A Voyage of Discovery and Research in the Southern and Antarctic Regions, during the years 1839-43
London, John Murray, 1847 [first issue, with the January 1847 publisher's catalogue].
Octavo, two volumes, lii, [ii] (list of plates and maps, verso blank), 366 pages plus 7 vignettes (on 10 unnumbered chapter fly-title leaves), 5 tinted lithographs (one of them a four-panel panorama), and 6 maps (2 of them folding, including a long chart of Wilkes' discoveries); and [v]-x, [ii] (list of plates and maps, verso blank), 448, 16 (publisher's catalogue, dated January 1847) pages with a vignette on page 387 (and an unlisted illustration on page 401) plus 10 vignettes (on 13 unnumbered chapter fly-title leaves), 3 tinted lithographs, and 2 maps (including the large folding 'South Polar Chart shewing the Discoveries and Track of HMS Erebus and Terror during the years 1840,1,2,3').
Original gilt-pictorial and blind-decorated blue cloth (possibly recased at an early date, with endpapers replaced and edges trimmed and lightly speckled); cloth lightly marked, rubbed, and with very light wear to the head of the spines (the latter a little sunned, a problem endemic to the cloth, according to Rosove); tidemarks to three plates in the first volume (barely noticeable from the image side on two of them, and affecting only the bottom margin clear of the image on the panorama); a very crisp and attractive set.
Rosove 276 (not noting the unlisted illustration): 'a cornerstone of the Antarctic literature and a monument to one of mankind's greatest expeditions of geographical and scientific exploration'; Taurus Collection 9; Renard 1328. The expedition was 'the first to enter what is known today as the Ross Sea, the first to sight the Admiralty Mountains, the first to see Victoria Land, Ross Island, Mounts Erebus and Terror, and the Ross Ice Shelf, amongst other momentous discoveries' (The 'Taurus' Collection).
Item #102934
Sold