Travel, Photographs, Maps and Natural History

Travel, Photographs, Maps and Natural History

View full screen - View 1 of Lot 169. Joseph Rene Bellot | Memoirs ... with his journal of a voyage in the Polar Seas, in search of Sir John Franklin. 1855.

Joseph Rene Bellot | Memoirs ... with his journal of a voyage in the Polar Seas, in search of Sir John Franklin. 1855

Lot Closed

November 17, 04:48 PM GMT

Estimate

1,500 - 2,000 GBP

Lot Details

Description

Joseph Rene Bellot

Memoirs ... with his journal of a voyage in the Polar Seas, in search of Sir John Franklin. London: Hurst and Blackett, 1855


FIRST EDITION IN ENGLISH, 2 volumes, 8vo (194 x 117mm.), engraved portrait frontispiece of Bellot in volume 1, publisher's adverts at end of each volume (21pp. + 24pp.), original brown cloth, upper covers with gilt vignette of the Bellot obelisk, blue endpapers, portrait spotted and offset, most text lightly browned, some spotting or stains, library stamps (see provenance), volume 1 recased with repairs to spine, hinges starting, bindings rubbed and bumped 


Bellot's posthumous memoirs were published first in French in 1854. The young explorer was second in command of the expedition in search of Franklin under Captain Kennedy in 1851. During a sledge journey in 1852 he discovered a strait that now bears his name. The following summer he disappeared in an attempt to deliver messages to Sir Edward Belcher. An obelisk was erected in his honour outside Greenwich Hospital (Dictionary of Canadian Biography).


PROVENANCE:

Coleraine Library, nineteenth-century ink stamp on some text leaves and endpapers, and 'Rules for subscribers to the library', printed by Eccles of Coleraine, on upper pastedowns


LITERATURE:

Arctic Bibliography 1305; Sabin 4566