A finely printed edition of the California chapters of Sir George Simpson's Narrative of a Journey Round the World (London, 1847). As Governor-in-Chief of the Hudson's Bay Company's North American territories, Simpson visited Yerba Buena (San Francisco), Monterey and the coastal missions in 1841–42, on the eve of the American conquest, and left one of the sharpest outsider's descriptions of Mexican California — its ranchos, its trade, and its precarious government.
Simpson's visit came at the height of the Company's commercial push into Mexican California. Its trapping brigades had worked the Sacramento and San Joaquin for years in defiance of Mexican law, and in 1840 the HBC secured a trading post at Yerba Buena, exchanging English goods for wheat, hides and tallow. He came to weigh how far the Company should deepen its California stake — a question a contemporary editor framed pointedly: had Simpson "envisaged the future … the Hudson's Bay Company never would have abandoned California" [W. Kaye Lamb, "Simpson, Sir George," Dictionary of Canadian Biography].
xxxii, 232 pp. With two portraits of the author (tissue-guarded), facsimiles of the original title-pages and of a double-page holograph report by Simpson, and a folding facsimile map. Octavo (255 × 160 mm), original cloth-backed boards, paper spine label, in the custom slipcase.
Very good to near fine: touches of toning to the boards; the slipcase present. A fresh copy.
REFERENCES
Howes S4965 (this Russell edition); Howes S495 and Cowan p. 590 (the 1847 London original); Peel, Bibliography of the Canadian Prairies, no. 212
Number 122 of 250 copies. Edited by Thomas C. Russell
