10/06/2026
Have you ever seen such an unusual preface to a book? ✒️
💌 It is, one must say, quite fitting for this travel account, which is fully rendered as a series of lively and witty letters to a friend.
🗺️ "Promenade autour du monde" documents one of the most important explorations of the Pacific: the l'Uranie's expedition from Toulon to Gibraltar, Tenerife, and Rio de Janeiro, then past Cape of Good Hope to the Mascarene Islands, Western Australia, Timor, New Guinea, the Mariana islands, the Caroline islands, the Sandwich islands, New South Wales, New Zealand, Tierra del Fuego, and the Falklands, where the ship was unfortunately wrecked. Luckily, In 1817, Captain Freycinet, who had been commandeering the l'Uranie in her mission to collect natural history specimen, and gather information in the fields of geography, ethnology, astronomy, terrestrial magnetism, and meteorology, was able to acquire a new ship and sail back to Le Havre.
📖 The book was written by Jacques Etienne Victor Arago (1790-1855), the draughtsman of the expedition, and includes many insightful comments on the places visited, in particular on Western Australia and Hawaii. As it was less technical than Freycinet's own account of the voyage, Arago's version, published in 1822, became more popular.
