Composite Atlas of Maps Illustrating La Perouse's Voyage
The First Non-Spaniard to Visit Monterey and a Key Pacific Explorer.
Unusual composite atlas of the maps and profile views for La Pérouse's voyage to the Pacific, including several of La Perouse's most famous charts. The collection of 34 maps and views includes:
- Two Maps of the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii)
- San Francisco Bay (earliest obtainable map)
- San Diego Bay (earliest obtainable map)
- Monterey Bay (earliest obtainable map)
- World Map
- Pacific Ocean
- Several General Maps of the Pacific Coast From California to Alaska
- Maps of Japan, China, Korea, and the Philippines
- Queensland, Australia and environs
La Pérouse was a key early figure in Pacific discoveries, and an explorer of the same importance in the region as Bougainville, Cook, and Humboldt. Hill says of the expedition he led that:
"La Pérouse's expedition was one of the most important scientific explorations ever undertaken to the Pacific and the west coast of North America"
La Pérouse led an important circumnavigation of the world, undertaken between 1785 and 1788. His ships, the Astrolabe and Boussole, made valuable contributions to the discovery and exploration of the Pacific and the Northwest coast of America, including Alaska, the Northwest Coast of America, Hawaii, numerous islands in the Pacific including Samoa, Tonga and Australia and the northeast part of Asia, including Japan and the Philippine Islands. The resulting cartographic and ethnographic are amply displayed in the atlas volume. The scientific contributions in the fields of natural history and anthropology were also of great importance, and the expedition was noteworthy for the scientific experiments undertaken on board, in particular concerning the preservation and sterilization of drinking water which to some degree anticipated the research of Pasteur.
The La Pérouse expedition is full of fascinating stories, including its rejection of a young applicant named Napoleon Bonaparte, dashing his hopes of serving in the navy, the disappearance of the expedition for some nearly thirty years, and its encounter with the First Fleet. Given the loss of the entire Lapérouse expedition, the tale survival of the plates and charts published in this report is a fascinating tale. While notes and some journals were sent back to Europe at several different ports, a large portion of the expedition's surviving journals were carried to France, overland across Russia, by Barthélemy de Lesseps. It took over a year before he finally reached Paris, and his trials along the way are almost as fascinating as those of the Lapérouse. Lesseps was one of only three crew members to survive the expedition.