Good unsophisticated example. First edition of the first published account of Cook's first circumnavigation, published two months after the return of the Endeavour, and preceding Hawkesworth's offical account by two years. This copy with the dedication leaf suppressed.

'This was the first in a series of so-called "surreptitious accounts" of Cook's various voyages to appear in print: the Admiralty found it practically impossible to enforce their ruling that no unofficial publications should pre-empt the official and lengthier accounts of the voyages, naturally much slower in the press' (Parks). It is noted for containing the first printed account of the east coast of Australia, with Botany Bay named Sting-Ray Bay, the first name given to it by Cook. Authorship has variously been attributed to Banks or Hawkesworth (working from the journals of Sydney Parkinson), Richard Orton, William Perry, the publisher Thomas Becket, and even to Cook himself; Arnold Wood, in his Discovery of Australia (1922), was the first to suggest that the author was American midshipman James Magra (later Matra) — later a leading proponent of establishing a convict colony at Botany Bay — an attribution supported by the editor of Cook's journals, James Beaglehole, and now widely accepted.

If Magra was the author, he neglects to describe how 'in May 1770, when midway up the coast of New South Wales, suspecting that [he] was implicated in the drunken cropping of his clerk's ears, Cook suspended the midshipman from duty, noting that he was "one of those gentlemen, frequently found on board King's Ships, that can very well be spared, or to speake more planer good for nothing"' (ADB). It has also been noted that 'on the evidence of a letter from himself to Banks, Magra was one of the ringleaders of an intended mutiny when the Endeavour was at Tahiti, which was rendered abortive only by the prevalence of venereal disease' (Holmes). There is nonetheless much important information in addition to the account of the Australian coast, and 'The story moves rapidly, with well-chosen detail … The author describes marine animals, Tahitian and New Zealand society, and foodstuff including … the breadfruit that Joseph Banks later decided to introduce to the Caribbean, leading to the ill-fated Bounty voyage' (introduction to the Cambridge University press digital edition, 2015).

First edition, second issue. 4to, [ii],130, [3], [1 (blank)] pp., entirely uncut in original calf-backed marbled boards, light wear, well preserved in modern calf-backed book-form box, red morocco label, a fine copy.

Beddie, 693; Hill, 1066 (2nd issue); Holmes, 3; Parks Cook, 6; Sabin, 16242; Spence, 229; Streeter, 2405.