Through New Guinea and the Cannibal Countries - Captain Webster’s Adventurous Pacific Expedition Narrative

WEBSTER, Captain H. Cayley. Through New Guinea and the Cannibal Countries. London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1898. First Edition, first impression. Large octavo. Original blue publisher’s cloth, boldly lettered and illustrated in gilt to the upper board and spine, with gilt figures after native subjects. Photogravure portrait frontispiece of the author, title printed in red and black, and numerous photographic plates throughout. Early ownership inscription dated 1903 to the half-title. A tremendous late-Victorian Pacific exploration narrative, written by Captain H. Cayley Webster from journeys made through New Guinea, the Admiralty Islands, New Britain, New Ireland and the Solomons. Webster opens his journey in August 1893, leaving London by P. & O. steamer, changing ships at Colombo, and then waiting seven weeks at Singapore because the mail service to New Guinea ran only twice monthly. From there the book moves into a world of coastal cruising, jungle routes, island settlements, colonial stations, missionary outposts, unfamiliar customs, and hazardous encounters at the edge of the British, German and Dutch Pacific spheres. The appeal of the book lies in its immediacy. Webster gives the reader the movement of the expedition itself - ships, delays, heat, disease, barter, suspicion, hospitality, sudden danger and the constant uncertainty of travel through a region still imperfectly mapped in the European imagination. A contemporary Nature review placed the work among accounts of “adventurous cruises” along the New Guinea coast and neighbouring island groups, with a land journey through German New Guinea. The author also had a natural history connection beyond the narrative itself. Butterfly material collected by Captains Cayley Webster and Cotton in New Britain, the Duke of York Islands and the Sattelberg district of German New Guinea was later used in descriptions of new species by the entomologist Henley Grose-Smith, whose work drew on important Pacific collections. This gives the volume added resonance as a product of the age of expedition, specimen collecting and imperial science, not merely travel adventure. A visually striking book, especially in this original gilt pictorial cloth. The binding is one of its chief attractions: bold, theatrical and unmistakably of the great age of decorated exploration books. The photographic plates give the text documentary weight, preserving images of people, settlements, expedition scenes and island life from one of the most compelling regions of the Pacific. Condition: very good. Cloth lightly rubbed and marked, spine a little softened at ends, gilt still bright and effective. Some foxing and spotting, especially to preliminaries, plates and margins, but generally clean and sound. Without the folding map. A handsome and highly collectible copy of an increasingly desirable New Guinea exploration title. A substantial, adventurous and richly illustrated Pacific travel book, with appeal to collectors of New Guinea, Melanesia, exploration, anthropology, natural history, decorated cloth and nineteenth-century colonial travel. The book is especially compelling as a physical object. Its original decorated cloth, with bold gilt lettering and native figures to the cover and spine, captures the late nineteenth-century appetite for exploration literature at its most theatrical and visually engaging. Inside, the photographic plates give the volume a documentary force, preserving images of people, places and expeditionary life at a period when New Guinea was still only partially known to the wider reading public. This is a landmark book in the literature of New Guinea exploration: adventurous, visually rich, and increasingly difficult to find in attractive original condition. The title reflects the language and attitudes of its period, but the work remains a significant source for the history of Pacific exploration, colonial encounter and ethnographic writing at the close of the Victorian age.…