[ENGLISH Robert A.J.]. Sailing Directions for Antarctica including the Off-Lying Islands South of Latitude 60 [degrees]. H.O. no. 138. Washington: Hydrographic Office, 1943.
4to. Publisher's original white cloth, lettered in dark blue; pp. xiii, 312; numerous black illustrations from photographs, 9 folding photographic panoramas, one large folding colour map in pocket at rear (see below); cloth a little marked and spotted, rear inner hinge strengthened.
First edition. Shortly after publication, the US Government was obliged to insert an errata slip in copies of the Sailing Directions correcting several misappelations; a similar correction slip was pasted to the map. The present copy is without either of these errata slips, and perhaps was issued before the corrections could be made. The work itself offers a wealth of information, with an introductory chapter on exploration, living conditions and the like, and other chapters on the island groups and the Antarctic continent. The photographic illustrations of the various islands, capes, mountains and ice-shelves, along with the textual descriptions of them and other features, make this an essential companion for any devotee of the literature. 'A wonderfully comprehensive and well-illustrated work, with an extensive preliminary chapter on Exploration, Ice Terms, Ice Navigation, Currents, Meteorology, Optical Phenomena, Beacons, Health and Living Conditions, Flora, Fauna and Whaling; followed by detailed description of the geography' (Renard).
Spence 424.
Provenance: Posthumous bookplate Brian Birley Roberts inside front cover. Brian Burley Roberts, inspired as a child by reading Raymond Raife's The Quest for the Arctic Poppy, became a Polar ornithologist, researcher anf the father of the Antarctic Treaty. 'While an undergraduate, he organized and led the Cambridge University Expedition to Vatnajokull in Iceland in 1932 and the Cambridge University Expedition to Scoresby Sund in East Greenland in 1933. Roberts joined the British Graham Land Expedition, 1934-1937 (leader John Rymill), as an ornithologist, spending the austral winter of 1935 at the Argentine Islands and, after an operation to remove his appendix, the following winter on South Georgia where he studied Antarctic birds and elephant seals … In 1946, he joined the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge, as a part-time research fellow' (https://archiveshub.jisc.ac.uk). - The map in this copy is that issued by the Hydrographic Office in 1959, and must have been placed here by Roberts, discarding the 1943 map in order to have the up-to-date version at hand.
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