A scarce publication, the second published version of the official account of Dumont d'Urville's first voyage, publishing the voyage narrative and a selection of the fine lithographic plates. The huge original publication with its 13 text volumes and five folio atlas volumes was beyond the reach of most readers and this was effectively a version for the "general reader". It is quite difficult to find in complete form, the atlas in practice being rarer on the market than the volumes of narrative text.

A scarce publication, the second published version of the official account of Dumont d'Urville's first voyage, publishing the voyage narrative and a selection of the fine lithographic plates. The huge original publication with its 13 text volumes and five folio atlas volumes was beyond the reach of most readers and this was effectively a version for the "general reader". It is quite difficult to find in complete form, the atlas in practice being rarer on the market than the volumes of narrative text.

It includes as narrative text the Historique section of the full voyage account, though the title has been changed to include the words "et à la recherche de La Pérouse", and has a selection of eight maps and 12 plates as a separately bound atlas volume. Three of the twelve plates are Australian Aboriginal studies lithographed from drawings by the official artist Louis Sainson. A coloured portrait plate of two Aboriginal men is followed by depictions of two encounters, one at the Georges River and the other at Jervis Bay. Of additional interest are two coloured Māori portrait plates, and further studies of the native inhabitants of New Guinea, Vanikoro and Tikopia. The maps are notable as some of the finest ever produced of the Pacific, and include charts of Australia and New Zealand, New Guinea, Fiji, Tonga and Vanikoro.

One of the primary objectives of the voyage was to confirm the fate of the ill-fated La Pérouse expedition, a long-standing source of mystery and speculation. The wreck of La Pérouse's Astrolabe had been reported a few years previously by Peter Dillon, the South Seas trader, suggesting that the island of Vanikoro (present day Solomons) was the French explorer's final resting place. Dumont d'Urville's expedition confirmed this, and erected a monument to La Pérouse and his men upon the island (the ceremony is memorialised in a fine lithographed plate included in the atlas to this edition).

This edition, surprisingly rare on the market, was not noted by several standard bibliographies and appears in the Ferguson Addenda volume only from a set of the text in the State Library of Victoria and from a copy of the atlas volume that appeared (without text) in a Bernard Quaritch catalogue in 1983. McLaren too could cite the atlas only from the Ferguson/Quaritch entry.

The Astrolabe was renamed for this voyage in honour of La Pérouse's lost ship; it had previously sailed as the Coquille in Duperrey's expedition in the early 1820s, with Dumont d'Urville serving as second-in-command. The expedition visited Australia, New Zealand and the South Pacific in 1826-29; it was a major scientific undertaking and a large number of natural history specimens were collected returned to France. Likewise, the haul of geographical and ethnological information was considerable.