Lot 60. PARKINSON, Sydney.

Large paper copy of one of the principal visual accounts of Cook’s First Voyage, by ‘the first European artist to set foot on Australian soil, to draw an authentic Australian landscape, and to portray Aboriginals from direct observation’ (ADB). Parkinson joined Cook’s expedition as natural history draughtsman at the behest of Sir Joseph Banks, and ‘with great diligence and flair … made at least 1300 drawings, many more than Banks had expected’, which also included some of the earliest European views of the South Pacific. His valuable observations include the first published use of the word ‘kangaroo’ (as ‘kangooroo’, p149), and his vocabularies of South Sea languages cover the ‘languages of Otaheite, New Zealand, New Holland, Savoo, and Sumatra … the Malayan language spoken at Batavia, called the low Malay, and the language of Anjenga on the coast of Malabar, called the high or proper Malay’ (Hill). After exploring Tahiti, New Zealand, Australia, and the Great Barrier Reef, the expedition reached Batavia, where Parkinson contracted malaria and dysentery, dying shortly after the departure for the Cape of Good Hope.

First edition. Royal 4to (35 x 27 cms), xxiii, 212, [ii] pp., engraved frontispiece portraits, 27 engraved plates; light offsetting from plates; contemporary calf, rebacked, red morocco label to spine; scuffing to covers, nonetheless an excellent copy.

[Beddie, 712; Hill, 1309; Hocken, 12-13; Holmes, 7; Howgego I, C173; NMM I, 564; Sabin, 58787; Spence, 652.]

Milton, Peterborough, book label; sometime in the stock of Beeleigh Abbey.