COOK, James (narrative comp. from Cook's journals & those of his officers; maps John Tallis, engr. John Rapkin; additional map W. Hughes). The Three Voyages of Captain Cook Round the World. London: London Printing & Publishing Company, [1860]. 2 vols.

Quarto. Both volumes bound in contemporary half tan calf and marbled paper boards. Edges marbled. Vol. I: frontispiece, title, xx, [xxxii], 596 pp; Vol. II: frontispiece, xi, [xxvi], 556 pp. Numerous steel-engraved plates, portraits, and illustrations throughout, drawn from the original expedition artists and other artists of note; portraits of Cook and Sir Joseph Banks. Thirteen maps in total, including a suite of Tallis atlas maps of Australia and the Australian colonies, many bearing the London Printing and Publishing Company's own imprint, together with an apparently unrecorded 1842 map of Australia by W. Hughes, depicting Western Australia, South Australia, Australia Felix, Van Diemen's Land, and New South Wales as separately delineated colonies. Second edition.

Captain James Cook (1728–1779) undertook, across three voyages between 1768 and his death in Hawaii in 1779, the most consequential programme of Pacific exploration in the history of European navigation. The first voyage (1768–71), ostensibly mounted to observe the transit of Venus from Tahiti on behalf of the Royal Society, carried secret Admiralty orders to search for the fabled southern continent, Terra Australis Incognita — a search that led Cook to the first European charting of New Zealand's coastline and to landfall on the eastern coast of Australia at Botany Bay in April 1770, followed by a survey northward along the Great Barrier Reef during which the Endeavour nearly foundered. The second voyage (1772–75), in the Resolution and Adventure, definitively established that no habitable southern continent existed, made Cook the first navigator to cross the Antarctic Circle, and produced an enormous body of new information about the peoples and islands of the Pacific. The third voyage (1776–80), undertaken in search of the Northwest Passage, carried Cook through Tahiti, along the Alaskan coast and into the Bering Strait, and finally to Hawaii, where he was killed in a violent confrontation with islanders in February 1779 — an event that shocked the British public and cemented Cook's status as both a supreme navigator and something approaching a tragic national hero.

This mid-Victorian compiled edition of Cook's three voyages, issued by the London Printing & Publishing Company around 1860, belongs to a long tradition of popular nineteenth-century digests that made the official Admiralty accounts — originally published in expensive multi-volume quarto sets with atlas volumes far beyond the means of the ordinary reader — available to a much wider domestic audience. The narrative draws directly on Cook's own journals and those compiled by his accompanying officers and naturalists, condensed and illustrated for a general readership increasingly fascinated by the Pacific world Cook had opened to European knowledge.

The mapping in this edition carries its own considerable interest. John Tallis (1817–1876) was among the most celebrated cartographic publishers of the Victorian era, and his Illustrated Atlas of the World, first issued in 1849–51 to coincide with the Great Exhibition, is now recognised as among the last great decorative atlases produced in Britain — each map surrounded by elaborate engraved borders and vignettes depicting local peoples, flora, and fauna, engraved chiefly by John Rapkin. When Tallis's firm ceased independent operation around 1851, the London Printing & Publishing Company acquired the rights to his plates and continued issuing them, in many cases retaining the original Tallis imprint, into the 1860s — precisely the arrangement reflected in the maps of this volume, several of which bear the London Printing and Publishing Company's own imprint alongside Tallis's original decorative scheme. The additional 1842 map of Australia by W. Hughes, apparently unrecorded elsewhere, is a further point of cartographic interest, depicting the Australian colonies at a formative moment in their separate political development, before Queensland's separation from New South Wales and while Van Diemen's Land still carried its pre-1856 colonial name.

Near fine. Leather smooth, supple, and well preserved. Binding tight, with only very mild cocking to Volume II. Contents near fine, only mild age toning towards edges. Engravings, maps, and illustrations clear and well preserved throughout; colours bright.

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Catalogue Number: HH000059