A voyage to the South Sea, undertaken by command of his majesty for the purpose of conveying the bread-fruit tree to the West Indies, in his majesty's ship The Bounty, commanded by lieutenant William Bligh. Including an account of the mutiny on board the said ship, and the subsequent voyage of part of the crew, in the ship's boat, from Tofoa, and the Friendly Islands, to Timor, a Dutch settlement in the East Indies.

London, George Nicol, 1792.4to. Contemporary polished calf, gilt fillets round sides, skilfully rebacked with the original spine laid down, spine richly gilt with green morocco titlelabel, in modern buckram slipcase. With engraved frontispiece portrait, 3 engraved plates (2 folding) and 4 charts (3 folding). (10),153,IV,88, 247-264 pp.First edition; with armorial bookplate of Wiliam Lloyd of Aston, dated 1806. - Our copy is one of the very few known copies of the composite issue of Bligh's complete official account of the Bounty voyage, specially printed to incorporate the original printing of the Narrative of the mutiny, on board his majesty's ship Bounty, London 1790. Bligh, a man of almost pathological integrity, had a special state of the Voyage prepared which excluded the Mutiny chapters, so that those who wished might bind their copies of the Mutiny in with the chapters that preceded and followed that portion of the work (The Davidson collection 111). - In 1787 Lieutenant Bligh took command of HMS Bounty, hoping to win a premium offered by the Royal Society for anyone who could obtain breadfruit trees, seen as a cheap, high-energy food source which could be given to British slaves. Having obtained the trees in Tahiti, Bligh set course for the Caribbean but the ship never reached its destination because of a mutiny mounted by Bligh's protégé Fletcher Christian on 28 April 1789, during which he and eighteen loyal crewmen were forced into a tiny launch. Despite a brief landing in Tofua, where one crewman was killed by hostile natives, the rest of the crew survived the seemingly impossible 3,618 nautical miles voyage to Timor, the nearest European settlement, after a 47-day voyage. They visited several more islands before being transported back to Britain. Several of the mutineers, who had settled on Pitcairn Island, were eventually captured and three were executed in England. - A fine copy of the extremely rare composite edition.Hill 132 & 135 'an extremely important book'; Wantrup 62b; Du Rietz 93 'not seen'; Ferguson 126; Howgego p. 125.