SPARRMAN, Anders

Voyage au Cap de Bonne-Espérance...

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chez Buisson, Paris, 1787. Two volumes, quarto, with a folding map and 16 engraved plates, some folding; a good copy in contemporary mottled calf. Cook's second voyage and travels in South Africa, by the famous Swedish naturalist. This is the first edition in French, the most profusely illustrated of the early editions of the book. This is an example of the quarto version (an octavo version appeared simultaneously).

Sparrman, professor of zoology at Uppsala University, was in South Africa when Cook's second voyage called there in 1772; Forster engaged him to accompany the expedition as assistant naturalist. Though much of his book is a narrative of travels in Africa with emphasis on its flora and fauna (and a remarkable series of plates on termites and their habitations), he includes an interesting account of his voyage with Cook in the first volume - as Hocken notes, 'Hairbreadth escape from collision of the two ships, not mentioned elsewhere. Shocking details as to the food on board. Described the plants which Georg Forster drew... Both interesting and amusing...'.

Sparrman published an expanded Swedish version of his account of the voyage in 1802 (with a second volume in 1818), but this account in its various versions was the only eighteenth-century text by this member of the second voyage.
Beddie, 1279; Kroepelien, 1223; Mendelssohn, p. 361; not in Hill.

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• bookseller: Hordern House (AUSTRALIA)