The History of New Holland, from its First Discovery in 1616, to the Present Time (First Edition)

[ANONYMOUS] (erroneously attributed to The Right Honourable William Eden). The History of New Holland, from its First Discovery in 1616, to the Present Time. With a Particular Account of its Produce and Inhabitants; and a Description of Botany Bay: Also, a List of the Naval, Marine, Military, and Civil Establishment. London: Printed for John Stockdale, 1787.

Octavo. Two-tone mottled calf. Spine titled in gilt on brown Morocco panel. Edges speckled blue. xxiv, 254, [ii] pp. Two folding hand-coloured maps: A General Chart of the Passage from England to Botany Bay in New Holland 1787, and A New Chart of New Holland on which are delineated New South Wales and a Plan of Botany Bay. First edition. Armorial bookplate of William Strickland of Boynton to front pastedown; bookplate of Milton Whitmont to front free endpaper. Bibliographic references: Ferguson 24; Holmes 66.

One of the earliest and most historically significant accounts of Australia published in the English language.

Predating Cook's famous account of 1789, this volume appeared in the same year the First Fleet departed England, written specifically to satisfy the enormous public curiosity generated by the announcement of the Botany Bay settlement scheme. Formally, its true author remains anonymous. The attribution to the Right Honourable William Eden that appears on the title page, and that has followed the book through more than two centuries of bookselling and cataloguing, is now understood by bibliographers to be a genuine error: Eden did not write the history itself, but the volume incorporates, as an "Introductory Discourse on Banishment," the fourth chapter of Eden's own earlier work Principles of Penal Law. This chapter was likely added to lend the volume the authority of an established statesman and penal reformer, and sufficiently prominent in the original publication that later readers and cataloguers assumed Eden had written the whole. 

Accordingly, the true anonymous author compiled the bulk of the text from existing published sources on New Holland. Chiefly, the accounts of Captain Cook, supplemented by earlier material stretching back to Dampier were used to produce a digest intended for a public that Eden's own preface describes as eager for "every information relative to a country so extraordinary and so little known."

The book's real significance lies less in its originality than in its function: this is very plausibly the primary source from which many of those who sailed with the First Fleet, and those in England anxiously following their departure, formed their understanding of the place to which more than a thousand convicts and their guards were being sent. The publisher, John Stockdale, was exceptionally well connected in official government circles, and this volume — along with others he issued in 1786–87 relating to the Botany Bay scheme — was almost certainly prepared with a degree of official sanction, if not direct encouragement, from the government overseeing the settlement.

The two folding maps within the volume are of particular significance: one traces the intended sea route of the First Fleet itself from England to New South Wales, and the other presents the fullest contemporary depiction of the New Holland coastline as then known to European cartography, with an inset detail of Botany Bay.

The provenance of this copy spans continents and centuries. The armorial bookplate of William Strickland of Boynton almost certainly identifies Sir William Strickland, 6th Baronet of Boynton (1753–1834), a documented naturalist who travelled extensively studying flora and fauna. The bookplate of Milton Whitmont, a twentieth-century collector whose library and bookplate have themselves been the subject of dedicated scholarly study within Australian bookplate circles, nicely links this copy in the inverse of it's original direction; back to Australia from the British Isles.

Very good. Binding in wonderful condition, square and tight; leather remains supple and strong. One point of wear to rear cover and some rubbing to edges. Contents generally very good and complete. Some foxing to preliminary leaves and those near the second folding map; second map with some foxing, mainly at edges. Folding maps otherwise in wonderful condition, complete and without tears.

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Catalogue Number: HH000678