WILSON, William

A Missionary Voyage to the Southern Pacific Ocean...

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T. Chapman, by T. Gillet London, 1799. Quarto, 13 maps and plates; tear to one fold of the largest map, some offsetting and marking especially to plates and a few spots as common for this issue, marginal repairs to title-page; a good copy attractively bound in mottled calf antique, spine label. An attractive copy of the Chapman edition of the Duff voyage. This is the second edition of this account, published the same year as the Gosnell edition: both editions were set up by the same printer, but were distinct (the two works, for example, have different lists of subscribers). A preliminary census would suggest that this is, however, the scarcer of the two contemporary editions.

This is the full official account of the first missionary voyage to the South Pacific. The Duff set out for Tahiti in 1796, but visited many island groups, including particularly Tonga and the Marquesas. A new group of islands, the "Duff Group", was discovered among the Santa Cruz Islands. The maps here include a large chart of the Fiji Islands as well as charts of Tongataboo, the Gambier Islands, the Marquesas, Tahiti and the Duff Group; the plates include an engraved view of Rio de Janeiro.

Wilson is identified as the author of the main body of the work in the Advertisement, which explains that he put it together from the captain's papers as well as his own, and from the missionaries' reports. The Hill catalogue notes that 'the long "preliminary discourse" was anonymously written by Samuel Greatheed, using the then-unpublished narrative of James Morrison, one of the pardoned Bounty mutineers. Morrison's manuscript was also the source for the extensive appendix on Tahiti. Indeed, William Wilson and James Morrison may be called co-authors of this book...'.

According to the map expert Dorothy F. Prescott, 'the Wilson book contained a map that actually used the words "Greater Australia" - taking in Captain Cook's map of the south and east coasts of Van Diemens Land... this map would have influenced Matthew Flinders...'. Flinders is traditionally said to have been the first to use the term "Australia" in a voyage context: the Duff account appeared about fifteen years earlier.

There is much of Australian interest in the account of the voyage including a mention of escaped Botany Bay convicts, and the flight of several missionaries from Tonga, where three were killed, to Sydney. Some of the missionaries made their homes in Sydney and founded families later to become important in Australian history.
Ferguson, 302; Hill, 1895; Kroepelien, 529; O'Reilly-Reitman, 675; Sabin , 49480; Spence, 'Bligh', p.26.

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