Added to your basket:
A two years’ cruise off Tierra del Fuego, the Falkland Islands, Patagonia, and in the River Plate: a narrative of life in the southern seas ...

Checkout now

First edition, with attractive coloured lithographed plates after drawings by the author.

William Parker Snow (1817–1895) led an extraordinary life, living wild in the Australian bush, saving a man from a shark attack off the coast of Africa, serving as an amanuensis to Thomas Babington Macaulay, and searching for Sir John Franklin aboard the Prince Albert.

‘In 1854 Snow went to Patagonia in command of the South American Missionary Society’s vessel Allen Gardiner, and for two years carried missionaries and their stores between Tierra del Fuego, the Falkland Islands, and stations on the mainland. This service ended in a disagreement between him and the superintending missionary at the Falkland Islands, who deposed Snow from his command for disobedience, and left him and his wife to find their own way to England. On his arrival Snow published A Two Years’ Cruise ... which had some success, but he spent the proceeds on an unsuccessful action against the missionary society’ (ODNB).

Hill, p. 1599; Sabin 85559.

You may also be interested in...

LIVINGSTONE, David. 

Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa; including a Sketch of sixteen Years’ Residence in the Interior of Africa, and a Journey from the Cape of Good Hope to Loanda on the West Coast; thence across the Continent, down the River Zambesi, to the eastern Ocean. 

First edition.  ‘Livingstone’s services to African geography during thirty years are almost unequalled; he covered about a third of the continent from the Cape to the Equator and from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean.  He made three great expeditions; in 1853-6 (described in this book), 1858-64 and 1865-73, of which the first and third are the most important.  During these years he explored vast regions of central Africa, many of which had never been seen by white men before’ (Printing and the Mind of Man). 

Read more

PRE-WAR SINGAPORE [DICKSON, George.

Singapore flight.

Apparently the first and only edition of a fascinating personal diary of an 18,000-mile flight from Southampton to Singapore made in 1938 (pp. 1–36). It includes accounts of stop-overs in Athens, Basra, various parts of the Indian subcontinent, Malaya, Java, Batavia (Jakarta), Bandoeng (Bandung), Alexandria and Rome. The final destination strikes Dickson as ‘a lovely heavily wooded island with everything extremely clean’ (p. 24). On sightseeing in the Sultanate of Johor, he comments: ‘the visit was admirable and the monkeys around the place were as tame as I, but a hundred times smaller and slimmer and, I guess cooler’ (p. 26). There is also a description of the 1938 Empire Exhibition in Glasgow, which attracted twelve million visitors (pp. 37–44), and of a 1939 trip to New York, with photographs of the Rockefeller Centre (pp. 55–59). Dickson incorporates a poem entitled ‘The Night Ashore’ (pp. 45–54). In poignant contrast to the glamour of air travel, the journal gives an insight into a world which, on the brink of war, was still feeling the effects of the 1929 crash: while in New York, Dickson ‘went walking in some of the poorer streets, where 15 cents. is a lot of money. Unemployed men and women walked around sadly, hopelessly, it seemed, in droves . . . America has her own troubles. If there is a war, when will she enter it? . . . Chamberlain must declare war this time’ (p. 58). There volume has no title page, seemingly as issued; and author and title are taken from the cover, which is illustrated with an evocative sketch of a sea plane.

Read more