Blown off course: a trade mission to Vietnam ends badly

Méniolle, François Valentin, French commercial traveller in Asia (1792-1841). Journal et Correspondance, Septembre 1817 à Février 1819. [Narrative of a failed trade mission to Vietnam and India].

€ 12,500.00

The journal and first-person account of a French trade mission to "Cochinchine" (Ðàng Trong, today southern Vietnam) by the young traveller François Valentin Méniolle. The nephew of the bishop of Adran, Méniolle does not keep his journal like a standard ship's log, but as a gentleman's diary, recording the harrowing typhoon which blew his ship off course, the emergency retreat to Mauritius, and a period of wandering about Sri Lanka and India before finally returning home to Europe.

In one of his most important encounters of his Indian wanderings, he describes meeting the famous French naturalists Pierre-Médard Diard (1794-1863) and Alfred Duvaucel (1793-1824) at the French East India Company trading post of Chanderagore, who were collecting massive numbers of botanical and zoological samples to ship back to Paris. He describes them as "deux jeunes Parisiens qui habitent [à] Chandernagore, pour y étudier l'histoire naturelle du pays. Ils sont détenus à autres des encursions [!] dans les serres, et se proposent de faire un voyage dans le Nepaul. Ils ont déjà fait beaucoup d'envois au Musée de Paris". Diard and Duvaucel particularly impressed Méniolle with their extensive collection of venomous snakes, with which they were endeavouring to find a cure for snakebite.

Méniolle's ship, called the Julie-Marthe, bore Méniolle and his uncle around the Horn of Africa and into the Indian Ocean to secure French trading agreements in what is now south Vietnam. After the typhoon, their trek through India took them first to Pondicherry (or Puducherry) in June 1818, and from there to Kolkata and up the Hooghly River to Chandernagor.

Méniolle keeps a meticulous record not only of the voyage, but also of those he meets (and the trade deals he does manage to make) along the way, turning his journal in India into a dossier of the notable Europeans in colonial French India, alongside glimpses of Indian festivals, rajahs, and politics.