BARRINGTON, George

An Account of a Voyage to New South Wales.

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Jones, London, 1810. Octavo, portrait frontispiece and nine handcoloured plates, folding map (laid down); some browning and staining but an adequate copy in contemporary half calf. The second edition (first published 1803) of this substantial account of the voyage to New South Wales via the Cape of Good Hope, with incidents partly derived from Barrington's experience on the Third Fleet.

Transported to New South Wales on the Third Fleet of 1791, Barrington was already a legendary hero in England, a prince of rogues. The English public's continuing interest in New South Wales and the fate of the transported convicts encouraged the publishers' greed: they compiled information from various sources to satisfy a public starved of accounts of the new colony since the books by Tench and Hunter in 1793.

For better or worse, Barrington became the peg on which the less scrupulous London publishers hung their hats: how much if any of the extensive literature attributed to him was actually Barrington's work will always be a matter for conjecture, although it is generally accepted that his contribution was minimal if it even existed at all. But even if the whole "Barrington" canon is a concoction from other sources, the 80 entries in Ferguson demonstrate the great popularity that his accounts had with the contemporary reader. These early editions represent the form in which information about New South Wales and the voyage there reached those of the public who could not afford the expensive quartos published by members of the First Fleet.
Ferguson, 486; Garvey, 'George Barrington', AB48.

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