As the reproduction, right, shows, the title page, and indeed some other headlines, had been shaved and the binding was one of modern morocco, but only four copies are recorded in STC (one at Chatsworth and three in American libraries) and no copy has been seen at auction since the Lothian sale in New York in 1932.
Four years earlier two copies, one with a variant title, had sold at £2500 and £1500 to Rosenbach, but in the 21st century prices are a little different and bidding for this copy reached £120,000 before it was knocked down to an unnamed US dealer.
Sold for £60,000 to a collector was A True Declaration of the estate of the Colonie in Virginia, with a confutation of such scandalous reports as have tended to the disgrace of so worthy an enterprise, a work printed for the Council of the Virginia Company in 1610 and again a slightly shaved and stained copy in a modern binding of a very rare book.
One of the inspirations for Shakespeare’s The Tempest, this book provides an account of the voyage of the Virginia Company’s fleet to Virginia and the wreck of the Sir George Somers’ flagship in the Bermudas. No lives were lost in that accident, but when Somers and the new Deputy Governor, Thomas Gates, continued their voyage to Virginia in two pinnaces, after
over-wintering in the Bermudas, they found that of the 400 people aboard the other seven ships of the expedition, only 60 had survived.
Trouble and tribulations in the Colonies...
Captain John Smith’s A True Relation of such occurrences and accidents of noate as hath hapned in Virginia since the first planting of that Collony... , the first printed account of the settlement at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607 – or, “the first permanent English colony in the New World, and hence the direct progenitor of the United States”, to quote Boies Penrose – is one of the legendary rarities of early Americana.
