First French edition, first issue: the artist's account of Cook's first voyage and the discovery of eastern Australia. Translated by C. Henri from the 1784 English edition, it also contains material from later voyagers updating the account, including the experiences of the Forsters on the second voyage. This is the octavo issue noted by Kroepelien as preceding the otherwise identical quarto of the same year.

First French edition, first issue: the artist's account of Cook's first voyage and the discovery of eastern Australia. Translated by C. Henri from the 1784 English edition, it also contains material from later voyagers updating the account, including the experiences of the Forsters on the second voyage. This is the octavo issue noted by Kroepelien as preceding the otherwise identical quarto of the same year.

Parkinson had been employed in 1767 by Sir Joseph Banks, who thought so highly of his work that he arranged for the young man to join him on Cook's first voyage. When the expedition's draughtsman Alexander Buchan died at Tahiti, Parkinson was called on to take over all of the topographical work, completing some 1300 sketches, quite apart from compiling vocabularies in Tahiti and New Holland. At the end of the voyage, en route from Batavia to the Cape of Good Hope, he died of a fever, and after the return of the Endeavour ownership of his manuscripts and drawings was disputed: Banks considered that they were his, while Parkinson's brother Stanfield claimed them under the provisions of his brother's will. When Hawkesworth learned of the impending publication of this work, he got an injunction to delay its appearance until some time after his official account, and, despite having used Parkinson's work extensively, retaliated by deliberately omitting Parkinson's name from the narrative: even the botanical illustrations in the official account have no credit to the artist.

Some of the bibliographical history of this work is quite complex. An extended note by Rolf du Rietz in the Kroepelien catalogue explains that this octavo issue, although textually identical to a quarto issue published the same year by the same publisher, is actually the genuine first issue (du Rietz demonstrates from an error in the signatures that the quarto was re-imposed). Du Rietz knew the octavo only from the copy in the University of Oslo, although no complete census of the two issues has been attempted. A note in O'Reilly-Reitman suggests - as if we needed more complexity - that the number of plates is uncertain, as they examined copies with any number between five and eight; nonetheless, six plates is the standard collation.