Listing on its endpapers details of the Endeavour’s crew and other information about Cook’s first voyage to Australia and the Pacific, a 1737 edition of Horace’s works that belonged to the ship’s surgeon sold for £50,000 at Bonhams.
The reason that an otherwise unexceptional 1737 English language edition of Horace’s Odes, Satyrs and Epistles – lacking a portrait and three text pages – sold for the substantial sum of £50,000 in the Bonhams (27.5/25/20/13.9%) sale on June 26 is to be found on the front endpaper notes illustrated right.
This was one of the books that William Perry, surgeon’s mate (and later surgeon) on the Endeavour took with him on Captain James Cook’s first circumnavigation of the globe in 1768-71.