Citizen Cossigny and a voyage to Canton
8th Apr 2025 - Rare and Early Books
Amidst the excitement around the publication of accounts of the Macartney embassy to China in the 1790s, another book appeared
We think of the sub-Antarctic Auckland Islands as a conservation success, full of seals, peat bogs and birds, the culling then saving of a seaweed-eating breed of cows, and all constantly battered by rain and southern winds. While there is evidence for very early Māori occupation, the group of small islands first came into wider notice as a base for whaling and sealing in the early 19th C, then for a rather mad settlement and immigration scheme. Over the whole of the century, the islands stood inconveniently in the way of ships sailing from Australia to London, and these along with more scientific explorations, and voyages serving the whaling and sealing industry, resulted in shipwrecks which were the stuff of adventure stories. Much of this has been written up, from the 1830s onwards, and features in the article attached here.
8th Apr 2025 - Rare and Early Books
Amidst the excitement around the publication of accounts of the Macartney embassy to China in the 1790s, another book appeared
26th May 2023 - Blog
While reading about Thomas Gilbert and his refusal to serve in the Taranaki militia during the first war there in