Shestoy Kontinent [The Sixth Continent]…
Shestoy Kontinent, ili Kratkoye Obozreniye Plavaniy k Yugu ot Kuka do Rossa, s Kartoyu [The Sixth Continent, or a Brief Overview of the Voyages to the South from Cook to Ross, with a Map].

Saint Petersburg: Eduard Weimar, 1854.

Octavo, [4], 18 pp; with a lithographed map; redundant library stamp on verso of title; 19th-century Russian quarter leather binding.

A Bellingshausen veteran on the exploration of the Antarctic

First edition and very rare: no copy of this original edition is noted in Worldcat (though it must be held in Russian libraries), which records nothing before a single copy of the third edition at the State Library of New South Wales (which in fact appears to be in fact a microform version).

First edition and very rare: no copy of this original edition is noted in Worldcat (though it must be held in Russian libraries), which records nothing before a single copy of the third edition at the State Library of New South Wales (which in fact appears to be in fact a microform version).

This St Petersburg imprint is a most interesting and early work on Antarctic exploration, anonymously published by Pavel Novosil'skii, a participant in the famous Antarctic expedition under the command of Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen and Mikhail Lazarev in 1819-21. Novosil'skii served as a midshipman on the Mirny, and Bellingshausen named a bay on South Georgia Island for him. After the return of the expedition, he served in the Naval Cadet Corps, and later in the Ministry of Public Education and the Ministry of Internal Affairs. In the 1850s he published a series of essays on the history of Antarctic and Arctic exploration, starting with "Yuzhny Polyus, iz zapisok byvshego morskogo ofitsera" ("South Pole, from the notes of an ex-naval officer". St Petersburg, 1853) which, published a year before the present work, became an important addition to Bellingshausen's official account of his expedition. Novosil'skii's publications were either offprints from Russian periodicals, or separate editions like this, published on the author's account: in either case the print-runs were extremely small, and they quickly became bibliographical rarities, even within Russia.

This was the first Russian work to give an overview of the results of early exploration in the Antarctic, describing the results of all known expeditions from James Cook to James Ross, including the voyages of Cook (1773-74), Bellingshausen and Lazarev (1819-21), William Smith (1819), Nathaniel Palmer and George Powell (1821), James Weddell (1822-23), Henry Foster (1828-31), John Biscoe (1830-33), Dumont d'Urville (1837-38), Charles Wilkes (1838-42), and James Ross (1839-43). The map outlines and names the discovered parts of the Antarctic coast. The book was published anonymously, with the preface signed by "a former naval officer." Despite the limited print-run it proved popular, and two revised and enlarged editions followed in the same year, (published by Eduard Weimar, the publisher of this first printing, and the Imperial Academy of Sciences).

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Provenance: With the stamp of a pre-revolutionary engineers' institution (no longer extant).

Not noted by Rosove's "Antarctica, 1772-1922".

Condition Report: Overall a very good clean copy; binding mildly rubbed at extremities.

Ref: #4505174

Condition Report