Richardson, Sir John Arctic Searching Expedition A Journal of a Boat-Voyage through Rupert's Land and the Arctic Sea, in Search of the Discovery Ships under Command of Sir John Franklin. With an Appendix on the Physical Geography of North America. London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1851. First edition, 2 volumes, 8vo, original brown cloth, titles gilt to spines, blind rules to spines and covers, viii 413, viii 426 pp., 10 lithographic colour plates including frontispieces, hand-coloured folding map, 32 pp. advertisements, very light fraying to spine-ends, damp-stain to frontispiece of volume 2, light marginal spotting to a few other plates, cloth tape reinforcement to inner hinges (possibly original) [Arctic Bibliography 14489; Sabin 71025; Stafleu & Cowan 9170] (2)

Note: '[Richardson's] search for Franklin in 1847–9 was a model of careful planning and good execution, with no loss of life, no injuries, no shortages of food, and no lack of shelter. He shared the reasonable belief that some of Franklin's party survived the sinking of the Erebus and Terror and discovered the north-west passage before they died; and he argued for his old friend in The Times when McClure later claimed to have completed the discovery of the passage' (ODNB). The plates in the present work are mainly depictions of the Kutchin (Gwich'in) people native to Alaska and Canada.