Parkinson, Sydney.
A Journal of a Voyage to the South Seas in HMS Endeavour.
Caliban Books.
1984.

This is a facsimile production of the 1784 edition of the Journal.

Stanfield Parkinson's preface to the original edition is included, and is followed by a lengthy 'Explanatory Preface' by John Fothergill, who presented the other and concluding side of the argument over the circumstances surrounding the original publication.

Twenty seven plates of Parkinson's drawings with attributions to various engravers are included. Parkinson's attentive ear supplies vocabularies for Tahiti, New Zealand, Savu and New Holland, and calculations for the Transit of Venus (2 - 3 June 1769).

The text is most readable and makes a superb supplement to Cook's more nautical account. And the whole book makes a very useful addition to a Cook library of accounts of the First Voyage.

Paul Capper

Originally published in Cook's Log, page 410, volume 9, number 1 (1986).