McCORMICK, Robert (1800-1890). Voyages of Discovery in the Arctic and Antarctic Seas, and Round the World: Being the Personal Narratives of Attempts to Reach the North and South Poles; And of an Open-Boat Expedition up the Wellington Channel in Search of Sir John Franklin and Her Majesty's Ships “Erebus” and “Terror,” in Her Majesty’s Boat “Forlorn Hope.” London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, and Rivington, 1884.
2 volumes, royal 8vo. 66 plates including 5 color-printed maps (one folding) and 37 tinted lithographs (including 3 portrait frontispieces and 5 folding panoramas with two scenes each). Original royal blue cloth decorated in black and stamped in gilt (rebacked preserving original spines, spines also sunned, spine worn on vol. II, corners rubbed, some spotting at foot of vol. II). Provenance: Ann Savours Shirley (1927-2022), ownership inscriptions, bookplates, and notes laid in. Shirley was a British historian and collector of polar exploration, more notably the head curator at the Scott Polar Institute at Cambridge University and editor of numerous scholarly works on Robert Falcon Scott.
FIRST EDITION, LIMITED ISSUE, ONE OF ONLY 750 COPIES of McCormick’s important first-hand account of the Ross expedition (1839-1843) taken from his own diaries, in which “he conveys the sense of awed wonder experienced by all aboard Ross’ ships when the true enormity of the Antarctic continent revealed itself for the first time” (Taurus). McCormick sailed with Captain Parry on his fourth voyage to the North Pole in 1827 aboard Hecla, and served under Ross from 1839-1843 on the Erebus and Terror expedition to the South Pole serving as the surgeon on board; he recounts both expeditions in the first volume. The second volume describes his voyage with Captain Sir Edward Belcher's 1852-54 on the last Admiralty search for Sir John Franklin and his ships Erebus and Terror (which had successfully carried Ross to the Antarctic ten years earlier). McCormick was also the ship’s surgeon aboard the second voyage of the HMS Beagle (1831-1836) under Captain Robert FitzRoy which employed a young Charles Darwin as the expedition’s naturalist. Arctic Bibliography 10582; Rosove 221.A1 (“very scarce”); Spence 747; Taurus 10.