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 and from the library of adventurer Steve Fossett

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: 95147

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 437. From the library of James Stephen “Steve” Fossett with his bookplate to the pastedown. American businessman and record-setting aviator Steve Fossett became the first person to fly solo nonstop around the world in 2002 in his 10-story high balloon Spirit of Freedom. He completed the 2002 trip in 13 days, 8 hours, and 33 minutes and set records for both the Longest Distance Flown Solo in a Balloon and Fastest Balloon Flight Around the World. Fossett was also one of sailing’s most prolific distance record holders set the Absolute World Speed Record for airships with a Zeppelin NT in 2004. He received numerous awards and honors throughout his career including aviation’s highest award, the Gold Medal of the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale (FAI), which he was awarded in 2002. Fossett disappeared on September 3, 2007 while flying a light aircraft over the Great Basin Desert, between Nevada and California. In near fine condition. Rare and desirable with noted provenance.

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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