Thomes, William H. The Bushrangers: A Yankee's Adventures during his second visit to Australia (The Gold-Hunter's Library). Boston: Lee & Shepard, 1865. Later printing. [10915]
Green pebble cloth with blind borders, gilt to spine, 7 3/4 x 5 1/2 inches, 1880 owner's signature on ffep, tight. Wood-engraved frontispiece, extra engraved title page, several additional plages. 480 clean pages. Very good. Hardcover.
1865 copyright; this printing circa 1880.
William Henry Thomes (1824-1895), b. Portland, Me; Thomes was a journalist, editor, travel writer, and novelist. He wrote several rollicking tales of adventure. In 1842 he went to sea on the ship Admittance, and sailed round the Horn to California. After returning to Boston he caught the gold fever of the great Gold Rush, and returned to San Francisco. He then joined a ship's crew bound for the Orient, and visited Hawaii, Guam, Manila and China, then spending a year or more in Australia.
"He returned to Boston and to the printing trade, eventually breaking into publishing, and in the end prospered. He began his career as a novelist in 1864 with The Gold Hunter's Adventures, or Life in Australia, a work of some 300,000 words, full of the liveliest action, but showing in its planning more generosity, perhaps, than skill...he belongs to the American west in spirit, even when he writes about the Australian bush, and it is with the west rather than with Boston that one associates him...[His Australian fiction] have been read with interest and enjoyment - sometimes with amazement, always with pleasure, and with a delight enhanced by the excitement of discovering not merely an early link between American and Australian fiction, but a stimulating imaginative exploitation of elements of Australian life which have never been handled with so debonair and light a touch at home." - ibid.
