Sep 28, 2017 - Sale 2455

Sale 2455 - Lot 264

Price Realized: $ 650
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 400 - $ 600
(TRAVEL.) Archive of letters sent from the second Fahnestock South Seas Expedition. 11 letters total: 8 mimeographed circular letters, some of them with long personalized notes added, and 3 original letters signed, all from either Bruce or Mary Fahnestock to either Sybil Darlington or her son Joseph, plus one photograph of the expedition's ship; condition generally strong; 9 of the letters with stamped postal covers bearing South Pacific postmarks and the expedition's inked stamps. Vp, 1939-41
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Additional Details

The Fahnestock South Seas Expeditions set out to document music and dance in the South Pacific. They were led by two young brothers from New York, Bruce and Sheridan Fahnestock, and sponsored by the American Museum of Natural History. With the first expedition well underway, they invited their recently widowed mother Mary Sheridan Fahnestock (1883-1954) to join them. She wrote a memoir titled "I Ran Away to Sea at Fifty." To help underwrite a second expedition in 1940, the family offered subscriptions to their circular letters. One such subscriber was a cousin, Sybil Emma Hubbard Darlington (1877-1967), whose mother was a Fahnestock. Her son Joseph, to whom one of these letters is also addressed, would soon become an overseas intelligence officer in the OSS (see lot 296). The first letter describes the journey ahead. The stamped letters are sent from the Panama Canal Zone (2), Galapagos Islands (2), Pago Pago in American Samoa, Fiji, Australia (2) and the Kangean Islands in the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia). The 14 October 1940 letter describes the loss of their ship on the Great Barrier Reef, and one 1941 letter describes a final recording trip among the gamelan musicians of Indonesia.