A Journal of a Voyage to the South Seas

A legal injunction prevented the publication of the Journal until after the official account of Cook's voyage, edited by John Hawkesworth, had appeared.

The book is organised chronologically and mainly describes the voyage from England to Tahiti, the time spent there, and the encounters with New Zealand and Australia.

When Joseph Banks joined James Cook on his first voyage, he took Parkinson with him as part of his entourage,[1] for a salary of £80 per year,[2] equivalent to £10,000 in 2023.

[6] Unlike the ship's officers, Parkinson was not under orders to yield his journals to the Admiralty or to keep silent about details of the journey.

[6][7] On the return voyage, Parkinson fell ill with malaria and dysentery contracted at Batavia (now Jakarta, Indonesia),[8] together with most of his shipmates.

[10] Stanfield asserted that his brother's collections and journals and everything done in his spare time should be among the inheritance,[3] and that only the botanical artwork was included in Parkinson's contract with Banks.

[12] This was based on a misunderstanding between Banks and Daniel Solander, who later clarified that the dying Parkinson had just asked that James Lee should be allowed to read his papers.

[13] The quarrel was finally mediated by John Fothergill, a Quaker physician and botanist who had known the Parkinson family in Edinburgh.

[15] The writer William Kenrick was engaged as editor for Parkinson's papers, and added a preface attacking both Banks and Fothergill.

[11] These troubles played a part in the decline of Stanfield Parkinson's mental and physical health; he was committed to an insane asylum and died in 1776.

[31] The posture and stance of the warriors in the engraving are similar to heroic figures of classical antiquity, unlike those in any of Parkinson's drawings of indigenous peoples, and are likely due to Chambers.

The illustrations and the word lists are mentioned as giving the Journal a "superiority over those of contemporary voyagers, who ... have departed from the simplicity of Nature.

[35] The botanist Elmer Drew Merrill, while calling the fact that the journal was published "on the whole, fortunate",[36] dismissed the quality of the botanical content, stating "It is clear that Parkinson ... did not realize what he was doing when he recorded the Solander generic and specific names, and his brother Stanfield ... was even less informed", and went on to suggest that the entire Journal be considered outlawed as an opus utique oppressum.