Erskine, John Elphinstone.

First edition. 8vo. pp. vi, [i, list of illustrations], 488; 4 coloured plates, 3 uncoloured plates, other illustrations to text, one folding map; some foxing to plates, else good in contemporary full calf, spine decorated in gilt, bumped to lower outer corner, else a handsome copy, with an inscription to a front blank from Charles and Alfred Gathorne Hardy to Frederick Charles Kinglake on his leaving Eton, 1857.

Hill p.98; NMMC I.681. In the years 1849-50, Erskine sailed from New Zealand to Samoa, then to Tonga, Fiji, the New Hebrides and finally the Solomon Islands before returning to New Zealand. His visits to various islands among these groups allowed him to gain much ethnographic information concerning the islanders. Appendix A also contains the narrative of the Englishman John Jackson, who in 1840 was taken prisoner by the islanders of the Samoan island of Manua for 2 years. This copy was a gift from two sons of Gathorne-Hardy, the British politician (1814-1906).