ENGEL Samuel Remarques sur la partie de la relation du voyage du capitaine Cook, qui concerne le détroit entre l’Asie et l’Amérique, dans une lettre. Traduite de l’allemand, pouvant servir de suite au mémoire du même auteur de 1779.

Sabin, 22575 ; Lada-Mocarski, 30 (note) ; Hordern House, Captain James Cook Collection (Robert & Mary Anne Parks collection), 63 (Berne issue) ; Forbes, Hawaiian National Bibliography, 29 (“the text of this is printed from the same setting of type as the Berne edition, the title leaf only having been reset ; the woodcut vignettes on the title and at end of the text and the folding map are identical to those in the Berne edition”); not in Hill.

First edition of the French translation, Geneva issue (there was another issue published in Bern the same year).

A very scarce book relating to Cook’s third voyage. The exploration of the Bering Strait and the search for the Northwest passage had been one of the most important tasks for Cook’s last voyage in the Pacific. The region was explored at length by Cook in 1778, and again by Clerke, after his former commander’s death, in 1779.

The folding map contains two separate charts of Bering Strait and the northwest coast; it was engraved in Zürich by Rodolf Holzhalb. New regarding their findings was keenly awaited in Europe, where a controversy raged between Engle on eh one hand and geographers Anton Friedrich Büsching and G.F. Müller on the other. Engel’s opponents had attacked his “theory and assumptions regarding the Bering Strait. This was the era of passionate controversy about the figuration of Alaska and northwest coast, as well as the existence of the Northwest passage” (Lada-Mocarski). Engel, the distinguished Swiss geographer and economist, was a prolific writer on the North Pacific. This book had first appeared in a much slighter form in German in 1780, but without the map. It is worth pointing out that the catalyst for this publication wa the entry of the death of Captain Cook and the discovery of Hawaii in Büsching’s influential weekly journal the Wöchentliche Nachrichten, now better known as the first entry in Forbes’ Hawaiian National Bibliography. Engel had taken exception to Büsching’s critique of his theory, and this work was his response.

Very good copy, upper corner of the title restored.