[TRANSPORTATION] Adventures of a Guardsman.

A$2,500 · Offered by Douglas Stewart Fine Books

Limited edition

London : Richard Bentley, 1848. First edition. Duodecimo (170 x 110 mm), contemporary half red calf over cloth, spine in compartments with gilt decoration and contrasting leather title piece lettered in gilt; top edge gilt, original marbled endpapers, pp. viii, 272; occasional light foxing, several leaves with browning, else internally excellent; ex St. John s College Library, with library shelf number in manuscript to upper board and discreet stamps to several pages including title. Rare convict memoir written by a gentleman soldier of the Royal Horse Guards, who in 1839 was sentenced to transportation to New South Wales for seven years for making violent threats against his superior officers. Cozens was born in Pembrokeshire in 1815, the son of a Justice of the Peace. Well-educated and highly literate, he was marked for a career in the Church, but he ran away from school and joined the Royal Horse Guards instead, and it is around this point that his account begins in earnest. In 1839, at the age of 24 and with the rank of sergeant, he was found guilty at a Regents Park court martial of the charge of violence towards a superior officer; his threats to officers had followed an act of insubordination, in his refusal to obey a command to clean his troop horse. He was sentenced to be transported for seven years. Cozens was one of 230 convicts who arrived at Port Jackson on the transport ship Woodbridge , on 28 February 1840. After initially being forced to share quarters with ma

• Binding: Hardcover

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