BEECHEY, Frederick William.

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Narrative of a Voyage to the Pacific and Beering's Strait, to Co-operate with the Polar Expeditions: First edition, in the preferred Admiralty quarto format. Unlike the octavo edition issued later in 1831, this edition contains uniformly high-quality plates and an appended selection of important scientific papers.Beechey's (1796-1856) expedition was sent as the third part of a "grand design for the assault on the Northwest Passage" (Gough), in which his ship, the Blossom, would approach from the Pacific, while the expeditions of captains Franklin and Parry would approach from the north. Beechey heard at Kamchatka that Parry had turned back, but he waited at Kotzebue Sound for Franklin through the summers of 1827 and 1828. "Near Point Barrow, Alaska, Beechey and Franklin had arrived within fifty leagues of each other, when the latter was compelled by the weather to turn back" (Hill). His account includes descriptions of visits to Pitcairn Island, Tahiti, Alaska, Hawaii, Macau, Okinawa, and the coast of California. He gives "an important account of Monterey and San Francisco before the American conquest" (Hill). On Pitcairn, Beechey met the last survivor of the Bounty mutiny, John Adams; one engraved plate reproduces a delicate portrait of Adams by Beechey's brother, Richard, who was serving as a midshipman on the Blossom.

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