An historical journal of the transactions at Port Jackson and Norfolk Island, by HUNTER, John (1737-1821)

with the discoveries which have been made in New South Wales and in the Southern Ocean, since the publication of Phillip's Voyage, compiled from the official papers; including the journals of Governors Phillip and King, and of Lieut. Ball; and the voyages from the first sailing of the Sirius in 1787, to the return of that ship's company to England in 1792. Illustrated with seventeen maps, charts, views & other embellishments, drawn on the spot by Captains Hunter, & Bradley, Lieutenant Dawes, & Governor King. London : John Stockdale, 1793. Quarto, later half calf over marbled papered boards ruled in gilt (rubbed), spine in compartments with gilt ornament and maroon leather title labels lettered in gilt; edges stained yellow, marbled endpapers, engraved frontispiece, pp (ii) (engraved title page and blank verso), [vi] (list of subscribers); [ii] (list of plates and blank verso), [viii] contents; 583, with 5 maps and charts (2 large folding) and 10 engraved plates (complete); frontispiece and title and both folding maps with scattered foxing (one map with an insignificant tape repair to verso of fold), the remaining plates with occasional light foxing, otherwise clean throughout; a good copy with wide margins. Captain John Hunter (1737-1821) arrived in Port Jackson in 1788 as second-in-command of the First Fleet flagship HMS Sirius, and was later to serve as Governor of New South Wales from 1795 to 1800. Hunter was responsible for carrying out the first surveys of the Sydney region, and he visually documented the landscape and natural history of the new colony in numerous sketches, several of which are reproduced as engravings in this work. (It is now known that the drawings in his sketchbook Birds & Flowers of New South Wales Drawn on the Spot in 1788, ’89 & ’90, held in the National Library of Australia, were copied from works made by George Raper, a gifted midshipman). Among the plates in Hunter's An historical journal is the earliest published view of Sydney, View of the Settlement on Sydney Cove, Port Jackson, 20th August 1788; another plate, engraved by William Blake after a sketch of an Aboriginal group by Phillip Gidley King, is the important A Family of New South Wales, in which Blake has clearly idealised the features of King's subjects. The quarto edition of An historical journal is by far the more desirable of the two published in 1793, the abridged octavo edition of the same year having only one folding map and one folding plate. ""[Hunter's] journal is a very valuable work on the early history of the English settlement in Australia"". (Hill) Ferguson 152; Hill 857; Wantrup 13