The Last Voyage: Captain Cook’s Lost Diary by Hammond Innes lands on the |> SALE <| shelves in my shop.
Collins, 1978, Hardback in dust wrapper.
Illustrated by way of: Maps to the endpapers and blanks;
From the cover: Captain James Cook, RN, the great navigator, was killed in the Pacific 200 years ago, on 14 February, 1779, aged 50. At that time he had explored further and for longer periods than any seaman before him. In three great voyages of discovery the first two in search of the Southern Continent, the third probing the Arctic for a North-West Passage he sailed more than 160,000 miles. Even more remarkable, by diet and hygiene aboard his ships he kept them free of scurvy and other diseases while at sea for more than three years at a stretch -something that had never been done before.
The Last Voyage is the story of that third expedition as Cook might have told it. Unlike his Journals, which were official records, largely impersonal, this is a highly personal and self-revealing account of a man stretched to the limit.
In visiting many of the places Cook discovered, and in sailing and navigating his own boat, Hammond Innes became increasingly fascinated by Cooks Journals and by the enigma of the man who wrote them. Everybody knows what Cook did, he says; he wrote so much about his voyages, yet so little about himself. He has therefore created a different kind of document that shows James Cook as he believes him to have been.
In presenting it as Cooks own writing, I am conscious of having taken a great liberty, he says. But it has been done as a labour of love and in an honest endeavour to set right the impression left by the official Journals. Cook was neither a dull man, nor unemotional and inhuman. He could not have been, or he would not have achieved what he did.
Very Good in Good Dust Wrapper. Dust wrapper heavily sunned at the spine with fraying to the top edge. Price Clipped.
Brown boards with Gilt titling to the Spine. 254 pages. 8½” x 5½”.
This book will be eventually reach my delightful website…(added to my Fiction Author: I category.) but get 60% off buying from this very blog blog… Buy it now for just £2.60 + P&P! Of course, if you don’t like this one there are plenty more available here!
BookLovers of Bath 