(London: Richard Bentley, 1833).

FIRST EDITION OF A RARE AND HIGHLY SOUGHT AFTER BOOK. COPIES COMPLETE AND IN CONDITION ARE ESPECIALLY ELUSIVE. THIS IS A COMPLETE COPY WHICH RETAINS ITS ORIGINAL BINDING.  Owen joined the Royal Navy in 1788. He discoverd the Seaflower Channel off the coast of Sumatra, and explored and surveyed the Canadian Great Lakes. He received in 1822 an appointment by the Admiralty to command a surveying expedition to the coast of Africa, Madagascar and Oman, for which there were, up to the time, no accurate charts of the coastlines. The initial efforts were costly...after 7 months effort, the team returned Cape Town in July 1822 with two-thirds of the officers, and half the crew dead from malaria. It was Owen who identified the mosquito as the culprit spreading the disease. The second sortie, departing Cape Town in September 1822 suffered a similar fate, with Owen himself falling prey, though this time, the survey work continued. Owen's flagship, Leven, in company with the brig Barracouta, eventually returned to Cape Town and remained in port until June 1823.
In January 1824 Owen once again sailed, continuing with his tasking to survey the coast of Oman. He began at Ras al Hadd, continuing to Masirah Island and along the coast to Ras Mirba. Finally concluding in 1826, the end result "was a continuous series of charts for the entire West African coast far more definitive in detail than anything that had gone before. Owen's charts remained in use for nearly a century and his remarks were still being reproduced in the Africa Pilot as late as 1893."
When it was all said and done, Owen had mapped the entire east African coast from the Cape to the Horn of Africa and had established a one-man protectorate of Mombasa with the aim of disrupting the 'hellish trade' in slaves. The British government, honouring its treaty with the Sultan of Oman, did not formally recognize the colony and withdrew the British flag.
Ultimately Owen was forced to shut down under orders from the Crown after only three years. When he returned in 1826, with 300 new charts, covering some 30,000 miles of coastline, over half of his original crew had been killed by tropical diseases. Item #28289

2 volumes. First Edition, A Rare Complete Set. Illustrated with 4 large folding maps, 5 full-page lithographed plates and 5 wood-engraved illustrations, complete and original as called for. Tall 8vo, handsomely bound in contemporary calf backed marbled boards with calf corner pieces, the spines with wide gilt tooled flat bands between blind stippled compartments, two compartments with gilt lettering. With fine engraved armorial bookplate in each volume of Captain E. N. Norcott, Royal Navy. xxiii, 434; viii, 420 pp. A handsome and very pleasing copy of this scarce and highly sought work, in an excellent state of preservation, the paper clean and still quite fresh with only a touch of occasional foxing, the maps are complete and in surprisingly good order with a few unobtrusive paper repairs at the versos, the spines have been restored with the original back-strips laid down.