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BYRON, John [and] Abbé Gabriel François COYER.
The Narrative of the Honourable John Byron… [bound with] A Supplement… Containing a Discovery and Description of the Island of Frivola….
London, Baker, Leigh and Davies [and] Millar, Whiston and White, 1768 and, 1752.
Octavo, two works bound in one, the first with frontispiece; very fresh copy in contemporary sprinkled calf, neatly rebacked to style, triple red labels to spine; armorial bookplate of Thomas Smyth.
Second edition of Byron's account of the Anson voyage, bound together with the most famous satire on Anson's Pacific voyage, written by the Abbé Coyer and purporting to tell of a "Frivolous Island" suppressed from the official accounts by Anson himself. It is ironic to see the two works, the first an exciting account of the voyage, the second a subtle and funny satire published at Anson's expense, bound together.
The first work is Byron's Anson narrative in its second edition (published the same year as and apparently quite unchanged from the first). Bound with it here is Coyer's wonderful satire, first published in French in 1750, and published in an English translation the same year. This copy is the first revised and extended edition, the first to sport the new and seemingly more authentic title A Supplement (the 1750 edition was simply called A Description of the Island Frivola, and, at only forty pages long, is significantly shorter than the present work).
The wonderful premise is that this account is said to have been suppressed by Anson as demeaning to his other achievements. As its name suggests, the island is an insubstantial world, ruled by a court seeking ever greater levels of sophistication. Thus, when Anson first approaches the city, he gives a long account of British advances in science, only to be met with derision. On the brink of being turned away, he dances a jig for the entertainment of the bored decadents, and only then does he succeed in gaining their attention, even if one of them comments crushingly that 'this Europe of yours must be a very poor Place, since it is not the first Time that it has sent hither Men but half clad'.
The irony of this vision of the dour Anson dancing, bartering with ribbons, and kow-towing to his own barber (whose advances in curling are widely admired) is enhanced by the fact that, as Fausett comments, Anson's activities, 'both in reforming the Royal Navy and harassing the Spanish, were far from sentimental'.
Gove, 'The Imaginary Voyage in Prose Fiction', p. 317 (second work); Hill, 233; James Ford Bell, B642; Kroepelien, 235 (second work).
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