A Scientific Voyage in the Southern Hemisphere and Around the World Executed Successively on Board the King's Corvette Uranie and His Majesty's Corvette La Physicienne During the Years 1817, 1818, 1819, and 1820

Résumé du livre

For the European powers, the departure of the French corvette Uranie from Toulon in 1817 arguably marked the end of their Age of Exploration. The continents and larger islands had all been discovered and their coastlines and harbours had been mapped, and most of the places visited by the corvette were already European colonies. The avowed aims of the expedition were scientific. Gravity and magnetic fields were to be measured natural history specimens were to be collected and described, and primitive societies were to be visited and studied. The voyage culminated in a shipwreck that stranded the entire ship's company for three months on the (then uninhabited) Falkland Islands. Seven months before that calamity, as the Uranie was leaving the Marianas, the junior of the two surgeons on board, Joseph-Paul Gaimard, made his final entry in the pages of a large notebook that had been issued to him at the start of the voyage. The first entries had recorded advice for him related to his medical duties and lists of the relevant stores taken on board, but it was the practice at the time on French expeditions for the medical officers to b responsible also for parts of the scientific work, which for the surgeons meant principally zoology and anthropology. Gaimard recorded the advice and instructions he received for those duties also, and then, with almost four hundred pages to spare, he began to write a diary. Not even his friends ever claimed that was a systematic or organized observer, and what he produced was a strange, but often fascinating, mix of straightforward narrative, lists of stores and samples, records of dynamomentric measurements on peoples encountered, and extracts from material located in colonial libraires. It provides an unusual perpsective on the global circumnavigations of the early nineteenth century.