar, Swallow, and the Endeavor through the South Seas, along with a fold-out chart of the Strait of Magellan, and Volume Four is 486 pages long: the first part of Volume Four is about Captain Cook’s voyage around the world in 1768, 1769, 1779, and 1771, including two pages of Vocabulary of the language of the inhabitants of New Holland and two pages showing Specimens of the language of the inhabitants of the island of Savu; that is followed by an Account of Bougainville’s Voyage Round the World, including two pages of Vocabulary of the Language of Taiti Island, and the last part of Volume Four is about the journal of Commodore Phipps
and Captain Ludwidge when they ventured towards the North Pole - their voyage was undertaken to discover a North-East passage to China and Japan, according to the introduction for this part of Volume Four, with maps of Spitsbergen and New Greenland and a map for what they thought was the North-East passage to China and Japan - and strangely enough, Volumes One and Two are dated 1774 and Volumes Three and Four are dated 1773 - we don’t know why they are dated like that, but they are.
We’ve only seen one set like this offered for sale, but it had just three of the four books in the set; Christie’s sold a similar set at auction in 2012 for over £8000, but that set also had one of the additional two volumes that were published by Henry later on, and we haven’t seen any other offerings for this elusive title. It is just difficult to find this particular set with all four books present.
All four volumes are 8vo. and measure 8 1/4 x 5 1/8 in. wide, and they show age wear on the boards and the spines, the first volume has a loose binding and the rest are relatively secure. The plates and text are surprisingly clean, and the maps are in great shape.
This is a rare and historically important set, with maps and engravings and content that describe the voyages of some of England’s greatest explorers, and the set is just hard to come by.