Lot 64. PORTLOCK, Nathaniel.

Heavy-paper copy with coloured plates. Sent by the King George’s Sound Company in pursuit of the fur-trade on the northern Pacific coast of America, Nathaniel Portlock (and George Dixon (1748-1795), commanding the King George and her companion vessel the Queen Charlotte respectively, visited the Falkland Islands and Hawaii before surveying the American coast. The two captains, both veterans of Cook’s Third Voyage, supplemented Cook’s surveys of the area, these being the most significant results of their voyage. Portlock’s account of the voyage covers the geography, natural history, and ethnography of the region, and is the first work to establish the Queen Charlotte Islands as distinct from the American mainland. ‘This work is an early and important original source material, with many illustrations which enhance its value’ (Lada-Mocarski). Only the heavy-paper copies, such as the present, were issued with coloured ornithological plates.

First edition. Large 4to, [7], viii-xii, 384, xl (appendix)pp., with copper-engraved frontispiece portrait, 6 folding blue-paper maps, and 13 plates, including 8 hand-coloured ornithological plates; some foxing and offsetting, one map minimally trimmed; near-contemporary British scored calf, borders roll-tooled in gilt, marbled endpapers, ribbon page-marker, skilfully rebacked and recornered in sheep, spine gilt in compartments, lettered directly in one, naval centre-pieces in others; a little rubbed, corners bumped, nonetheless a good copy.

[Hill, 1376; Lada-Mocarski, 42.]

‘H.J.’ (?, early ink ownership inscription to flyleaf); H.F. Davies, Elmley Castle (19th-century armorial bookplate to upper pastedown); W. Batelle (19th-century pencil ownership inscription to flyleaf); Carl Wendell Carlsmith (20th-century printed booklabel to flyleaf); Frederick E. Ellis, Shaw Island (20th-century pictorial bookplate to upper pastedown).