C. B. Wadstrom. An Essay on Colonization, Particularly Applied to the Western Coast of Africa, with Some Free Thou...

Click the image to load the highest resolution version.

Sold on Feb 11, 2010 for:

Sign-in or Join (free & quick)

Get one of these:

Share this lot

Track Item Printable Auction Results

Sell One of These

Description

Auction Info

Guides & Info

Description

Iconic Slave Ship Illustration

C. B. Wadstrom. An Essay on Colonization, Particularly Applied to the Western Coast of Africa, with Some Free Thoughts on Cultivation and Commerce; also Brief Descriptions of the Colonies Already Formed, or Attempted, in Africa, Including those of Sierra Leona and Bulama. London: Darton and Harvey, 1794, 1795.

First edition. Two quarto volumes in one. 196, 363 pages. List of subscribers. Errata page. Directions to the binder. Folding illustrations, diagrams, maps.

Contemporary calf with leather title label to spine. Covers detached. Missing front endpaper. An ex-library copy, with markings on front pastedown and title leaf. Bookplate of previous owner on rear pastedown. Heavy bumping and wear to boards. Some crumbling to backstrip. Text block sound and clean, signatures tight. Large map detached, as is the large folding illustration, "Plan and Sections of a Slave Ship," with facing text, "Description of a Slave Ship." Some slight foxing and offsetting to the plates, minor crumbling to the very extremities of the Slave Ship plate. Internally very good.

"Wadstrom, in many ways, takes abolitionist rhetoric to a new level in his Essay on Colonization, because he not only calls for abolition, but he advocates a colonial solution in West Africa. He includes, with the Essay, the plate of a slave ship, that diagrams in detail the inhumane and cattle-like manner in which slaves are stowed on a ship for transport to the New World" (Caulker). This is the first appearance of this iconic illustration of the interior of a slave ship. From the Professor John Ralph Willis Collection of Rare Africana.

Tcho Mbaimba Caulker, The African-British Long Eighteenth Century, 150. Gay 2854.