The official report of an heroic endeavour
SCOTT, Captain Robert F. Scott's Last Expedition. London, Smith, Elder & Co., 1913.
Two volumes, 8vo. Original blue cloth gilt, top edges gilt; pp. xxvi, 633, [2, advertisements]; xvi, 534; portrait frontispiece to each volume to each, numerous plates including some in colour and photogravure, folding panoramas, 8 folding maps and charts; one corner with bump, cloth a little rubbed at extremities, internally remarkably clean and fresh; booplates Peter Arney, attributed with a note in pencil on the first fly-leaf to 'the library of Lord Harmsworth', the newspaper magnate of the Edwardian era.
First edition, first printing, of the official account of the expedition, comprising Scott's journal (volume I) and accounts by Cherry-Garrard, Campbell, Tayler, Evans, and Atkinson (volume II).
Scott's writing 'contains far more personal commentary about himself and his men than was contained in The Voyage of the Discovery, and he achieved those great literary moments characterizing that former work, even early in the course of the expedition when he had so many preoccupations that most leaders might have transferred to their journals only the simplest notations' (Rosove p. 357).
Spence 1056; Renard 1386; Rosove 290A1; Taurus 77.
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