Voyage au Cap de Bonne-Esperance, et autour du Monde avec le Capitaine Cook, et principalement dans les pays des Hottentots et des Caffres. Traduit par M. Le Tourneur.?

First edition of Pierre Le Tourneur’s French translation, published in Paris by Buisson in 1787, in two quarto volumes. It appeared the same year as a more common three-volume octavo edition issued by the same publisher. The work is illustrated with a folding frontispiece showing a view of the Cape, a large folding map of the Cape and 15 hors-texte plates, several folding. In the present copy, the plates have been bound at the end of volumes I and II. Some still bear the indication “Tom. III”, inherited from the pagination of the octavo edition, showing that the two authorised editions circulated with the same engraved plates.

Contemporary full mottled brown calf. Spines with raised bands and gilt decoration, red morocco lettering-pieces and black morocco numbering-pieces. Double blind rules to the boards. In volume I, losses at the head of the joints and the upper joint finely split at head and foot; in volume II, the upper joint rubbed. Corners restored with strips of leather. A few browned leaves at the end of volume II, otherwise scattered pale foxing. Plate 2 in volume II incorrectly folded.

Anders Sparrman arrived at the Cape in April 1772, having already sailed to China as a ship’s surgeon. A pupil of Linnaeus, he first settled there as a tutor while continuing his natural-history researches. A few months later, Johann Reinhold Forster recruited him as an assistant aboard the Resolution: Sparrman thus joined Cook’s second voyage and took part for nearly twenty-eight months in a journey that carried the expedition beyond the Antarctic Circle, to New Zealand, Tahiti and Easter Island.

Returning to the Cape in March 1775, he did not immediately make for Europe. He practised medicine and then, from July 1775 to April 1776, undertook a long journey eastwards through the colony as far as the Great Fish River. It is this expedition that supplies most of the substance of the book: observations on natural history, descriptions of the Khoikhoi and Xhosa, the lives of Dutch and German settlers, roads, landscapes and the resources of the country. He returned with important zoological collections, including specimens of species now extinct.

The account first appeared in Swedish in 1783, followed by German in 1784, English in 1785 and French in 1787. In his translation, Le Tourneur retained the division into chapters and sections found in the German version. The voyage with Cook occupies only a relatively small part of the work; most of the text is devoted to the Cape and the interior of southern Africa. The large map, first issued separately in 1779, is itself an important landmark in eighteenth-century South African cartography.

The quarto format gives this first French translation a particular bibliographical interest. Buisson justified the existence of two formats by the wish to accommodate owners of the published voyages of Cook, so that Sparrman could be added to their sets. In this larger format, the work thus returns to the bibliographical context for which it was intended: an account of southern Africa written by a Linnaean naturalist who had himself sailed around the world aboard the Resolution.