Voyage à la Nouvelle Guinée, dans lequel on trouve la description des lieux, des observations physiques & morales, & des détails relatifs à l’Histoire Naturelle dans le Règne Animal & le Règne Végétal

Paris : Chez Ruault, 1776. Quarto, full speckled calf, corners subbed and bumped, rebacked with new head and tail caps, preserving original spine, spine in compartments with contrasting morocco title label lettered in gilt, marbled edges and endpapers, bookplate for Henry White to front pastedown with bookseller’s label of A. H. Spencer, half-title, engraved frontispiece, pp. xii (a couple of pencil marks to title page), [iv]; 206; (2 – adverts), 120 engraved plates (plates 90 and 91 are on the one page), 6 plates folding, light offsetting and foxing, small water stain to lower margin of a few leaves, one corner with loss, not affecting the text, a very good copy.

Pierre Sonnerat was nephew of French colonial administrator Pierre Poivre, and became assistant to him in the Mascarene Islands in the Indian Ocean. From there Sonnerat was stationed in Pondicherry, and made several trips to China and South East Asia, where he collected natural history specimens.

Sonnerat’s wonderfully illustrated volume Voyage à la Nouvelle Guinee includes some most extraordinary natural history specimens one can scarcely imagine finding in the tropical jungles. No less than three types of Antarctic Penguin are illustrated and described, as well as the common Australian kookaburra which is not found in New Guinea. In reality, Sonnerat never visited New Guinea, and this work is one of fiction, based on natural history specimens largely gathered in the Philippines and Indonesia.

The penguins and kookaburra were actually given to Sonnerat by Joseph Banks at the Cape of Good Hope in 1770, while the naturalist was en route home on the voyage of the Endeavour. Banks asked Sonnerat to deliver them to naturalist Dr Philibert Commerson based in Mauritius. The skins were sketched by Commerson’s artist Paul Philippe Sanguin de Jossigny, and upon the death of Commerson in 1773, Sonnerat retained Jossigny’s illustrations, signed them, and passed them off as his own work, illustrating his apparent voyage to New Guinea.

Despite the obvious inaccuracies, Sonnerat’s work is still an important early achievement in recording newly discovered species, his illustration of the kookaburra is the first time it appears in print.

A fascinating confluence of fact and fiction.