Taking into account the cultural significance and physical condition of the National Library of Australia's several copies of the first edition of the Voyages the creation of photocopies involved the selection of the copy judged by the Library's conservators to be least likely to be damaged by unbinding and light exposure. The copy selected was that catalogued as FERG 7243.

The resulting electronic text was then manually corrected and chronologically related to the South Seas transcriptions of the Cook, Banks and Parkinson journals. Christine Winter corrected volume one and in the process created a relational database of places, people, cultural artefacts and natural phenomenon that helped in designing the South Seas Companion. Paul Turnbull corrected volumes two and three.

As bibliographer Ronald L. Ravneberg has pointed out, the first edition of the Voyages has inconsistencies in pagination and errors caused by the typesetting of volume one being started at two points and by volumes two and three originally being paginated as a single volume. In this online edition these original erroneous pagination and errors have been preserved as an aid to researchers wishing to consult the printed text of the first edition.

Readers interested in further information about the publication history of the Voyages should consult B. J. McMullin's article, 'Cook's First Voyage and the Strahan Quarto Editions of 1773, in Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand Bulletin vol. 11, 1(1989), pp. 5-35; and Ronald L. Ravneberg's 'The Hawkesworth Copy: an Investigation into the Printer's Copy used for the Preparation of the Second Edition of John Hawkesworth's Account of Captain Cook's First Voyage (2002-2004), http://www.captaincooksociety.com/ccsu4148.htm

As with the Cook Banks and Parkinson journals, contemporary spellings and punctuation have been retained with the exception of the long s that was represented typographically by the letter f prior to 1800.

Paul Turnbull
March 2004

Voyaging Accounts