The Cruise of the Corwin

MUIR, John.

The Cruise of the Corwin.

FIRST EDITION, TRADE ISSUE. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1917.

Octavo. xxxi, 279 pp. Edited by William Frederic Badè. Original pale green cloth over boards, with a color pictorial label of the Corwin in Arctic ice (after a painting by Denny) mounted to the front board, white lettering, top edge gilt. Illustrated with photogravure plates from photographs — several by Edward S. Curtis — and with drawings from Muir's own sketches; appendices on glaciation and botany; one map of Wrangell Land. In the original publisher's pictorial dust jacket, priced $2.75 to the spine, unclipped. Kimes 348; BAL 14775; Arctic Bibliography 11838. Book very good, binding tight and internally clean; dust jacket good, with chipping and short tears at the spine head and corners but the pictorial artwork and $2.75 price intact.

Muir's Arctic journal, published posthumously by his literary executor. In the summer of 1881 the U.S. Revenue Cutter Corwin sailed from San Francisco into the Bering Sea, charged with searching for the lost Jeannette expedition under Commander George W. De Long and with resupplying the whaling and trading stations along the Alaskan and Siberian coasts. Captain Calvin L. Hooper invited Muir to join as the cruise's naturalist. Muir kept a daily journal and sent letters to the San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin recording glaciers, plant life, and the Aleut and Chukchi villages, as the Corwin worked north toward Wrangell Land.

SKU TO-2026-026