A spurned doctor's account of a voyage of exploration

Le Guillou, Élie / (d'Urville, Dumont). Voyage autour du Monde de L'Astrolabe et de La Zélée.

€ 18,000.00

First edition of this rare work on the last French expedition in the Age of Discovery, written as a challenge to the official narrative of the voyage by a ship's surgeon and illustrated with thirty lithograph plates. Interestingly, the two volumes are bound together in a custom binding featuring the personal crest of Peter II, Emperor of Brazil, making this copy a probable gift to the Emperor himself.

Though Brazil was indeed a brief stop for the two ships of the expedition, the Zélée and the Astrolabe, they sailed much further afield in pursuit of circumnavigating the globe and locating the magnetic South Pole. All this was done under the leadership of the famous Dumont d'Urville (1790-1842), who hoped to emulate Captain Cook by making a third voyage of exploration. As chief surgeon of the expedition, the author, Élie Le Guillou, became increasingly concerned with the men's state of health under d'Urville's leadership. Early on, a scurvy outbreak killed one man, and later nearly twenty sailors died in a very short span from dysentery. According to Le Guillou, this was despite repeated warnings that the search for magnetic South Pole should not be attempted until the ill had recovered. D'Urville, however, blamed his surgeon for negligence, had him removed from the list of men who would receive honours upon their return to France, and cut him out of the publication of the official narrative, which dealt largely with the Polar exploration.

Instead, Le Guillou wrote this work, which focuses on his additional role as the ship's naturalist and geologist, and on the years spent in Oceania, travelling through Australia, New Zealand, the Philippines, Singapore, New Guinea, Guam, Micronesia, the Solomon Islands, Fiji, Tonga, Samoa, and Tahiti and Nuku Hiva in French Polynesia. It is very thoroughly illustrated with lithographic prints, nearly all of which show some form of action scene depicting (through French eyes) local customs of dress, worship, tattooing, dance, and punishment.