‘INDISPENSABLE FOR THE DISCOVERY OF HISTORYIN THE NORTHERN PACIFIC’
MÜLLER, Gerhard Friedrich.
Voyages from Asia to America, for completing the discoveries of the north west coast of America. To which is prefixed, a summary of the voyages made by the Rusians [sic] on the frozen sea, in search of a north east passage … Translated from the High Dutch of S. Muller, of the Royal Academy of Petersburgh. With the addition of three new maps … By Thomas Jefferys, geographer to his majesty. The second edition.
London, T. Jefferys, 1764.
4to, pp. viii, 120; with 2 folding maps by Jefferys (with some outline colouring) and 2 further small engraved maps; occasional light marginal damp-staining and foxing, closed tears (without loss) to folding maps (neatly repaired to versos); a very good copy in mid-twentieth-century half dark blue morocco over light blue cloth, spine in compartments lettered and filleted in gilt, edges gilt, pale blue marbled endpapers; extremities very slightly rubbed, small abrasion to upper cover; ink inscription (1983) to front free endpaper.
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Voyages from Asia to America, for completing the discoveries of the north west coast of America. To which is prefixed, a summary of the voyages made by the Rusians [sic] on the frozen sea, in search of a north east passage … Translated from the High Dutch of S. Muller, of the Royal Academy of Petersburgh. With the addition of three new maps … By Thomas Jefferys, geographer to his majesty. The second edition.
Second edition (first 1761) of this key work devoted to discoveries in northeastern Asia and northwestern America, including the Bering Strait, published by Thomas Jefferys, geographer to George III, ‘remembered in particular for some of the most important eighteenth-century maps of the Americas’ (ODNB).
‘This important book is indispensable for the history of discovery and explorations in the northern Pacific. It is a sometimes incomplete translation of Nachrichten von Seereisen, und zur See gemachten Entdeckungen, which forms the third volume of Müller’s Sammlung Russischer Geschichte, published at St Petersburg, 1758, and it represents the most extensive account in English of Bering’s polar expedition and of the discovery of Bering Strait and the western limits of North America’ (Hill). This second edition makes some corrections to the first and adds an index.
The two folding maps by Jefferys comprise ‘a map of the discoveries made by the Russians on the north west coast of America’, and ‘a map of Canada and the north part of Louisiana’, while the two smaller maps depict ‘the N.E. parts of Asia, and N.W. parts of America … taken from a Japanese map’, and ‘the discoveries of Admiral De Fonte, and other navigators … in quest of a passage to the South Sea’.
ESTC T90483; Hill 1200; Sabin 51285.
