Voyages dans les Parties Interieures de l’Amerique, pendant le Cours de la Derniere Guerre; Par un Officier de l’Armee Royale by Anbury, Thomas

Paris: Chez Briand, 1790. First edition, in two volumes (pp. 396, 470), folding map showing Virginia north to the Great Lakes. Octavo, in recent modern three-quarter leather over complimentary marbled boards, five raised bands, gilt titles to spines, impressed decoration. Thomas Anbury served with the royal army during the early years of the American Revolutionary War and was captured and made prisoner at Saratoga by the colonial forces. Upon giving his parole, he travelled throughout the colonies, an interested but not especially objective observer (He thought slavery a curse). These two volumes, comprising eighty letters to ‘a friend’, record his impressions of what was soon to become the United States. Anbury first writes in August, 1776, from Cork, Ireland, where an expeditionary force is about to embark for North America, later from Montreal where British units have been gathered for a march down the Champlain valley into New York. There are letters, then, from various places along the eastern seaboard, including Richmond; the final letter is dated at Falmouth, England, in December 1781 when Anbury arrived home. It would be two years before the war concluded with the American victory at Yorktown. A scarce, not to say rare, book. This copy was found in virtually original condition, with wide margins, the pages uncut (still), and as issued at Paris without boards or bindings. It appears now, at over two hundred years of age, as it were, in its first dress. Exceptional.