Evidently very rare: this is one of the earliest recorded photographically illustrated exhibition catalogues. It was published to accompany the 1880 display of a remarkable suite of 22 paintings of the Niger's four-year whaling voyage. Raleigh, a retired seaman, was a "fancy painter of carriages and house interiors" as well as a sign and boat painter in New Bedford, when he took up a second career as a painter of maritime art. The photographs here are of his series of oil paintings, each measuring six by eleven feet, which were designed to form a vast discontinuous panorama of a whaling voyage. Some seventeen of the paintings are held today in the New Bedford Whaling Museum, and Philip Purrington's 4 Years A-whaling: Charles S. Raleigh, Illustrator (New Bedford, Mass., 1972) has published them in full with explanatory materials. The images were painted in 1878-80 and exhibited sporadically until 1904.

Evidently very rare: this is one of the earliest recorded photographically illustrated exhibition catalogues. It was published to accompany the 1880 display of a remarkable suite of 22 paintings of the Niger's four-year whaling voyage. Raleigh, a retired seaman, was a "fancy painter of carriages and house interiors" as well as a sign and boat painter in New Bedford, when he took up a second career as a painter of maritime art. The photographs here are of his series of oil paintings, each measuring six by eleven feet, which were designed to form a vast discontinuous panorama of a whaling voyage. Some seventeen of the paintings are held today in the New Bedford Whaling Museum, and Philip Purrington's 4 Years A-whaling: Charles S. Raleigh, Illustrator (New Bedford, Mass., 1972) has published them in full with explanatory materials. The images were painted in 1878-80 and exhibited sporadically until 1904.

The Niger departed New Bedford in 1870 for the Pacific. It sought whales in the waters near Tristan da Cunha before entering the Indian Ocean, skirting the south coast of Australia and finally spent seven months in New Zealand, visiting the Bay of Islands, Auckland, Portand Russell, before stopping at Norfolk Island and Savage Island.