Cabinet 06
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Alexander Dalrymple was a man slighted. He was severely annoyed at being rejected as the leader of the scientific expedition to observe the Transit of Venus in June 1769. He was also highly critical of Dr John Hawkesworth’s editorial account of Captain Cook’s first voyage, first printed in 1773. Dalrymple vented his anger in two open letters, this being one of them. Both publications are rare and Hocken was fortunate to secure one, which he had bound into a volume titled ‘Old New Zealand’. Part of the east coast of ‘Staats Land or New Zeland’ is visible on the chart displayed.
Alexander Dalrymple, A Letter from Mr Dalrymple to Dr Hawkesworth, Occasioned by Some Groundless and Illiberal Imputations in his Account of the Late Voyages to the South. London: Printed for J. Nourse, 1773. Vol. 13, no. 2.
Hocken’s second volume of pamphlets has the spine title ‘New Zealand. Taranaki War.’ Sixteen titles are bound within, ranging from Sir William Martin’s Taranaki Question (1860) to Thomas McDonnell’s An Explanation of the Principal Causes which led to the Present War (1869). On display is John Featon’s The Last of the Waikatos, published in 1873 and written under the non-de-plume ‘Comus’. Featon is a man of mystery. He certainly served in the New Zealand Artillery Volunteers in the 1860s, when the 1863-4 Waikato War was fought, and may have been a journalist on the Daily Southern Cross. Hocken offers a little more evidence with: ‘Commission Agent’. This copy lacks the purple paper covers as described by A. G. Bagnall in the NZNB. Presumably they were discarded by the binder when bound. The illustrator is not known.
[John Featon], The Last of the Waikatos. A Sensational Tale of the Province of Auckland. Auckland: Daily Southern Cross Office, 1873. Vol. 2, no. 13.