60 23rd June 2012 antiquarian books Early treasures from the
■ Journals and drawings with the Cook factor continue to enjoy a strong following
Ian McKay reports
SALES held on what may be termed home ground – in Australia – along with others in the UK and USA provide the lots that make up this report on recent Southern hemisphere successes at auction.
A dozen drawings relating to
engraved plates published in John Hawkesworth’s 1773 account of Captain Cook’s first voyage to the South Seas took Aus$90,000 (£57,040) on May 7 at Australian Book Auctions of Armadale, Victoria. The eight views and four ethnographic subjects are unsigned and seemingly by three different hands, but they are contemporary copies of the originals and executed on good quality 18th century paper. Most of the original drawings made on the Endeavour’s voyage are now in institutional collections, but at the time, interest in the voyage was such that many artists borrowed freely from the work of others to satisfy the demand and the drawings offered at this sale may have been specially commissioned. An excellent example of this process,
say the auctioneers, is provided by ‘A View of the indians of Terra del Fuego by their Hut’, the drawing seen above. Two versions were drawn by the
ship’s official artists, Sydney Parkinson and Alexander Buchan, but as the ABA cataloguer explains, while Parkinson’s
elaborate composition follows the dictates of picturesque composition and taste, Buchan’s drawing may be seen as more documentary and realistic. Parkinson’s composition was
subsequently redrawn by John James Barralet – evidently for Hawkesworth’s account, although not actually used – and Buchan’s drawing, showing the hut and its inhabitants ‘full-face’, was used by Giovanni Battista Cipriani as the basis of yet another version. The latter was “somewhat classicised”
within an adaptation of the picturesque setting and incorporates additional figures inspired by the Parkinson drawing, or at least the Barralet version of it. This conflated Cipriani drawing was engraved without alteration by Francesco Bartolozzi as Plate I in the Hawkesworth account. The drawing at ABA is based on
that Cipriani-Bartolozzi image but with alterations for the sake of modesty: a central figure behind the fire is no longer squatting with revealingly open legs and is
now clothed, as are the figures outside the hut. Whoever commissioned this group
of drawings seems to have a had a primarily ethnographic interest in the voyage, and the second of the drawings reproduced here is ‘A Fly-flap of the Island Ohiteroo’. The plate in the Hawkesworth account is based on a drawing by John Frederick Miller, a botanical artist and engraver employed
Left: ‘The Head of a Chief of New Zealand...’, one of the engraved plates from a rare, hand- coloured copy of the enlarged, 1784 second edition of Sydney Parkinson’s Journal of a Voyage to the South Seas... that sold for a record £38,000 at Sotheby’s on May 9.
by Joseph Banks, the expedition’s naturalist, to complete or further work up sketches made by Parkinson, who had died of dysentery before the voyage ended. However, the present drawing differs in enough detail from both the print and Miller’s drawing to lead the ABA cataloguer to suggest that it was based on the object rather than a copy of the Miller drawing. Professor Adrienne Kaeppler has more
recently identified the object depicted as a fly-whisk among the Cook artefacts now in the British Museum and the drawing has in recent years been both exhibited and published, in James Cook and the Exploration of the Pacific by Kaeppler et al (Thames & Hudson, 2009). At Christie’s New York on May 18, a
complete set of the Cook Voyages, their period calf bindings uniformly rebacked, proved a disappointment – the selling price of $24,000 (£14,900) falling some way short of even the low-estimate figure – but on May 9, Sotheby’s London saw two other lots of Australasian and South Pacific interest make excellent prices. One of them, sold at a record £38,000,
was an exceptional copy of the above- mentioned Sydney Parkinson’s own Journal of a Voyage to the South Seas... on the Endeavour. This had been posthumously first
issued in 1773 by Sydney’s brother, Stanfield, who edited it from his brother’s papers, but Hawkesworth and Banks then obtained an injunction delaying publication until their official account had appeared. A dispute also arose concerning the true ownership of Sydney Parkinson’s papers and drawings. The copy offered by Sotheby’s was a second edition of 1784, one substantially
Left and above: two of the group of drawings relating to Cook’s first voyage to the South Seas that sold for Aus$90,000 (£57,040) in a recent Australian Book Auctions sale – showing a group of Tierra del Fuego Indians and a Pacific island fly-whisk.
“Hawkesworth and Banks then obtained an injunction delaying publication until their official account had appeared”
enlarged by Dr John Fothergill, a Quaker and friend of both the Parkinsons and Banks, who had attempted to settle the dispute but for his pains was himself attacked by Stanfield Parkinson. Stanfield died, insane, shortly after
publication, and Fothergill bought up the remaining 400 or so copies, “both to save the Parkinson family from financial distress and to protect himself and Banks from the virulent preface that Stanfield had prepared for the book”. I am quoting here from the description of one of the copies sold as part of the Davidson collection of Australiana by ABA in 2005. Fothergill later issued a few copies
containing an answer to Stanfield’s preface, and this was also included in this 1784 edition. Other additions and appendices, which include abridgements of the narratives of the second and third Cook voyages as well as vocabularies of the languages of Tahiti, New Zealand and Australia, almost doubled the size of the original work and make this the preferred and ‘best’ edition. In fact this, too, was a posthumous
edition. Fothergill – one of whose other claims to fame is as the author of a 1748 pamphlet, Account of the Sore Throat attended with Ulcers, that contains one of the first descriptions of streptococcal sore throat in English – had died in 1780. In a contemporary binding of diced
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