[BERENGER, Jean-Pierre]

Le Cook de la Jeunesse...

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n.p. Paris, 1808. Two volumes, duodecimo, the three folding engraved plates after John Webber unusually crisp; the second volume slightly taller (as always), a fine set in the original orange paper wrappers, a little dusted and rubbed. A very handsome copy of this charming and popular French account of various voyages for children. As the title suggests, much of the material here is taken directly from the voyages of Captain Cook. The three folding engraved plates, all after Webber, respectively depict a Maori war canoe, a walrus hunt and a Tahitian human sacrifice: each are unusually crisp in this copy.

There were a number of juvenile editions based on Jean-Pierre Bérenger's popular collections of voyage accounts which first appeared in 1780. Bérenger was a Swiss polymath; politically active, he was exiled from Geneva and spent much of his adult life in Lausanne. He wrote several important books on geography and the voyages to the Pacific. This Paris edition is largely devoted to the voyages of Cook and has chapters describing Tahiti, New Zealand, Unalaska, and the Sandwich Islands, followed by an abridged life of the navigator. Forbes notes that the second volume of this work includes a lengthy section, some fifty pages, devoted to Hawaii.

No copy of this version is recorded by Forbes in Hawaiian National Bibliography, though its existence is noted in the entries for two Avignon editions (370 & 495).
Beddie, 70; Muir, 669; not in Ferguson.

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