SNOW, William Parker. 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. Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans, & Roberts, 1857.
Two volumes, 8vo. Contemporary full green calf (Eton leaving present); pp. [iii]-xvi, 376; viii, 368; 6 hand-coloured and tinted lithographs, 3 folding maps; binding restored with new lettering-pieces (retaining one original one); volume one bound without half-title, volume two issued without half-title; a very clean and fresh set.
First edition. Snow (1817-1895) led an eventful life, during which among other things he "led a wild, if not crminal life" in Australia (DNB), acted as amanuensis for Macaulay, and volunteered for a Franklin search expedition. In 1854, he commanded a South American Missionary Society ship transporting missionaries and supplies between Tierra del Fuego, the Falkland Islands and stations on the mainland. A disagreement with the Society's Falkland Islands agent resulted in Snow's dismissal from the command, and A Two Years' Cruise, written on his return to England, tells the story of this period. The work sheds much light on the natives, natural history and other aspects of the southernmost part of the continent, and contains occasioanl asides on Franklin's fate, which remained a central preoccupation with Snow. His book is an important work that has become scarce.
Sabin 85559; Borba de Moraes p.817; Spence 1141.
Provenance: Posthumous bookplates Brian Birley Roberts inside front covers, his signature on vesors of flyleaf and frontispiece. Roberts, inspired as a child by reading Raymond Raife's The Quest for the Arctic Poppy, became a Polar ornithologist, researcher anf the father of the Antarctic Treaty. 'While an undergraduate, he organized and led the Cambridge University Expedition to Vatnajokull in Iceland in 1932 and the Cambridge University Expedition to Scoresby Sund in East Greenland in 1933. Roberts joined the British Graham Land Expedition, 1934-1937 (leader John Rymill), as an ornithologist, spending the austral winter of 1935 at the Argentine Islands and, after an operation to remove his appendix, the following winter on South Georgia where he studied Antarctic birds and elephant seals … In 1946, he joined the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge, as a part-time research fellow' (https://archiveshub.jisc.ac.uk).
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