Histoire de la Virginie with Voyage de Guillaume Dampier, avec le Voyage de Lionel Wafer

2 works bound as one. Histoire de la Virginie [iv]+432-folding typographical table+[xvi index] pages with title page printed in red and black, illustrated engraved frontispiece featuring the arms of the Commonwealth, fourteen full-page engravings of Native Americans. Second edition in French (translated from the English and published in the same year as the first French-language Paris edition) with Voyage de Guillaume Dampier, avec le Voyage de Lionel Wafer 274+[xiv index] pages with title page printed in red and black, illustrated with eighteen folding engravings including maps, plants, birds, fish, and Native American Indians. Only six copies of the 1705 edition found in OCLC. Duodecimo (6" x 3 3/4") the two bound in full contemporary mottled calf with five raised spine bands in gilt-tooled spine.

Histoire de la Virginie, written by a native Virginian and published originally in English in 1705, Robert Beverley's work is considered the most important and reliable history of early life in the Virginia colony. He was a clerk of the council of Virginia about 1697, and his history covers all aspects of life in Virginia, including the best contemporary account of the Native American tribes and the life of its early settlers. The engraved plates are based on 16th-century drawings by John White.

William Dampier (c1651-1715) was an English explorer, pirate, privateer, navigator, and naturalist who became the first Englishman to explore parts of what is today Australia, and the first person to circumnavigate the world three times. He has also been described as Australia's first natural historian, as well as one of the most important British explorers of the period between Francis Drake (16th century) and James Cook (18th century), he "bridged those two eras" with a mix of piratical derring-do of the former and scientific inquiry of the later. His expeditions were among the first to identify and name a number of plants, animals, foods, and cooking techniques for a European audience; being among the first English writers to use words such as avocado, barbecue, and chopsticks. In describing the preparation of avocados, he was the first European to describe the making of guacamole, named the breadfruit plant, and made frequent documentation of the taste of numerous foods foreign to the European palate such as flamingo and manatee. After impressing the Admiralty with his book A New Voyage Round the World, Dampier was given command of a Royal Navy ship and made important discoveries in western Australia, before being court-martialed for cruelty. On a later voyage he rescued Alexander Selkirk, a former crewmate who may have inspired Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. Others influenced by Dampier include James Cook, Horatio Nelson, Charles Darwin, and Alfred Russel Wallace.

Lionel Wafer (1640–1705) was a Welsh explorer, buccaneer and privateer. A ship's surgeon, Wafer made several voyages to the South Seas and visited Maritime Southeast Asia in 1676. In 1679 he sailed again as a surgeon, soon after settling in Jamaica to practice his profession. In 1680, Wafer was recruited by buccaneer Edmund Cooke to join a privateering venture under the leadership of Captain Bartholomew Sharp, where he met William Dampier at Cartagena. After being injured during an overland journey, Wafer was left behind with four others in the Isthmus of Darien in Panama, where he stayed with the Cuna Indians. He gathered information about their culture, including their shamanism and a short vocabulary of their language. He studied the natural history of the isthmus. The following year, Wafer left the Indians promising to return and marry the chief's sister and bring back dogs from England. He fooled the buccaneers at first as he was dressed as an Indian, wearing body-paint and ornamented with a nose-ring. It took them some time to recognize him.

Wafer reunited with Dampier, and after privateering with him on the Spanish Main until 1688, he settled in Philadelphia. By 1690 Wafer was back in England and in 1695 he published A New Voyage and Description of the Isthmus of America, which described his adventures. It was translated into French (1706), German (1759), and Swedish (1789). The Darien Company hired him as an adviser when it was planning its settlement on the isthmus in 1698.

Condition:

Gilt-tooled spine dulled and rubbed, slight crack at top of front joint, otherwise sound, some light waterstaining, corners bumped and rubbed, inner hinges cracked.