This fine series of views with accompanying text was the first published account of the important voyage of Hyacinthe de Bougainville in the Thétis (1824-26), separately issued some nine years before the official account of this voyage. Edmond de la Touanne, a friend and protégé of Bougainville (and referred to in Bougainville's journal as "faithful companion of my travels"), sailed on the expedition as lieutenant de vaisseau. Because of the haste with which the expedition was manned, no official artist was sent; as Bougainville remarks, no pictorial record of the expedition would have survived but for de la Touanne's sketches.

This fine series of views with accompanying text was the first published account of the important voyage of Hyacinthe de Bougainville in the Thétis (1824-26), separately issued some nine years before the official account of this voyage. Edmond de la Touanne, a friend and protégé of Bougainville (and referred to in Bougainville's journal as "faithful companion of my travels"), sailed on the expedition as lieutenant de vaisseau. Because of the haste with which the expedition was manned, no official artist was sent; as Bougainville remarks, no pictorial record of the expedition would have survived but for de la Touanne's sketches.

This rare and beautiful voyage album has considerable Australian textual content, as well as the three famous views of the Nepean River that resulted from their inland travels: a view of the Nepean where it is joined by Glenbrook Creek, with kangaroos on the river bank and a group of First Nations people in the middle distance; a view of the Norton Waterhole on the Nepean River with members of the expedition being rowed across the river in two boats watched by a group of Aboriginal people; and a view of the Nepean Gorge below Macarthur's house Camden Park, with a group of First Nations people around a fire on the shore. There is also a fine engraved vignette of the expedition's ships under sail south of Tasmania, in the heavy seas which forced them to abandon their visit to Hobart and continue directly to Port Jackson.

Hyacinthe de Bougainville, son of the great eighteenth-century navigator, sailed as an eighteen-year-old ensign on the Baudin voyage. After distinguished service in the Napoleonic Wars, he was given command of the Thétis, only the second French frigate to be commissioned for a circumnavigation, the first having been his father's ship the Boudeuse. The expedition's most important visit was to Sydney where they stayed three months. Having been given secret orders to report on the defence capabilities of British settlements, the French officers travelled as widely as possible within the colony. Their investigations of Botany Bay, Camden, the Warragamba River and the Blue Mountains are well recorded in Bougainville's diaries (translated by Marc Serge Rivière as The Governor's Noble Guest, Miegunyah Press, 1999).