Voyage des pais septentrionaux. Dans lequel se void les mœurs, maniere de vivre, & superstitions des Norweguiens, Lappons, Kiloppes, Borandiens, Syberiens, Samojedes, Zembliens, & Islandois, enrichi de plusieurs figures

First edition of this curious account of Arctic exploration, published in Paris by Louis Vendosme in 1671. Illustrated with an engraved pictorial title bearing the arms of the City of Paris, a portrait of the author and fourteen copper-engraved illustrations in the text, depicting the inhabitants of the northern regions, their costumes and boats, together with various hunting and fishing scenes. The engraved title and portrait are signed by Ladame.

A copy retaining the author's portrait, absent from some copies of the first edition. The John Carter Brown Library records two states, distinguished by the presence of the portrait and of the word “Fin” at the foot of the final page.

Contemporary full mottled calf, restored, spine with five false raised bands, gilt fillets and double gilt compartments, gilt rolls at the head and foot partly worn, small repairs to the joints, gilt fillets to the board edges and slightly rubbed corners. Early pen-and-ink signature “J B Mazierre” at the head of the half-title, with manuscript annotations on a blank endpaper.

Provenance: the library of the Château de Menneval, with its engraved bookplate mounted on a pastedown.

Born in Rouen in 1634, Pierre-Martin de La Martinière led a life scarcely less adventurous than the stories he would eventually tell. Trained as a surgeon, he embarked at Copenhagen aboard one of three vessels fitted out by a Danish trading company for an expedition into the northern seas, with the approval of King Frederick III. According to his account, the voyage took him along the coasts of Norway and Lapland, then towards Siberia, Novaya Zemlya, Greenland and Iceland, through regions whose geography was still imperfectly understood by Europeans.

Even the date of the expedition has been disputed. La Martinière places the company's approach to the Danish king at the end of February 1653, a chronology followed by Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld, while other writers have dated the voyage to around 1670. Although this discrepancy cannot be conclusively resolved, the narrative preserves the observations and perceptions of a seventeenth-century traveller encountering a world whose geographical and cultural boundaries remained uncertain.

La Martinière is concerned less with the adventures of navigation alone than with the peoples he encounters, their dress, dwellings, customs and beliefs. Norwegians, Laplanders, Samoyeds and inhabitants of Novaya Zemlya appear in a narrative in which ethnographical descriptions mingle with accounts of animals and natural resources: reindeer, bears, narwhals, fishing and hunting all occupy a prominent place in his portrayal of the far North. The engravings extend this curiosity, offering images of people and scenes whose unfamiliarity would have particularly struck a French readership.

The final chapter, devoted to the errors of geographers concerning the respective positions of Novaya Zemlya and Greenland, also reveals the author's ambition to contribute to the understanding of regions still inadequately mapped. This geographical dimension helps explain the inclusion of the Voyage des pais septentrionaux in the principal bibliographies of Americana, which naturally encompass accounts of Greenland.

Yet the fascination of the book lies as much in its observations as in the freedom with which La Martinière embraces the marvellous. Information gathered from local inhabitants, second-hand stories and the most improbable phenomena are woven together with little apparent concern for distinguishing one from another. The reader moves from concrete description to episodes whose imaginative character belongs to a long tradition of travel writing, in which distant lands readily become the setting for every conceivable wonder.

This willingness to believe, or at least to recount, earned La Martinière a particularly cutting judgement from Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld. In his account of the Vega expedition, the distinguished Arctic explorer called him the “Münchhausen of the North-east voyages”, likening the French surgeon to the legendary baron whose imaginary adventures had become proverbial. The comparison is severe, yet it also illuminates the peculiar appeal of a work in which the observation of the world and the allure of fable remain closely intertwined.

The book proved sufficiently popular to secure an early European readership: translated into English as early as 1674 and into German in 1675, it also went through several French editions. Such success is hardly surprising in a writer whose appetite for controversy matched his taste for adventure. In 1667 and 1668, La Martinière published a series of pamphlets attacking the proponents of blood transfusion, particularly Jean-Baptiste Denis, carrying his objections so far as to challenge the circulation of the blood itself. A few years after his northern voyage, he also published L'Heureux esclave (1674), an account of his captivity at the hands of Barbary corsairs.

Dedicated to the Provost of the Merchants and the aldermen of Paris, whose arms appear on the ship depicted in the engraved title, the Voyage des pais septentrionaux was completed in the press on 20 August 1671. It belongs to a period in the history of exploration when the desire to understand distant lands had not yet entirely parted company with the pleasure of recounting their wonders.

La Martinière may have possessed more of the storyteller's temperament than the geographer's rigour; his book nevertheless retains all the charm of an age when the unknown still seemed to promise as many marvels as discoveries.