To The Antarctic Seas 1819-1821. Edited By Frank Debenham.
INSCRIBED BY FRANK DEBENHAM
The Voyage of Captain Bellingshausen To The Antarctic Seas 1819-1821. Edited By Frank Debenham.
Printed For The Hakluyt Society, 1945.
First edition in English. Two volumes. 8vo. Publisher's original blue cloth, lettered gilt to the spine with gilt vignettes to the covers. In the rare original dustwrappers. Inscribed affectionately by the editor Frank Debenham for his assistant Elizabeth Rought to the front endpaper, "To my dear ex-sec, aide and abettor, from Deb, Xmas 1946." Frontispiece portraits to each volume. Thirty six-illustrations on eighteen plates. Twenty maps in all, eight of which a fold-out and two of which are large folding maps in pockets at the end of each volume. A fine set, the cloth wonderfully well-preserved thanks to the surviving of the dustwrappers. The dustwrappers are in very good condition, slightly toned to the spine, with a little wear to the edges and a closed tear to the lower panel of volume 1.
An excellent association copy of this first translation of one of the major early Antarctic voyages.
Frank Debenham, a veteran of Scott's ill-fated Terra Nova expedition, was the founder of the Scott Polar Research Institute in 1920, and served as its director from then until 1946. As director he made the Cambridge institute the centre of scholarly polar research, and in the 1940s his assistant was the recipient of this book Elizabeth Rought, a geography graduate from Newnham College. The inscription attests to their close working relationship and friendship.
Captain Bellingshausen's was the first expedition to cross the Antarctic circle since Captain Cook and is ranked by Hugh Robert Mill as "one of the greatest Antarctic expeditions on record" (Siege Of The South Pole, 1905). On January 27th 1820, Bellingshausen was the first to sight the Antarctic continent, recording a distant "icefield covered with small hillocks."
PROVENANCE: Elizabeth Rought (1924-2018), assistant to Frank Debenham at the Scott Polar Research Institute.
Stock ID: 40144
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