Hordern House

ANONYMOUS COMPILER Voyage autour du Monde. Notes extraites de divers ouvrages etrangers & traductions... ?France,, circa 1810- 1820

Octavo journal, manuscript in ink on about 140 pages, in English and French; in its original binding of mottled sheep, heavily rubbed at spine, preserved in a folding cloth box.

A very interesting manuscript compilation of material on voyaging. The manuscript is written by the same hand throughout, but appears to have been added to at different times over the years. The author shifts back and forward between English and French, and although the title is written in French, if anything the writer seems more at ease in English (although he does translate some passages from other languages into French). The various materials that comprise the text have been put together by someone with a strong interest - probably professional - in navigating Australian, Pacific and Asian waters. Throughout, the tone is specialized and impersonal. Although it is anonymous, the work nonetheless provides an insight into navigation at the turn of the nineteenth century, and shows a familiarity with the published accounts of Bougainville, Krusenstern, Kotzebue and Horsburgh.

A number of digests of printed accounts appear early in the manuscript (extracts from Bougainville in English are followed by a translation into French of Captain Heywood on the River Plate, an extract from Horsburgh on the coasts of South America, from Krusenstern on Macao and the East Indies); these are followed by longer, more personal entries which include reports on Port Jackson and Cape Town (see below), as well as directions for sailing from the Cape of Good Hope to Bombay, along the Malabar Coast and Ceylon, or from Mauritius to Ceylon by the middle passage (from a 1791 voyage). Extensive notes are present on Timor, the China Sea, and the Straits of Sonda, and the author is knowledgeable about the Antarctic islands such as Campbell (here said to have been discovered 'about 8 years ago' by Captain Walker), Auckland (discovered by Bristow), and Bounty. The work concludes with the beginnings of an abridgement of Kotzebue's voyage in the Rurik and a note on the west coast of Africa from Gibraltar to Cape Frio.

The manuscript includes a particularly interesting section of great Australian interest as no less than fifteen pages discuss the anchorages and weather of Port Jackson, the coast of New South Wales, and the route eastward to Cape Horn, a section which appears to be based on personal experience and local knowledge. The author notes that Port Jackson is 'one of the best and safest harbours in the world, and a stranger may go into it with ease'. In this section he shows himself to be au fait with the work of John Hunter and, especially regarding currents in Australian waters, Matthew Flinders. There is even a note about a flood of the Hawkesbury that destroyed many small holdings 'a few years ago' (although the river flooded so routinely that this cannot be firmly dated).

Another section on Cape Town relies on personal impressions: 'I have known the south-easters blow so strong that a ship could not bring up under Penguin Island, but was driven to sea till the violence of the wind abated' he writes at one point; at another, that 'After working from Dassen Island, in January, 1798, to the entrance of Table Bay, we observed in the morning that it was calm under the high land in the S. Channel'.

The most intriguing reference is in a section discussing the typhoons of the China Sea. This is one of the sections that is clearly dated, as the author comments that during 'these last seven years' several British ships have been dismasted and foundered as a result of typhoons (including HMS Neptune, Elphinston, Ocean and True Briton; these vessels sank between 1809 and 1812). More intriguing, though, is a comment in this section that 'Capt. Krusenstern, the Russian circum-navigator, informed me that the mercury fell below the graduated scale of 27 inches in his marine barometer, during the progress of a ty-foong, when near the Japan islands...'.

$A22500

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