The Great Southland: Searching for the Antipodes, from Classical Scholars to Quiros & Dampier
By Hordern House, Sydney, Australia.
A Catalogue (August 2011): $55 Australian. (The Australian dollar is virtually equal to the U.S. dollar).
Reviewed By Dr. Robert J. Chandler
From Down Under comes an Up Ender. On August 4, 2011 Hordern House offered 127 items in a fixed-price catalogue, The Great Southland: Searching for the Antipodes, from Classical Scholars to Quiros & Dampier. Importantly, most volumes come from "a single important private collection" assembled over forty years.
The unknown consignor had a good eye. He picked the best editions in the best condition. Often the catalogue will note, as it did for a 1510 work, "We know of no copy appearing for public sale since the 1950s," or for a 1609 volume, one of a baker's dozen known, "we have never before seen a copy for sale and none has appeared at auction in the last twenty-five years."
Not only was the collector comprehensive, he scholarly sought the Great Southland everywhere. The catalogue observes, as it did for an item printed in 1643, that it contained "an often overlooked discussion," similar to one of 1677, with "a bizarre and surprisingly unnoticed text on the southern continent." This catalogue is a bibliography of the development of European ideas of Australia.
Hordern House divided the 127 items into five sections. Entries range from one to three pages, with colored illustrations of bindings, title pages, text, views, and maps from three centuries of fine books. Prices range from $248 to $225,000 in Australian dollars, along with two "Price on Application."
Section 1, "Ideas of a Southern Continent," is the longest with thirty-seven items, mostly told through maps. The earliest is Strabo's from the first century in a 1587 edition, followed by Ptolemy's view of the world, as portrayed in 1574. Ambrosius Macrobius's fifth century map (1483) is $185,000, while Maris Pacifica (1589), the first map of that ocean, and colored too, by Abraham Ortelius is yours for $13,850.
Of note is a 1981 work of two hundred copies by the Roxburghe Club, of England that is, not its San Francisco counterpart, reproducing a book of maps that cartographer Jean Rotz presented to King Henry VIII in 1542. It is a lavishly colored product from the fine mapmakers in Dieppe, France.
This school, active from the 1540s through the 1560s, drew "Jave de Grande." That prodigious compiler of Pacific voyages and sailing directions Alexander Dalrymple proposed in 1786 that this land showed early Portuguese discoveries of Australia. Since then, as the catalogue attests, that "topic that has been a flypaper for crackpots." Would that a BCC book would sell for $2850.
"Travellers and Story-Tellers" is the first of three sections of twenty-seven items each. It contains the thirteenth century journey of Marco Polo (Venice, 1555) and the fourteenth century one by Sir John Mandeville, plus volumes from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries picturing exotic people, strange critters, and the Southern Cross constellation.
Mandeville "fired the global imagination" for "a route to China and the Indies," Hordern House asserts. While the incunabula is $165,000, the splendid 1928 Grabhorn edition of 150 copies containing thirty-one Valenti Angelo illustrations is more affordable at $2850.
Furthermore, the Grabhorn version is a true pirated edition. Corsair Bennett Cerf seized the entire press run, although paying a handsome ransom, and carried it off to New York to appear under his Random House imprint.
A section on Dutch exploration and those intrepid East India fleets follows, wherein the tiny jacht or "scout" Duyfken mapped part of the Australian coast in 1595. Testifying to the breadth of the collection, one volume is a 1661 architectural study of the Amsterdam Town Hall. Why is it included? The hall had a large floor map of Abel Tasman's 1542 and 1544 voyages.
The least expensive item at $248 is here, one of Hordern House's own Australian Maritime Series, the 1622 Dutch edition of Jacob le Maire's Mirror of the Australian Navigation. Best of all, this 1999 edition contains Dalrymple's 1770 English translation.
Section 4, "Spanish and Portuguese Discovery," contains the two "POA" heavyweights. The first is the rare 1510 Italian edition of Lodovico Varthema's travels from 1503 through 1508. A convert to Islam, he became the first Westerner to see Mecca, and then journeyed beyond India into Malaya, Java, and the Spice Islands. Varthema declared that "the testimony of one eye-witness is worth more than ten hear-says," and, according to the catalogue, he "effectively determined the course of European expansion to the east."
The other POA is one of many memorials by Pedro Fernandez de Quiros, who sailed to the New Hebrides in 1605 and became convinced that Terra Australis Incognita lay just beyond. From 1607 to 1614 he showered the King of Spain with forty memorials to fund another expedition. This printed eight-page one from August 1608 is the "Foundation Document for the Discovery of Australia."
Finally, "The English Adventurers Make Landfall" in nine items. Sir Francis Drake, known to have planted the first English text in California in 1579 (accurately told in that learned 1937 work Ye Preposterous Booke of Brasse) appears in The World Encompassed (1628) at the brassy price of $225,000. The catalogue preposterously claims that Drake "discovered San Francisco Bay," but that theory is happily disappearing as Drake's Bay is on its way to becoming a National Historic Landmark.
This splendid catalogue closes with the voyages of privateer William Dampier, who in 1699 sailed directly for Australia. Captain Woodes Rogers describes such a booty voyage with Dampier from 1708 to 1711 wherein he devotes thirty pages to Baja California and maps California as an island.
Throughout The Great Southland pricing reflects rarity. The 125 listed selections tally $2.9 million and the two "POA's" bring the total up to $3.8 million. One purchaser would get seventeen hundred years of European intellectualism, exploration, and geography.
Let's put this in the perspective of popular culture. On November 28, 2011, a June 1938 copy of Action Comics No. 1, heralding the appearance of Superman sold for a super price of $2.2 million. Which would you druther have?