An Arctic Voyage to Baffin’s Bay and Lancaster Sound: in Search of Friends with Sir John Franklin

Goodsir, Robert Anstruther

An Arctic Voyage to Baffin's Bay and Lancaster Sound, in Search of Friends with Sir John Franklin.

London. Presentation Copy, First edition. 1850. 12mo, viii, 152pp., [8]. Tinted lithograph frontispiece, folding map. Original blue blind stamped cloth. Gilt lettering on the spine. Skillfully recased. Library stamps of the Medical Society Edinburgh of which Goodsir was a member. A book plate "from the Travel Library of Beekman Pool" on inside the front cover. Folding map of Baffin Bay. Three pages of the publisher's advertisements are bound in at the end. Text is clean except an unfortunate old ink spill affecting 5 pages with no loss of text, Binding has some fading to the spine, and slight surface scuffing and discoloration to boards. Otherwise a very good copy in the scarce original binding.

The presentation inscription reads: "For the Library of the Royal Medical Society from the Author."

Goodsir's brother was missing from the Franklin expedition and this is the "Narrative of a voyage with Baffin Bay whalers, 1849, undertaken in search of the author's brother. Describes a whaling vessel's passage through the ice and processes in whaling, the birds observed and the Lancaster Sound region." (Arctic Bibliography 5919). They searched the area around Prince Regent's Inlet but were unsuccessful in finding any artifacts from the Franklin expedition and were finally turned back by the ice.