Title: A Two Years Cruise off Tierra del Fuego, the...
Publisher: London, Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans, & Roberts.
Publication Date: 1857
Binding: Hardcover
Book Condition: Fair
Edition: 1st Edition
Complete FIRST EDITION in TWO VOLUMES. Volume one: xv, [1], 376 printed pages, with 3 coloured plates (all colour plates after drawings by Snow) and 2 folding maps. Volume two: viii, 368, with 3 coloured plates and a folding map. Historic staining on first and last leaves and on the plates, mainly on the margins. 13 x 20 cm. Contemporary full green calf, with spines in gilt hand-tooled compartments, raised bands; the titles and volume numbers in gilt on red and brown matching morocco labels. Marbled endpapers and all edges marbled. Spines slightly rubbed with some wear to the foot of volume one. Upper hinge of volume two split and weak but still attached. Covers with twin gilt fillet borders (stained and rubbing to corners and edges). First edition, with attractive coloured lithographed plates after drawings by the author. William Parker Snow (1817 1895) led an extraordinary life, living wild in the Australian bush, saving a man from a shark attack off the coast of Africa, serving as an editor and transcriber to Thomas Babington Macaulay, and searching for Sir John Franklin aboard the ketch, Prince Albert (In 1850, Snow was working as a writer in New York when he claimed to have had a paranormal vision of the whereabouts of the missing Arctic expedition of Sir John Franklin. He immediately wrote to Lady Jane Franklin with a plan for a search. Consequently, she made him the civil officer of her expedition). In 1854 Snow went to Patagonia in command of the South American Missionary Society's vessel Allen Gardiner, and for two years carried missionaries between Tierra del Fuego, the Falkland Islands, and stations on the mainland. This service ended in a disagreement between him and George Pakenham, the superintending missionary at the Falkland Islands, who deposed Snow from his command for disobedience, and left him and his wife to find their own way to England. On his arrival Snow published A Two Years Cruise, which had some success, but he spent the proceeds on an unsuccessful legal action against the missionary society. He correctly predicted that the society's method of operation would result in a massacre by the natives. Hill, p. 1599; Sabin 85559. Seller Inventory # 5142