Voyages et naufrages curieux en Océanie.

Paris ; Limoges : Martial Ardent, 1850. Octavo (187 x 11 3 mm), publisher’s original embossed cloth over boards gilt (corners worn, spine with small loss at head and with loss to cloth at tail), front paste-down with original owner’s name, lithographed frontispiece with ethnic types of the Americas and Oceania (including natives of the Sandwich Islands and Friendly Isles), pp 252; very clean throughout, a good copy.

Divided into five main sections: an introduction to Oceania; the Malay archipelago; Micronesia; Polynesia; and Papua (although strangely, this last part includes Botany Bay and Tasmania). The work is aimed at juvenile readers and covers the discovery and exploration of Australia and the Pacific by Europeans. It contains short accounts of maritime exploration, shipwrecks, cannibalism, convicts etc. These are augmented at the rear by individual sections (between 5 and 10 pages each) on Cook, La Pérouse, Bougainville, Dumont d’Urville, and the Māori of New Zealand.

This appears to be a later edition of a work with the same title first published in Paris by Eymery in 1837. However, the content of this 1850 Ardent imprint differs markedly from the 1830s editions we have previously handled, in that it includes the five significant sections on famous navigators and Māori which were absent in earlier editions.

Not in Ferguson (but see Ferguson, 2471 for the 1838 Liège edition)

Trove locates no copies in Australian libraries.