1819 A Voyage of Discovery : Captain John Ross : Arctic Exploration

A Voyage of Discovery
Made Under the Orders of the Admiralty in His Majesty's Ships Isabella and Alexander for the Purpose of Exploring Baffin's Bay and Enquiring into the Probability of a North West Passage

By John Ross

Published by John Murray, London, 1819. First Edition. Half leather binding, 4to, marble endpapers, pp xxxix, 252 pgs, cxliv, with 32 charts, elevations, and plates, including 3 folding maps and charts, 15 hand-colored aquatint plates (4 folding), 5 sepia plates, 2 uncolored plates, 3 folding elevations, 4 engraved meteorological plates (3 folding), plus other tables and illustrations in the text; Contains one of the great plates in the Arctic canon, that of a polar bear leaping from an iceberg into the ocean (see images)

Sir John Ross (1777–1856) was a Scottish naval officer and Arctic explorer. He joined the Royal Navy at the age of nine and distinguished himself during the Napoleonic Wars. In 1818, Ross was assigned to H.M.S. Isabella and commissioned to search for the North-West Passage.

This book, published in 1819, describes the expedition, which was unsuccessful although it did discover new facts about Baffin Bay. Several of Ross's former officers disputed his account of the decision to turn back at Lancaster Sound, which he had mistakenly believed was impassable. The ensuing controversy affected the rest of Ross's career and made him unpopular with influential contemporaries including Sir John Barrow and William Edward Parry. It also soured relations with his young nephew James Clark Ross, who had accompanied him, and who in 1831, during a second eventful expedition with his uncle, identified the location of the magnetic North Pole.

CONDITION
A good complete first edition. The book has been professionally rebacked at some point in the past and is in good condition. Inner and outer hinges secure with no cracking. All contents present including all plates. Top corner from title page clipped. All pages good throughout, with a couple of text pages having offsetting from the plates opposite. Page 88 has some grubby marks but all other pages clean with perhaps the odd light thumb mark to margins here and there. All plates present and in good condition. Overall a very good complete cop of the first edition.

(Location : Glass Cabinet 3, Bottom Shelf)