HOPPIN, Benjamin.

Inquire · Offered by Peter Harrington

A Diary kept while with the Peary Arctic Expedition of 1896. First edition, first issue, with Hoppin's manuscript corrections and excisions throughout. The primary objective of the voyage was to collect the Cape York meteorite, an endeavour that was completed the following year. Hoppin was the expedition's mineralogist. Between 1886 and 1909, the Peary Arctic Club organized eight expeditions to the Arctic. Although Peary had previously sighted the meteorite, he was unable to retrieve it and spent considerable time between expeditions planning how it could be removed. The 1896 expedition was equipped with large wooden beams and iron rails for this purpose. They sailed on SS Hope on 15 July from Sydney, Nova Scotia, accompanied by a group of Cornell students who wished to collect fossils, minerals, and botanical specimens. Along with notes on personnel and a day-to-day record of the voyage, the Diary contains descriptions of geographical locations, sites of previous expeditions, and transcriptions of graves at whaler burial grounds. The manuscript corrections comprise grammatical and factual amendments, such as place names and figures, many of which are incorporated into the errata of the second issue, published later that year.There are four excised sections where several lines were cut from each page; these deletions seem to have not been incorporated into the second issue. The first excision (p. 34) removes mention that a hill on Meteor Island was "named after a person on th

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