Sold for $16,250

3 volumes, 4to (307 x 251 mm). 52 engraved plates, maps and charts (42 folding), including the large folding map of the Straits of Magellan. (A few minor spots or browning, some light offsetting of text to plates.) Original blue paper-covered boards, uncut and partially unopened (spines reinforced with blue-gray cloth); red cloth slipcase.

 

FIRST EDITION, FIRST ISSUE, IN ORIGINAL BOARDS OF COOK’S FIRST VOYAGE, with the map of the “Streights of Magellan” and the direction for placing the cuts and charts. “Cook earned his place in history by opening up the Pacific to western civilization and by the foundation of British Australia. The world was given for the first time an essentially complete knowledge of the Pacific Ocean and Australia, and Cook proved once and for all that there was no great southern continent, as had always been believed.  He also suggested the existence of Antarctic land in the southern ice ring, a fact which was not proved until the explorations of the nineteenth century” (PMM). Volume I contains the voyages of Byron, Carteret and Wallis, and describes the discovery of Tahiti; volumes II-III contain Hawkesworth’s edited account of Lieutenant Cook’s voyage (he was only promoted to Captain on his return). Cook's instructions for this first voyage were to observe the transit of Venus from Tahiti and to carry on John Byron's survey and examination of the seas between Cape Horn and New Holland, but they did not extend to searching for Terra Australis. He did, however, add more than 5,000 miles of coastline to Admiralty charts for Tahiti, Australia and the Great Barrier Reef, and New Zealand, which he circumnavigated. Hill 783; PMM 223; Sabin 30934.