The title pages from The Voyage of Governor Phillip to Botany Bay by John Stockdale, 1789. Estimate Aus$38,000-48,000 at The Book Merchant Jenkins.
The fleet of 11 British ships that brought the first British colonists and convicts are known as the 'First Fleet'.
A deluxe first edition of the most famous of these ‘First Fleet’ books comes for sale at The Book Merchant Jenkins in New South Wales this month.
The 1789 copy of John Stockdale's The Voyage of Governor Phillip to Botany Bay - considered the foundation book of modern Australia – is expected to sell for Aus$38,000-48,000 at The Book Merchant Jenkins on August 12.
Published in London only a year after the arrival of the First Fleet in ‘New Holland’ in January 1788, Stockdale's work is the most detailed early account of the famous expedition.
Compiled from Admiral Arthur Phillip's official reports and the journals of other officers in the First Fleet, the account describes the 250-day, 15,000-mile journey from England, the administrative and functional challenges facing the fledgling colony and safaris to the interior around Botany Bay and Port Jackson.
New Holland Cassoware, a plate from The Voyage of Governor Phillip to Botany Bay by John Stockdale, 1789. Estimate Aus$38,000-48,000 at The Book Merchant Jenkins.
It includes the earliest plan of the settlement of Sydney Cove and, to the appendix, a list of the names of the first transported convicts that is today a key source for Australian genealogy. Six of the 11 ships that made up the First Fleet carried a total of around 850 convicts.
The cover of The Voyage of Governor Phillip to Botany Bay by John Stockdale, 1789. Estimate Aus$38,000-48,000 at The Book Merchant Jenkins.
The Voyage of Governor Phillip to Botany Bay was published at the time in two ‘grades’, one uncoloured, the other (as here in the first state) with the 46 natural history plates and seven folding maps and charts hand painted with watercolours. In Jonathan Wantrup's Australian Rare Books, 1788-1900, it is described as "a key work and essential to any serious collection of Australian books."
It was 18 years after Captain Cook first landed at Botany Bay, that Britain established the first permanent European settlement in Australia. The cost to Britain of dispatching the First Fleet of colonists was £84,000 (about £9.6m).
