The narrative was compiled chiefly by William Wilson, the ship's chief mate, from Captain James Wilson's papers and the missionaries' own reports: the captain gives his name to the voyage, but the book is largely the mate's composition [British Library / Wellcome catalogue records; London Missionary Society, 1799]. It is the German transmission of one of the cornerstone Pacific voyage narratives — the record of the expedition that carried the first body of European settlers, other than a penal colony, into Polynesia.

The ship Duff, under Captain James Wilson, sailed from London on 10 August 1796 and, after 208 days by way of Rio de Janeiro, reached Tahiti, where a settlement of twenty-five missionaries was landed — the first sustained European presence in the Society Islands. Further parties were carried to Tonga and the Marquesas, and along the way Wilson fixed the positions of numerous islands then unknown to Europe.

The narrative's lasting value is ethnographic: its preliminary discourse and appendix preserve some of the earliest detailed European reporting on Tahitian society, religion and language — gathered a generation after Cook and before the culture was transformed by the very mission the Duff founded. This is the first German edition, issued at Berlin in 1800 within a year of the London first and a year ahead of the Vienna edition of 1801; the speed of that transmission measures the Continental hunger for Pacific discovery in the wake of Cook and Bougainville [Ferguson 321a].

x, 526 pp., with the folding map at rear. Octavo (210 × 125 mm), contemporary sheep, raised bands and gilt lettering to spine, edges stained red. Lacks two of the copperplate engravings; the folding chart present.

Very good. Boards and spine rubbed, light wear to joints; early ownership inscription, minor toning. Lacks two copperplate engravings, as noted.

PROVENANCE

With an early manuscript ownership inscription. From a distinguished private collection of Pacific voyages.

REFERENCES

Ferguson 321a; Borba de Moraes 943. For the English first: Hill 1866; Kroepelien 1385; O'Reilly & Reitman, Bibliographie de Tahiti, 585