The Voyage of the Challenger (Cockerel Press Limited Edition)

SWIRE, Herbert (Navigating Sub-Lieutenant, R.N.). The Voyage of the Challenger: A Personal Narrative of the Historic Circumnavigation of the Globe in the Years 1872–1876. With a Foreword by Major Roger Swire and an Introduction by G. Herbert Fowler. London: The Golden Cockerel Press, 1938. 2 vols.

Quarto (32 x 20.5 cm). Original publisher's quarter white buckram and blue cloth boards. Spines lettered and decorated in gilt. Fore and lower edges untrimmed. Vol. I: 192 pp., map on front endpapers; Vol. II: 168, [2] pp. Illustrated throughout with 10 hand-coloured plates with tissue guards — two coloured frontispieces and eight further plates — and numerous black-and-white text illustrations including full-page subjects. Printed in Eric Gill's Perpetua type on Van Gelder paper. Housed in matching blue cloth slipcase. Limited to 300 numbered sets, this one being number 238. First edition. Pertelote 134.

The voyage of HMS Challenger between 1872 and 1876 was one of the defining scientific expeditions of the nineteenth century. A four-year circumnavigation of the globe undertaken at the prompting of the Royal Society, under the command of Captain George Nares, with the explicit purpose of investigating the deep oceans. What the Challenger's scientists found rewrote the map of the known world: the ocean floor was not the featureless abyss it had been assumed to be, but a vibrant landscape, teeming with life at depths previously thought impossible.

The expedition's published scientific reports ran to fifty volumes and laid the foundations of oceanography as an independent discipline. Yet for sixty years, the human story of the voyage — the day-to-day experience of living aboard a Royal Navy vessel for four years, navigating the world from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from the tropics to the Antarctic, calling at ports from Bermuda to Japan — existed only in the personal papers of those who had made it. Herbert Swire was the Challenger's Navigating Sub-Lieutenant, and his journals constituted the most detailed private account of the voyage in existence.

The Golden Cockerel Press, under Christopher and Anthony Sandford and Owen Rutter, brought those journals to print for the first time in 1938. This production is characteristic of the Golden Cockerel Press's publishing: Perpetua type set onto luxurious Van Gelder paper, Swire's illustrations reproduced finely with full-coloured plates, a beautiful and sturdy binding that perfectly fits the aesthetic of the work.

As Pertelote notes, this cheerful journal, kept by a high-spirited young naval officer, threw new light on one of the most important expeditions of modern times. It has never been reprinted.

Very Good/Near fine in slipcase. Slipcase shows some shelf wear, rubbing along edges and corners with some very mild internal wear. Volumes near fine: bindings square, tight, and free from markings. Contents show some mild foxing mostly to foredges, with very faint and scattered foxing internally. A beautiful set.

Catalogue Number: HH000427