Voyage de La Pérouse autour du Monde…
Voyage de La Pérouse autour du Monde… rédigé par M.L.A. Milet-Mureau.

Paris: Imprimerie de la Republique, 1797.

Four volumes, quarto, and folio atlas, with a portrait, 69 maps and plates (21 folding) in the atlas; the text in fine condition on bluish-tinted paper, completely uncut in modern French period-style blue mottled boards with double labels; the atlas in old French quarter calf over original dark green mottled boards.

"Vanished trackless into blue immensity"

First edition of one of the finest narratives of maritime exploration ever published. This is an unusually clean and attractive set of this great book, with particularly generous margins. In January 1788, two and a half years after their departure from France, La Pérouse's ships sailed into Botany Bay just hours after the settlers under Governor Phillip began the move from Botany Bay to Port Jackson. After their subsequent departure from the Australian east coast they "vanished trackless into blue immensity" (Carlyle); no further trace would be found of the expedition for three decades. La Pérouse's habit of forwarding records whenever he had an opportunity to do so ensured their survival. The first portion of the expedition's records had been forwarded by sea from Macao; the second (Macao to Kamchatka) went overland with de Lesseps, and the final reports went back with British despatches from Botany Bay, the British extending what was then a normal courtesy between the exploring nations. It was from these records that Milet-Mureau, the editor, established the official narrative of the expedition for its publication in this form.

First edition of one of the finest narratives of maritime exploration ever published. This is an unusually clean and attractive set of this great book, with particularly generous margins. In January 1788, two and a half years after their departure from France, La Pérouse's ships sailed into Botany Bay just hours after the settlers under Governor Phillip began the move from Botany Bay to Port Jackson. After their subsequent departure from the Australian east coast they "vanished trackless into blue immensity" (Carlyle); no further trace would be found of the expedition for three decades. La Pérouse's habit of forwarding records whenever he had an opportunity to do so ensured their survival. The first portion of the expedition's records had been forwarded by sea from Macao; the second (Macao to Kamchatka) went overland with de Lesseps, and the final reports went back with British despatches from Botany Bay, the British extending what was then a normal courtesy between the exploring nations. It was from these records that Milet-Mureau, the editor, established the official narrative of the expedition for its publication in this form.

As Glyn Williams has characterised it, the French voyage was 'A deliberate réplique française or counter-stroke to Cook's voyages… a follow-up to Cook's third voyage, [with] its instructions a running commentary on what Cook had discovered and left undiscovered…'. A voyage despatched in the fullest spirit of the Enlightenment, under the direct orders of the monarch himself, it was intended to complete discoveries and satisfy many different curiosities. La Pérouse was specifically instructed to study climates, native peoples, plants and animals, to collect specimens and artefacts and to observe the activities of other European powers. The official instructions included the requirement that he should 'act with great gentleness and humanity towards the different people whom he will visit'.

It has been remarked that the friendship between the French and English grew in proportion to their distance from home. Certainly the English attitude to La Pérouse seemed natural to Watkin Tench: "during their stay in the port the officers of the two nations had frequent opportunities of testifying their mutual regard by visits and other interchanges of friendship and esteem;" and La Pérouse endeared himself particularly "by the feeling manner in which he always mentioned the name and talents of Captain Cook." Philip Gidley King noted in his journal that the French explorer "informed me that every place where he has touched or been near, he found all the astronomical and nautical works of Captain Cook to be very exact and true, and concluded by saying, 'Enfin, Monsieur Cook a tant fait qu'il ne m'a rien laissé à faire que d'admirer ses oeuvres' ["Captain Cook has done so much that he has left me with nothing to do but admire his achievements'].

The timing was remarkable: coincident at its close with the Australian First Fleet, La Pérouse had left France in 1785 and never knew of the French Revolution; and while Marie Antoinette chose Cook's voyages to read the night before her death, Louis XVI is said to have repeated on his way to the scaffold the question that he had been asking for months: ''Is there any news of M. de La Pérouse? '

The narrative published here and in subsequent editions and translations covers the progress of the voyage from the departure of the two vessels from Brest in 1785. On their way to the northwest coast of America they stopped in Chile, Easter Island and Hawaii, where they were the first Europeans to land on Maui. During 1786 La Pérouse followed the American coast from their landfall near Mount St Elias in Alaska to southern California, exploring and mapping the coast and making particularly significant visits to Lituya Bay where they transacted with the Tlingit tribe (as dramatised two centuries later by Carl Sagan in Cosmos), the outer islands of British Columbia, San Francisco and Monterey. The first non-Spanish visitor to California since Francis Drake, the French explorer took close note of Spanish activity in the pueblos and missions.

The expedition sailed on, visiting Macau, Manila, Korea, the Pacific coast of Russia, Japan, and Samoa and exploring the central Pacific, but their main instructions were to make for Australian waters to check on English activity in the region. On 24 January 1788 they reached Botany Bay.

The folio Atlas contains the wonderful series of views chiefly after the original drawings by the chief official artist, Gaspard Duché de Vancy, that had been sent back to France with the various despatches; many of these were recently exhibited at the Musée de la Marine in Paris. Strikingly interpreted as engravings and printed here in rich dark impressions they were, as Christina Ionescu (Book Illustration in the Long Eighteenth Century) has noted, like the engravings in the huge Napoleonic Déscription de l'Egypte, continuing a tradition of "large and extravagant productions" at a time when more commercial publishers were generally downsizing the illustrative content of publications.

The Atlas also includes magnificent maps of Russian Asia, Japan, California and the Pacific Northwest Coast with important new data for the then imperfectly known Asiatic side of the Pacific.

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Provenance: Private collection (Australia).

Anker, 276; Borba de Moraes, p. 449; Cowan, p. 383; Ferguson, 251; Forbes, 272; 'Hawaii One Hundred', 12; Hill, 972; Judd, 102; Lada-Mocarski, 52; McLaren, 'Lapérouse in the Pacific', 1.

Condition Report: The world map lightly browned and a few others in the atlas slightly tanned; a few spots but generally in very good condition.

Ref: #4504304

Condition Report