Beschreibung:

[FLINDERS, Matthew (1774-1814)] Encyclopaedia Britannica; or, a dictionary of arts, sciences, and miscellaneous literature; ... The third edition. Edinburgh: printed for A. Bell and C. Macfarquhar, 1797 [vols. I-XVIII] and for Thomson Bonar, 1803 [supplement vols. I and II]. ‘Matt[he]w Flinders given by Sir Joseph Banks’: the Encyclopaedia Britannica given to Matthew Flinders by Sir Joseph Banks and used aboard HMS Investigator on the first circumnavigation of Australia. With autograph annotations by Flinders on subjects including Metaphysics, Theology, Weather, and the character of Australia’s native inhabitants. Sir Joseph Banks (1743-1820), as President of the Royal Society, was central to the approval of a British expedition to Terra Australis, and it was at his suggestion that the Admiralty appointed Flinders as its commander. In his Voyage to Terra Australis (1814), Flinders summarises the various articles taken aboard HMS Investigator, either for barter with the native inhabitants or for the crew's own use and convenience: ‘amongst the latter were most of the books of voyages to the South Seas, which, with our own individual collections, and the Encyclopedia Britannica, presented by the Right Hon. Sir Joseph Banks, formed a library in my cabin for the use of all the officers’ (p.6). While the two supplementary volumes were published too late to have been taken on the voyage, Flinders evidently completed the set either during his years in Mauritius (1803-1810) or on his return to England. The numerous autograph pencil annotations and underlinings, which appear on 24pp. across five volumes, reveal Flinders’s close engagement with theological questions about the nature of God, alongside more pragmatic notes on such subjects as weather, measures and weights which might reasonably concern a ship’s commander. Some annotations relate to God’s benevolence and omnipotence, while one, beside a paragraph on the mind’s ability to comprehend ‘absolute impossibilities’, gives the example: ‘To be one God and three at the same time’. Another asks how it is possible that there should be ‘fish in the lakes and pools upon the top of mountains, the Table Mountain at the Cape of Good Hope, for instance’, while another refers to an unusual meteorological phenomenon observed on the ‘Isle of France’ (Mauritius), where Flinders was detained for almost seven years. Most strikingly, beside a section which discusses whether virtue is instinctive or conditioned by Christian ideas of divine reward and punishment, Flinders writes: ‘A native of New Holland feels no remorse at having stabbed a man in the dark who had offended him, or at having killed his wife in rage!’. A truly rare and remarkable survival from a landmark moment in the history of Australia. We are unable to trace any appearance at auction of another book owned or annotated by Flinders. 20 volumes, quarto (268 x 205mm). Engraved frontispiece and 580 engraved plates (of 591), of which 4 folding and one hand-coloured and folding, folding letterpress table in vol.iv (first few leaves of vol.iii damaged by water and chipped with slight loss of text, leaves F2-3 and 2 plates in vol.xi detached, folding plate 418 bound upside down and sliced in two, variable browning and dampstaining). Uniform contemporary diced russia, spine lettered in gilt (somewhat rubbed and worn with a few covers detached). Provenance: Matthew Flinders (1774-1814; autograph ink inscription on title of vol. I recording receipt of the set from Sir Joseph Banks) – pencil annotations to the chapter on Medals, possibly in the hand of Matthew Flinders’s daughter Anne (1812-1892) or his grandson the Egyptologist Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie (1853-1942), both of whom were collectors of Greek and Roman coins – by descent to the present owners.