Dernier Voyage du Capitaine Cook autour du monde, où se trouvent les circonstances de sa mort, publié en allemand par Henri Zimmermann témoin oculaire, & traduit avec un abrégé de la vie de ce navigateur célèbre, & des notes

The second French edition, and very scarce. Beddie records only the Mitchell and National Library copies in Australia. 'Both French editions are of great rarity and are of interest not only on that account but because of the additional matter which they contain...' (Holmes).

Zimmermann's eye-witness account of Cook's third voyage first appeared, in German, at Mannheim in 1781. The French version was next, with this second French edition and a second German edition appearing in 1783. Dutch editions appeared in 1784 and 1791, and a Russian version was published at St Petersburg in 1786 (Kroepelien, 1365). These seem to have been all the appearances of the narrative until the Alexander Turnbull Library published Tewsley's translation in 1926. As Rodney Davidson wrote of the early printings, 'all these editions are exceedingly rare... It is hard to predict the realisation price for a copy if one were to come into the open market, as competition between collectors would be very keen...'.

In any early edition, this is one of the scarcest of all the Cook voyage accounts (there is for example no copy of any of the eighteenth century editions in the catalogue of the Hill collection). It was the first description of the third voyage to appear on the continent, and as one of two accounts first published in 1781 - a full three years before the official account - it may well be the first description of the voyage to have been published. It includes an eyewitness account of Cook's death and is also 'valuable for his lower-deck impressions of the character of Cook...' (Beaglehole).

'Zimmermann, a native of Speyer, was coxswain in the Discovery. From the start of the voyage he determined to keep a shorthand journal of the voyage and to retain it, despite the instructions... demanding the surrender of all logs and journals... His account is by no means free from errors, but it has an ingenuousness and charm which differentiate it from the other accounts. His appreciation of Cook's character deserves to rank with that of Samwell' (Holmes).