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First Edition. 32 pages. 5 3/4 x 8 1/2 inches. Brown cloth as issued. Faded gilt lettering on spine. INSCRIBED presentation copy from E. G. Squier to Wm Blackmore. The Graff copy with booklabel on front pastedown. Several penciled notes on the front pastedown including one noting this is one of 100 copies produced (we have been unable to corroborate this). Text in French. Boards bowed outward, corner tips bumped, sunning to spine. Still a nice copy with collector provenance. Cloth. A fictitious tale from the imagination of the illiterate Mathiew Sâgean. Scarce, with no copies for sale in RBH since 1970 (but 29 entries before that). Sabin notes: "Forms No. XVII. of Shea's Cramoisy Series. A few copies were printed on large paper. "Father Hennepin had among his contemporaries two rivals in the fabrication of new discoveries. The first was the noted La Hontan, whose book, like his own, had a wide circulation and proved a great success. . Mathiew Sâgean is a personage less known than Hennepin or La Hontan; for, though he surpassed them both in fertility of invention, he was illiterate, and never made a book. In 1701, being then a soldier in a company of marines at Brest, he revealed a secret which he declared that he had locked within his breast for twenty years, having been unwilling to impart it to the Dutch and English, in whose service he had been during the whole period. His story was written down from his dictation, and sent to the minister Ponchartrain. It is preserved in the Bibliothèque Nationale, and in 1863 it was printed by Mr. Shea."---PARKMAN'S La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West, pp. 458--461, where a summary of the relation is given. An English version is in the "Historical Magazine," vol. x. (1866), pp. 65--71. In the British Museum (Grenville collection (is the following: "The original Manuscript account of the Kingdom of Aacaniba, given by the Affidavit of M. Sagean, who with his Companions were the first Europeans in that Country, which, tho' hitherto unknown to all Geographers; yet on the faith of that relation, the late Regent of France erected the Mississippi, now the French East-India Company. But as that manuscript was never before published, which relates as facts, matters very singular, it is Englished by Quin Mackenzie, who, that he may not seem to have exaggerated its original, adjoins an authentic duplicate therefo. London, 1755. Fol." (Sabin 74898). Seller Inventory # 27675
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