Hordern House

ANONYMOUS Découvertes dans la mer du sud... Paris, Chez Everat, 1795

Octavo; text just slightly embrowned but a very good copy in old quarter red calf.

The very scarce first edition of this La Pérouse fantasy, 'a desirable addition either to a collection of La Pérouse items, or to a library of fictitious voyages' (Davidson). The National Union Catalog records only two copies, while Forbes identifies seven.

The disappearance of La Pérouse led to intense speculation in France, and many writers used the mystery as the catalyst for fantastic utopian accounts of the crew's possible survival in the South Seas.

This work claims to be printed from a letter written by a French traveller who, in 1793, joins a Portuguese expedition of four vessels to the South Seas. Although much of the book is dedicated to the description of a utopian community composed of refugees from the French Revolution and the Terror, it also sets out to explain the mysterious disappearance of La Pérouse, missing since at least 1790. At various points in the narrative they discover signs of La Pérouse's voyage, until they finally rescue an astronomer who claims to have travelled on the Boussole.

Although the astronomer is ravaged by sickness and eventually dies, he is able to describe the voyages of La Pérouse after leaving Botany Bay in some detail, including the expedition's return to Hawaii. Unlike the English pantomimes which envisaged a hero's return for the French explorer and his crew, here the castaway gives a vivid and entirely plausible account of the death of La Pérouse and his crew, after quarrelling with the islanders over the cutting down of trees. The narrator is at pains to show that the islanders were acting well within their rights: after all, why should the explorers disturb the peace of a people so far from them; by what right do they dare destroy their property, ravage their lands, and ransack them for their unique goods, the only resource by which they can subsist...

Doubt about the date of publication of this rare book (Ferguson, Sabin and Kroepelien say 1795, while Gove and the Library of Congress catalog say 1798) has finally been resolved by David Forbes' discovery of a contemporary advertisement confirming the later date.
Dunmore, p. 16; Ferguson, 225; Forbes, 'Hawaiian National Bibliography', 285; Gove, 'The Imaginary Voyage in Prose Fiction', pp. 397-8; Kroepelien, 283; McLaren, 269; Sabin, 38958.

$A6500

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