Lot 208
Strange, James
Journal and Narrative of the Commercial Expedition from Bombay to the North-West Coast of America
Auction: India in Ink: The Library of Dr Raj Krishna | 01 October 2026 from 10am | Lots 79 to 208
Description
Together with a Chart showing the Tract of the Expedition. With an Introduction by A. V. Venkatarama Ayyar. [Series title at head:] Records of Fort St George. Madras: re-printed by the Superintendent, Government Press, 1929. Folio (33.2 x 21cm), original cloth-backed boards, iii 63 pp., large folding heliozincographic map, map with closed handling tear and small rust-stain [Howes S-1064]
Provenance
INDIA IN INK: THE LIBRARY OF DR RAJ KRISHNA
T. M. Wilson, possibly an American diplomat (ownership inscriptions to front board recto and verso, the latter dated Madras 1941; laid-in typed letter addressed to T. M. Wilson care of the American consulate, Hong Kong, dated 1932).
Footnote
First edition, second impression, the text apparently a straightforward reprint of the first impression of the previous year, with the same extent and retaining the original date in the introduction, but the map containing the new date of 1929. Printed from a manuscript journal discovered by the Madras record office in the 1920s, the work describes the voyage undertaken by James Strange, son of the chief justice of the Madras supreme court, to Nootka Sound in 1785-7 with the aim of establishing a fur trade between America and China, and is ‘the first fur-trading voyage to these regions of which an adequate record survives’ (Howes). Strange had been inspired to make the voyage by ‘an attentive perusal' of the third voyage of Captain Cook, and includes lengthy glossaries of the native languages of Nootka Sound and Prince William's Sound.