The Life of George Bass: Surgeon and Sailor of the Enlightenment by Miriam Estensen

Book Description

Secondhand. Very good condition. Minor wear to book corners and edges. Chip to top edge of book. Previous owner has inscribed half-title page. Dust jacket has light wear to edges. minor wear. Body text and binding are still excellent.

On 5 February 1802, the 142-ton brig Venus cleared Sydney Heads to begin a trading voyage through the islands of the Pacific. On board as captain was one of her owners, the surgeon, navigator, adventurer, and entrepreneur George Bass. Bass nor the Venus completed the voyage. They simply vanished into the Pacific.

The brilliant and charismatic Bass embodied the Age of Enlightenment. He was a man of intense intellectual curiosity, of wide-ranging talents and contradictions as well. He had friends among Sydney's political radicals but was also of the establishment. He was a skilled surgeon who preferred navigation to medicine, a naval officer who put his career on hold to make a fortune, and a man deeply in love who abandoned his beloved Bess Bass for the rewards of an adventurous voyage into commerce.

Miriam Estensen draws on exhaustive research in archives and libraries worldwide to present a richly detailed account of the life and death of this most complicated man. In The Life of George Bass, lie all the elements of personality and circumstance that shaped this short but remarkable life.