A fine copy of the first edition: the last and most difficult to find of the great exploration journals published by Boone during the heroic age of Australian exploration.

A fine copy of the first edition: the last and most difficult to find of the great exploration journals published by Boone during the heroic age of Australian exploration.

The Rattlesnake completed the important series of hydrographical voyages undertaken by the Admiralty in the late 1840s to chart the Great Barrier Reef and north coast, as well as the southern coast of New Guinea, continuing the work that began with Lort Stokes on the Beagle and was continued by Blackwood on the Fly and Bramble. On board Rattlesnake were a number of men whose activities and achievements covered a wide field. Captain Owen Stanley, a naval officer with great skill as a hydrographic surveyor, was a fellow of the Royal Society and Royal Astronomical Society. He died prematurely, aged 39, soon after the return of the Rattlesnake to Sydney, in March 1850.

John Macgillivray, author of this journal, was a naturalist, who had already sailed in New Guinea waters with Captain Blackwood on the Fly; in 1852 he accompanied Captain Denham of the Herald on a surveying voyage in the South Pacific. He was an assiduous natural history collector, whose large collections are still housed in the British Museum (Natural History) and Kew. Thomas Henry Huxley, who in later life achieved great fame as a biologist, anthropologist and philosopher, was a young man at the beginning of his career when he accompanied Rattlesnake as assistant surgeon and naturalist. He was also a talented amateur artist, as the plates in these two volumes attest.

Oswald Walters Brierly, later Marine Painter to Queen Victoria, but in the 1840s living in New South Wales, went on the voyage at Owen Stanley's invitation. His greatest legacy from this experience unfortunately no longer exists: on the wall of one of the first houses in Mosman, he painted a huge mural of Rattlesnake in a storm off Timor.

When the party left Sydney, Edmund Kennedy and members of his ill-fated Cape York expedition were also on board. They disembarked at Rockingham Bay and within a couple of months had met with absolute disaster. This Narrative offers the only published records of the expedition: botanist William Carron's account, and the statement made by Jackey-Jackey, Kennedy's faithful aboriginal companion.