Edited and revised by john campbell (1 Ergebnisse)

Two volumes, large thick folio, with altogether 61 engraved maps and plates (several folding) by or after Emmanuel Bowen; a fine copy in contemporary calf. A splendid copy of this substantial and significant work in the history of exploration literature, a comprehensive compilation of accounts from numerous explorers and travellers. Harris's great collection first appeared in 1705, but it was John Campbell's extensive revision for the second and third editions that transformed it into the foremost English compendium of voyages before Cook. Campbell's editorial achievement lay not merely in enlarging Harris's original compilation but in reshaping it into the standard English survey of global exploration at a time when British interest in the Pacific was rapidly increasing. His own comments reveal how strongly he advocated renewed southern exploration, recommending an expedition to Van Diemen's Land and a voyage to New Guinea so that "all the back coast of New Holland, and New Guiney, might be thoroughly examined; and we might know as well, and as certainly, as the Dutch, how far a Colony settled there might answer our Expectations" (quoted by Williams and Frost, Terra Australis to Australia, 1988). He concluded with the striking prediction that "Whoever perfectly discovers and settles [the southern land] will become infallibly possessed of territories as rich and fruitful and as capable of improvement as any that have hitherto been found." Campbell incorporated accounts of the many expeditions undertaken or published since the appearance of the first edition, particularly those relating to the Pacific and the Southern Hemisphere, and commissioned Emmanuel Bowen to prepare a new series of maps. Foremost among them is the Complete Map of the Southern Continent surveyed by Capt. Abel Tasman, one of the earliest English maps devoted to Australia and a landmark in the transmission of Tasman's discoveries to an English readership. The present copy, a third edition, is one of the two preferred early issues of the book, with the complete complement of maps, including the important Bowen/Tasman map. Alongside world maps and Dampier's chart of the Roebuck voyage, Bowen's adaptation of Tasman's original chart is accompanied by two remarkable printed notes discussing Quirós' voyage and the prospects for colonising the Southern Continent. The collection assembles many of the principal narratives relating to Australia and the Pacific, including Quirós, Pelsaert, Tasman, Narborough, Magellan, Drake, Funnell, Woodes Rogers, Cavendish, Cowley, Dampier, Anson and Roggeveen, making it one of the most important eighteenth-century English collections of Pacific exploration. .…