Chappell served on the Royal Naval ship Rosamund, and in 1814 sailed with two Hudson’s Bay Company ships and a Moravian mission brig across the Atlantic. Chappell visited York Factory on Hudson Bay; his narrative provides a record of the Eskimos he met in the region. This copy once belonged to Donald Baxter Macmillan, the American Arctic explorer who joined Peary’s North Pole expedition and subsequently travelled many times to the Arctic.