8vo. With engraved frontispiece, engraved title-page, and 11 engravings (2 full-page). (Foxing.) Original publisher's dark brown cloth (recased preserving original endpapers, spine slightly worn). FIRST EDITION of the "earliest published Antarctic poetry" (Rosove). This delightful work recalls Palmer's time under the command of Charles Wilkes in the United States Exploring Expedition of 1838-1842. He was aboard the U.S.S. Flying-Fish which achieved the highest southern latitude to date. "The ice, the piles of ice, arrayed / In forms of awful grandeur still; But all their terrors how they fade, / Before proud man's sublimer will" (p. 36). The appendix is a prose description, "Antarctic adventures of the United States' schooner Flying-Fish, in 1839". Conrad p. 53; Haskell 186; Renard 1188; Rosove 246.A2c; Spence 890.