Two days ago Australian Rare Books 1607-1787 was sent for publication. It is expected the volume will be published early in 2025. Below is an extract from Chapter Five “James Cook in the Endeavour”, discussing the first book and the first map to describe and record the discovery of the New South Wales.
Jonathan Wantrup
27 November 2024
One thing that marks out the Endeavour voyage from earlier British voyages is the sizeable scientific company that sailed in her. Initially, it was only the assistant to the Astronomer Royal, Charles Green, with his astronomical equipment who was to sail. Then the polymathic celebrity dilettante Joseph Banks involved himself. Rich, young, a recent Member of the Royal Society, and an enthusiastic ‘scientific gentleman’, Banks sought and was given the Admiralty’s permission to embark with his entourage and to fit out the ship for the purpose at his own expense. Banks was accompanied by the respected Swedish botanist Daniel Solander, artists Sydney Parkinson and Alexander Buchan, and his secretary, Hermann Sporing, who was also a botanist and natural history artist. In addition, Banks was accompanied by four personal servants.
Banks proved to be such an effective scene-stealer that the voyage of the Endeavour was usually thought of as Banks’s voyage at the time. Beaglehole quotes a private letter from Horace Walpole, for example, who had written in 1773 that “at present our ears listen and our eyes are expecting East Indian affairs, and Mr. Banks’s voyage, for which Mr. Hawkesworth has received d’avance one thousand pounds from the voyager [i.e. Banks], and six thousand from the booksellers” (John Cawte Beaglehole, The Journals of Captain James Cook: the Voyage of the Endeavour, 1768–1771, Second edition, Cambridge, Hakluyt Society, 1968, p. ccxlix). The first published account of the voyage in French, appended as a “supplément” to a 1771 edition of Louis de Bougainville’s somewhat belated first French circumnavigation, was entitled “Supplément au voyage de M. Bougainville; ou journal d’un voyage autour du monde fait par MM. Banks & Solander” (Supplement to the voyage of M. Bougainville, or Journal of a voyage round the world made by Messrs. Banks & Solander). Indeed, it took Cook’s dramatic death in the course of his third voyage and consequent apotheosis for the Endeavour voyage to be widely credited to him rather than Banks.
The effect of these extra voices meant that more than one account of the voyage of the Endeavour was published at the time. It must be emphasised here that the literature surrounding Cook’s three voyages is vast. Even if we ignore the multitude of related works published in the following three centuries, the number – and often the great rarity – of contemporary publications is daunting. Consequently, what we may say here can be little more than an invitation to explore further.
The Admiralty required all members of the crew to hand over their journals and banned them from publishing any narrative before publication of the official account that was being edited (or, rather, entirely confected) by John Hawkesworth. It was perhaps too much to expect that all members of the crew, who had held their tongues on the return leg, would remain silent once home and the Admiralty was never really able to enforce this restriction. The earliest published account duly appeared in late September 1771, just over two months after the Endeavour had returned to England. Yet another private account was drawn up from the papers of the natural history artist, Sydney Parkinson. Parkinson had died of dysentery on the homeward voyage and his journal passed to his brother, Stanfield Parkinson, who published it in 1773.
The authorship of the anonymous 1771 work has remained uncertain from the time it was first published, although there has never been any doubt that the author was one of Cook’s men. Given Admiralty regulations, there was good reason for a writer to remain as obscure as possible. Beaglehole identified the American Loyalist, midshipman James Mario Magra (later Matra), as the most likely author and Alan Frost’s more recent examination of the entire corpus of Magra’s works places the matter beyond serious doubt and it is now generally accepted that he was the author.
Magra’s anonymous journal was published at the end of September 1771 by Thomas Becket and Peter Abraham de Hondt, booksellers and publishers in the Strand. A quarto volume of 134 pages, without map or illustration, it was issued uncut in wrappers or uncut in boards. The title, as often at the time, was expansively descriptive: A Journal of a Voyage round the World in His Majesty’s Ship Endeavour, In the Years 1768, 1769, 1770, and 1771; Undertaken in Pursuit of Natural Knowledge, at the Desire of the Royal Society: Containing All the various Occurrences of the Voyage, with Descriptions of several new discovered Countries in the Southern Hemisphere; and Accounts of their Soil and Productions; and of many Singularities in the Structure, Apparel, Customs, Manners, Policy, Manufactures, &c. of their Inhabitants. To which is added, A Concise Vocabulary of the Language of Otahitee.
The tardy publication of Hawkesworth’s official account meant that the European public, who were eager for details of Cook’s discoveries in Australia and New Zealand, had a continuing interest in Magra’s journal, with editions or translations published in Dublin, Berlin, and Paris in 1772, and in Philadelphia in 1774 (very rare).
When first issued, the book had, in addition to the title-leaf, a leaf of dedication – more of an Address, really – in which the veracity of the Journal is protested, signed in print by Thomas Becket and dated 29 September 1771. This leaf was an afterthought, printed after the book was finished, and at the very bottom of the first page were printed instruction to the binder “Place this next the Title” – this line has not often survived binding. The leaf is headed “To the Right Honourable the Lords of the Admiralty, and to Mr. Banks and Dr. Solander” and was printed to lend authenticity to the book by invoking the names of Banks, Solander, and the Lords of the Admiralty without explicitly claiming the book had been endorsed by them.
While no such claim had been included in the book itself, newspaper advertisements were a different matter. In announcing the forthcoming publication on September 27, the publishers claimed “To remove every possible doubt of the authenticity of this journal, the public are referred to the Editor’s address to the Lords of the Admiralty. And to Mr. Banks and Dr. Solander, prefixed to the publication”. Banks and Solander immediately inserted their own notice in the press:
Admiralty office, September 27 1771. The Editor of a work, intitled ‘A Journal of a Voyage around the World, in his Majesty’s ship the Endeavour’, which was advertised in a morning paper of this day, having made free with our names, we think it proper to assure the public, that we know nothing of any such journal. An account of the discoveries that have been made in the voyage of the Endeavour, with the charts and drawings necessary to illustrate the work, is now preparing to be laid before the public by authority; of which they will have timely information. Signed, Jos. Banks Dan. C. Solander.
Becket withdrew his ‘dedication’ leaf from future copies, thus creating two issues: the first with the ‘dedication’ leaf; the second without. The first issue is considered more desirable and realises a much higher price than the second issue.
There is at least one further cancellation in Magra’s book. This, I believe, is only found in quite late issues of the book. At the top of page 90, the verso of leaf N1, is a paragraph that must have been questioned or objected to at the time. The paragraph relates an incident that might perhaps show Cook in a bad light and on the cancel leaf N1, this paragraph is removed and the text on pages 89-90 is divided into widely-spaced paragraphs so that the text runs smoothly from page 88 and to page 91 – a simple way to identify the original leaf is that the catchword on page 89 is “Soon” but on the cancelling leaf it is “quantities”.
James Magra’s Journal of a Voyage round the World in His Majesty’s Ship Endeavour is a crucial book for the collector of Pacific voyages and the premier book to describe the completed discovery of the continent of Australia and of the two islands of New Zealand. The author himself, however, lends a wider appeal to his book. Magra was a remarkable, if often disappointed, man. Through the patronage and friendship of Sir Joseph Banks, he became an effective advocate for the colonisation of New South Wales, where he hoped displaced American Loyalists like himself might find a new home. Magra became the British consul at Teneriffe, where for a decade he ensured that the Mediterranean fleet had the supplies they needed in the desperate war with Napoleon.
Magra had been involved in detailed discussions with Banks and with Home Secretary Lord Sydney in the early 1780s, culminating in his 1783 “Proposal for Establishing a Settlement in New South Wales”, on which he gave evidence to the Beauchamp Committee in 1785. It was more or less his plan that was adopted by the Pitt administration, leading directly to the sailing of the First Fleet and the establishment of the settlement at Sydney Cove. Magra’s journal is in a very real sense a ‘preface’ to the foundation of European Australia and it is fitting that the first published account of New South Wales should have been written by the man who would later play such a crucial role in the establishment of the British settlement at Botany Bay – called in the present book by its first name, Sting-ray Bay.
Before we leave James Magra, we should notice the copy of Edward Augustus Petherick, now in the National Library of Australia. A brief pencilled note on the endpaper of that copy, in what appears to be Petherick’s hand, reads “? Dalrymple’s copy, with one of his charts, South Polar Projection, 1771 ?”. Although Petherick was a distinguished collector, bookseller, and bibliographer – indeed, the Father of Australian bibliography – this speculative note is dramatically wrong. The error is understandable: the map does indeed closely imitate the style of, and is drawn to the same size and scale as, Dalrymple’s map of “The Great Pacific Ocean” in his Historical Collection of the Several Voyages and Discoveries in the South Pacific Ocean (1769-1771) – an imitation that is perhaps a clue to its purpose.
That untitled map bound into the Petherick copy of Magra is in fact an unrecorded copy of an exceptionally rare and highly important map prepared by Joseph Banks and Daniel Solander, which was engraved for Banks in March 1772 by John Abraham Bayly and printed by him in May 1772. That this map even existed had not been known before 1975 when Harold Carter discovered the original copperplate in the Solander papers. Then, subsequently, a map printed from the copperplate was located in a volume of miscellaneous charts in the British Library. For some years that was the only known example. To the copy in the British Library must be added: a copy from the Robert and Mary Ann Parks collection (now State Library of New South Wales); and a copy in the collection of Franklin Brooke-Hitching – the Brooke-Hitching copy realised £134,500 (A$243,200) in 2014, while the Parks copy sold privately in 2011 for much the same. The Petherick copy of this Bayly map is now the fourth example known.
Dalrymple’s innovative 1769 map, imitated by the Bayly map, had shown the hemispherical northern and southern parts of the globe and, placed between them and connecting them, a rectangular projection of the central portion of the globe. This innovation allowed the whole globe to be seen in one view without distortion. Banks instructed Bayly to exclude Dalrymple’s North Polar hemisphere and only reproduce the Pacific and South Polar portion of the Dalrymple map overlaid with the discoveries of the Endeavour voyage. The map Dalrymple published in 1769 shows the world as it was known before the return of the Endeavour; the map engraved for Banks in 1772 shows how the world looked after the return of the Endeavour.
The map was never published and none of the known copies has the legally required dated imprint (“Published according to Act of Parliament . . .”).Various suggestions have been made to explain why the map was prepared and why it was not formally published, none of them very convincing. Even more to the point, none of them explains why the map was, to put it bluntly, an appropriation of Dalrymple’s 1769 map. Given that Banks and Dalrymple were a long-term friends, one-upmanship must be excluded.
The most straightforward explanation seems to be the best: the map Banks commissioned Bayly to produce was intended as nothing more than an emendation or updating of Dalrymple’s map, the hundred copies to be circulated to fellow scholars and ‘scientific gentlemen’ as a complement to Dalrymple’s well-known book. Now, if the map was then bound into related volumes by dozens of recipients, then there are more copies still to be found. Whatever the real explanation, this Banks-Bayly map is of the highest importance: it is the first printed map in any form to show Cook’s discoveries in the Endeavour; it is the first printed map of the east coast of Australia and the first to name New South Wales; it is the first map of the complete continent of Australia; and it is the first map to show both islands of New Zealand.
Hardened collectors will not be surprised to learn that, small as is the number of known copies, there are differences or ‘points’ to be noticed. The most straightforward is that, as Bayly’s receipt of 9 May 1772 reveals, one hundred copies were printed, fifty on thick paper (“paper calld French super Royal”) and fifty on thin paper (“Suppr Thin post”). The Brooke-Hitching and Parks copies are on thick paper while the copies in the British Library and the National Library of Australia are on thin paper. Less straightforward is the fact that there are two states of the map (the word ‘issue’ is hardly appropriate). In what is surely the first state (State Library of New South Wales) the legend “New South Wales” is crammed into the tiny Van Diemen’s Land section of the south polar map. In the second state “New South Wales” is more sensibly spread along the coast through both sections of the chart (British Library, Brooke-Hitching, and National Library of Australia). In present circumstances, where so few copies are known, it is unlikely a collector will be swayed one way or the other should another copy in either state come to light but, were twenty copies to become known, discriminations and decisions would have to be made.
