Dumont d'Urville's second expedition, the last and one of the most successful of the great French scientific grands voyages. The full publication of the voyage ran to an extraordinary 32 volumes, but the ten-volume section offered here represents the complete "Histoire du Voyage", therefore the full narrative of the 1837-40 expedition in the Astrolabe and the Zelée to the Antarctic and parts of the Pacific, to Australia and New Zealand. This excellent set is in the original printed boards of the first issue, with the exception of the last volume which is of a later issue and has the extra feature of a map of Torres Strait drawn by Vincendon-Dumoulin during the voyage's difficult passage there in May to June 1840.

Dumont d'Urville's second expedition, the last and one of the most successful of the great French scientific grands voyages. The full publication of the voyage ran to an extraordinary 32 volumes, but the ten-volume section offered here represents the complete "Histoire du Voyage", therefore the full narrative of the 1837-40 expedition in the Astrolabe and the Zelée to the Antarctic and parts of the Pacific, to Australia and New Zealand. This excellent set is in the original printed boards of the first issue, with the exception of the last volume which is of a later issue and has the extra feature of a map of Torres Strait drawn by Vincendon-Dumoulin during the voyage's difficult passage there in May to June 1840.

"The aims of this expedition were to explore the south polar regions and various island groups in the Pacific. The expedition reached the ice pack in January 1838 but failed to penetrate it or get south of the 64th parallel. Returning eastward they visited the South Orkney and South Shetland Islands, and discovered Joinville Island and Louis Philippe Land. Then they proceeded to Valparaiso and Juan Fernandez Island and landed at Mangareva, the Marquesas, Tahiti, Samoa, and Tonga. Proceeding to Fiji, Guam, and Palau, the ships afterwards coasted along New Guinea and circumnavigated Borneo. In 1840, from Tasmania, they returned to the Antarctic region where Adelie Land was discovered. An extensive visit was made to New Zealand. The return voyage took them through Torres Strait to Timor, La Reunion and St. Helena…" (Hill catalogue: the Hill collection copy also comprises only this Historique section).

The voyage was one of the three nationalistic Antarctic expeditions of the late 1830s/early 1840s, the others being Wilkes's United States Exploring Expedition and Ross's voyage of the Erebus and Terror. After circumnavigating three times, twice under his own command, it was a tragic irony that d'Urville died in the first train crash, at Versailles. He had finished only the first three volumes of the narrative account of this great expedition; the other seven volumes were the work of Vincendon-Dumoulin, the voyage's hydrographer.