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 THE FIRST FRENCH CIRCUMNAVIGATION
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BOUGAINVILLE, LEWIS de. A VOYAGE ROUND THE WORLD. Performed by Order of His Most Christian Majesty, In the Years 1766, 1767, 1768, and 1769 . . . . Translated from the French by John Reinhold Forster, F. A. S. London: For J. Nourse and T. Davies, 1772. 4to. Modern deep red half morocco. xxviii, 476 pages. Folding engraved plate and five folding maps. New endpapers, slight wear to outer margin of title, tape repair to margin of A2, short closed tear near mount of each map. A very good copy, handsomely bound.
FIRST EDITION IN ENGLISH of Bougainville's account of "the first French expedition to sail around the world" (Cox), translated by John Reinhold Forster, the German-born traveler, naturalist and writer who later accompanied Cook on his second great voyage.
Bougainville embarked on his voyage from the Falklands in November 1766. It took him fifty-two days to navigate the treacherous Strait of Magellan and round Cape Horn, and then he was into the open Pacific. Despite winds which were frequently unfavorable, shortages of provisions and lack of suitable anchorage wherever he tried to make land, Bougainville disproved the existence of the previously reported continent of Davis Land, and made his way to Tahiti, Samoa and the New Hebrides. Seeking to confirm whether the Torres Strait lies between Australia and New Guinea, Bougainville then headed west "into waters not previously navigated by any European ship. On the fringes of the Great Barrier Reef, he turned north without sighting Australia, passed the edge of the Solomon Islands, and went on to New Britain. Because his men were by then suffering from scurvy, and the ships needed refitting, he stopped at Buru in the Moluccas . . . and at Batavia (now Jakarta) in Java" (Encyclopedia Britannica). Bougainville returned to Brittany in March of 1769. "This expedition had considerable repercussions on the history of voyages, not only for its discoveries in the Pacific, but also for having been organized with true scientific precision" (Borba de Moraes).
It is less-known, but also of historical interest, that Bougainville inadvertently brought with him on his voyage the French girl Jeanne Baret who, accordingly, "seems to have been the first woman to circumnavigate the globe" (Delpar, The Discoverers). Baret "saw no other way of escaping into the free world of adventure enjoyed by men than by pretending to be one" (Id.), and in this disguise served as assistant to a botanist on Bougainville's expedition.
Forster apparently collaborated with his son Georg in the English translation of Bougainville's Voyage Autour du Monde, first published the previous year in Paris. "According to the main title, the translation was made by Johann Reinhold Forster; it seems, however, that the real translator was Georg Forster, while his father contributed the preface . . . and the numerous footnotes" (Kroepelien). Those portions of the text reflected the 18th-century colonial rivalry between France and Great Britain, and contained some inflammatory remarks in which Forster claimed that the French had "discovered very little; and what they discovered, had partly been seen by English navigators, or some Spanish ones of older date" (p. vi), that the maps in the English translation were superior in accuracy to those in the original French publication and that Bougainville had been "misled by false reports, or prejudiced in favour of his nation: we have, in some additional notes, corrected as far as it was in our power these mistakes, and impartially vindicated the British nation . . ." (p. vii). "Bougainville later replied to Forster's notes in the second version of his narrative . . ." (Kroepelien). Borba de Moraes I, p. 115. Cox I, p. 55. Kroepelien 113. NMMC I, 133. Sabin 6869. BT000065.
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