Description

Official account of Captain James Cook’s first voyage and the discovery of eastern Australia. Cook’s voyage occupies volumes 2 and 3; the first volume contains the official accounts of the voyages of Byron, Wallis and Carteret, with the result that Hawkesworth’s compendium contains the cream of eighteenth century English exploration. This second edition is generally preferred to the first as it is complete with the chart of the Strait of Magellan and the list of plates (missing in many copies of the first edition) and contains some extra material in the form of a new preface in which Hawkesworth replies to the charges of poor editing made against him by Dalrymple.

From the library of Sir Ashton Lever with his bookplate in each volume. Lever (1729-1788) was the great natural history collector whose private museum (known as the ‘Holuphusikon’, or more simply, the Leverian Museum) contained many shells collected on the Cook voyages, mostly purchased by him from the natural history dealer Humphrey. At the sixty five day sale of the Museum’s contents in 1806, some of these specimens collected in the Pacific brought spectacular prices. See S.P. Dance, (Leiden, 1986), pp. 77-79.