STEJNEGER, Leonhard Georg Wilhelm Steller, the Pioneer of Alaskan Natural History. Harvard University Press, 1936.
8vo. Original cloth, spine lettered in gilt; pp. xxiv, 623, colour frontispiece, maps and plates; a fine copy.
First edition of the magisterial monograph. The German naturalist and explorer Steller accompanied Vitus Bering on the Second Kamchatka Expedition, sailing across the straits to land at Kayak, Alaska in 1741.
Provenance: Posthumous bookplate Brian Birley Roberts inside front cover, his ownership inscription on front fly-leaf. 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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