Voyage dans le Nord de la Bolivie et dans les Parties Voisines du Perou ou Visite au District Aurifere de Tipuani

 Hugues Algernon Weddell

 Paris : P. Bertrand ; Londres : H. Bailliere, 1853

First edition.  23 cm. Bound in contemporary quarter black morocco over marbled blue boards.  Gilt stamped spine. Very good binding. Blue marbled endpapers.  Scuff cover on edge. XII, 571 p.  Tinted lithographic frontispiece, tinted lithographic plate, folding map, 4 pp. of musical notations. Scattered foxing to plates, title-page, and prelims.  Hugues-Algernon Weddell was a botanist at the Museum d'histoire naturelle de Paris.  He journeyed to Brazil and Peru on the orders King Louis-Phillipe in 1834-7 with Count Francis de Castelnau.  He returned to the region in 1851 with Charles Borniche and Martial de Herrypon in search of Cinchona "fever bark", the plant used to make quinine, a medicine to combat Malaria. Weddell was able to find 15 varieties and successfully germinate them at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris.  The cultivation and spread of Cinchona, and thus quinine, allowed European settlement and imperial domination of the tropical / Malarial zones of the world in the later half of the 19th century.  Weddell's voyage is one of the most significant voyages to South America in the 19th century.  Palau 374410.  Provenance: From the collection of United States Ambassador and diplomat, Alexander Weddell (1876-1948).  Weddell was US Ambassador to Argentina from 1933-1938.  Engraved book plate from Virginia House Museum.