Taking One’s Own Ship Around the World: A Journal Descriptive of Scenes and Incidents Together with Observations From the Log Books Recorded on the Voyage Around the World of the Yacht Ara.

First edition of Vanderbilt's Taking One's Own Ship Around the World; one of only 300 copies produced in buckram

Taking One’s Own Ship Around the World: A Journal Descriptive of Scenes and Incidents Together with Observations From the Log Books Recorded on the Voyage Around the World of the Yacht Ara.

VANDERBILT, William K.

Item Number: 100202

New York: Privately Printed by William Edwin Rudge, 1929.

First edition of Vanderbilt’s account of his voyage around the world aboard the diesel yacht Ara. Folio, bound in the original brown buckram, gilt titles and tooling to the spine, top edge gilt, pictorial endpapers, illustrated with engravings after photographs by Wiliam E. Belanske, Pierre C. Merillon, Charles H. Thompson, and Vanderbilt and 18 color plates with lettered tissue guards after watercolors by William E. Belankse. One of only 500 copies printed and 300 bound in buckram, this is number 412. From the library of Thomas and Margaret Winn with a note of provenance laid in in Margaret’s hand. Margaret Winn worked as a volunteer at the William K. Vanderbilt Museum and Education Center from 1985-1988 where she was gifted this book by the museum’s staff. In fine condition. Rare and desirable.

A member of the prominent American Vanderbilt family, William "Willie" Kissam Vanderbilt II was a skilled sailor and yachtsman. Already extremely wealthy from a trust fund and from his income as president of the New York Central Railroad Company, on his father's death in 1920, "Willie" inherited a multimillion-dollar fortune. In 1925, he traded his luxury yacht Eagle for ownership of Fisher Island, Florida, a place he used as a winter residence. The present volume recounts Vanderbilt's voyage around the world on the diesel yacht Ara, completed between October 25, 1928 and May 16, 1929. The voyage took Vanderbilt to Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Galápagos Islands and the South Pacific, where he collected thousands of specimens of invertebrate and marine life and birds, as well as cultural artifacts.

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