Journal of a Voyage of Discovery, to the Arctic Regions, in His Majesty´s ships Hecla and Griper, in the years 1819 & 1820. Second edition.

London, Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown 1821. Contemporary Quarter morocco, 8vo. XI, 320 pp. with a folding engraved chart of the Alexander’s route, 1 map and 5 several woodcuts. Little bit of foxing. A very good copy. Alexander Fisher was surgeon on boards HMS Alexander, commanded by Edward Parry, which accompanied the Isabella, commanded by John Ross, in the first modern British search for the Northwest Passage in 1818. Fisher was an astute naturalist; he kept a baby bearded seal on board ship to observe its behaviour and made a study of the behaviour of seals basking on ice floes. Fisher’s observation of Ross’s barrier in Lancaster Sound, dryly suggests how promising the sound appeared, with its deep water and strong current, as a possible entrance to the Northwest Passage, and how the men of the Alexander were stunned when Ross suddenly turned around and retreated, turned back by mountains that no one on the Alexander could see or find. He nowhere explicitly contradicts Captain Ross, but it is interesting that on his map, Lancaster Sound is open to the west, not hemmed in by the supposed Croker Mountains, described by Ross. The Fisher map shows how little was known of the region above Hudson Bay and west of Baffin Bay.