Narrative of a Second Voyage in Search of a North-West Passage and of a Residence in the Arctic Regions during the Years 1829, 1830, 1831, 1832, 1833....Including the Report of Commander, now Captain, James Clark Ross and the Discovery of the Northern Magnetic Pole.
London: A.W. Webster, 156, Regent Street, 1835.
Price: $1,250.00
About the item
First Edition. Illustrated. [8], xxxiii, [1], 740 pp. 1 vols. Thick 4to. Half modern green morocco and cloth sides. Fine. Arctic Bibliography 14866; Stam 2.6.; Abbey Travel II:636; Sabin 73381; Staton & Tremaine 1808. Hill I:261; Lande 1426; Smith 8792.
Item #312855
“In 1829, frustrated by the lack of progress [in search of a northwest passage], a philanthropic gin distiller, Felix Booth, sponsored John Ross’s second expedition. With his nephew James Clark Ross as second-in-command, Ross sailed down Prince Regent Sound in search of an opening to the west. The two Rosses mapped James Ross Strait and parts of King William Island and in 1831 James located the Magnetic North Pole. The Ross expedition then disappeared in the ice-bound Gulf of Boothia until 1833” (Goetzman & Williams, 186). A “wonderfully interesting narrative of human endurance, triumphing over the most awful peril and suffering. The sumptuous printing which makes every page a picture has even its luxury enhanced by the splendid steel engravings and lithographs. The former are so excellent as to be worthy of preservation as gems of art” (Field 1321). “Let no man imagine that he knows what a present is worth,” Ross wrote, “until he has found what happiness can be produced by a blue bead, a yellow button, a needle, or a piece of an old iron hoop” (Lehane, 113). Without the supplementary appendix volume.
