A Collection of Voyages chiefly in the Southern Atlantick Ocean.

£14,000 · Offered by Shapero Rare Books · No longer available

with extra Jefferys chart The extra chart, by Jefferys, is: A Chart of the Ocean between South America Africa. With the Tracks of Dr Edmund Halley in 1700 and Monf.r Lozier Bouvet in 1738. Halley and Bouvert outlined tracks in the South Pacific outlining a possible Southern Continent, the potential presence of which greatly concerned Dalrymple. The volume contains in its preface Dalrymple's appeal to Lord North to allow him official approval to make a voyage of discovery in the South Atlantic to investigate the reports of Halley, Bouvet, La Roche, and Leon, and to search for and establish a colony at Halley's Cape Circumcision. There is a most interesting section which contains a surprisingly modern constitution for the new colony: 1. '...there shall be a Tax of Batchelors or Maidens possessing lands and houses... which shall go the maintenance of orphans...'; 2. 'No coin but Copper Money as in China and accounts kept in decimals'; 3. 'Women are not debarred from public office, but may enjoy their rights in the public assembly on the same footing as men'; 4. 'No Person shall exercise the Profession of Law, by counsel or otherwise, for hire or fee, on penalty of forfeiture of all his property and perpetual imprisonment'; 5. 'No person to be imprisoned for debt, or for any offence, but such as make their being left at liberty dangerous to society'. Dalrymple had intended to expand the work further, but decided to collect such articles as he had assembled on the subject, for he

• Binding: Hardcover

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