An unrecorded and quite distinct printing of this important work on marine surveying and the drafting of nautical charts, by the hydrographer on the d'Entrecasteaux voyage.

An unrecorded and quite distinct printing of this important work on marine surveying and the drafting of nautical charts, by the hydrographer on the d'Entrecasteaux voyage.

This is the first separate edition of a highly significant work in the context of the d'Entrecasteaux expedition: although this rare cartographic study was one of the results of the expedition that searched for but failed to find any traces of the lost La Pérouse expedition, it demonstrates that d'Entrecasteaux's vessels actually came within a few hours sailing of the island of Vanikoro where we now know that La Pérouse had in fact ended up; it is ironic that Beautemps-Beaupré, hydrographer on the voyage and the father of modern French hydrography, should have chosen this very group of islands to concentrate on in extreme detail for this work on marine surveying and the drafting of nautical charts. His very detailed observations made in the islands in 1793 show quite how closely d'Entrecasteaux came to discovering the fate of La Pérouse in Vanikoro some 33 years before the sandalwood trader Dillon famously stumbled upon relics of the French expedition on the nearby island of Tikopia.

In its first form, this text with its extensive series of plans and maps appeared as an Appendix in the full account of the d'Entrecasteaux voyage, and later (1811) it was published as a separate work. The present version appears to be an interim issue; although it seems to be printed from the same setting-up of type used in its first form, as it appeared in the d'Entrecasteaux work (with certain broken letters confirming this), it has been re-paginated and re-signed (pp. [ii], 94; one unsigned leaf, A-L in 4's, M3) and is quite distinct from both other versions.

The two large folding maps here (which appeared originally as maps 19 and 20 in the large atlas to the D'Entrecasteaux voyage account) as well as the extensive series of coastal profiles all relate to the archipelago, while the island of Vanikoro itself (Ile Ourry to the French) figures in Beautemps-Beaupré's full charting and in a number of the coastal profiles. In fact the 23 plates of coastal profiles are all based on observations made between 19 and 23 May in the vicinity of Santa Cruz; seven of them were made on 19 and 20 May, on both of which days Beautemps-Beaupré took compass bearings on the island of Vanikoro itself several times each day and drew coastal profiles from different angles. At this point the expedition came within 15 miles of the island.

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Even today there is uncertainty about the exact details of the last stages of the La Pérouse story. A French expedition in 2005 found relics of the expedition proving beyond doubt that Vanikoro was where they ended up, but local tradition even now varies between a large contingent (up to fifty) survivors either dying of disease, or being eaten by cannibals, or escaping from Vanikoro in a phoenix boat built from the wreckage of their ships.

When d'Entrecasteaux sailed in May 1792 in the direction of New Caledonia and the Solomon Islands on their way to the Admiralty Islands he was deliberately following up on reports picked up at the Cape of Good Hope that supposedly emanated from Captain (later Governor) John Hunter that native vessels has been seen in the area with sailors wearing items of French uniform (a claim later denied by Hunter). They saw no such signs themselves, and abandoned the search in July.

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