Histoire générale des voyages ou Nouvelle Collection des relations de voyages par mer et par terre, mise en ordre et complétée jusqu'à nos jours

First edition of this new Histoire générale des voyages, arranged and brought up to date with contemporary discoveries by Baron Charles-Athanase Walckenaer (1771-1852). Published in Paris between 1826 and 1831 in twenty-one octavo volumes, it constitutes the only portion ever completed of a project originally intended to extend to some sixty volumes. The final four volumes were prepared by Jean-Baptiste-Benoît Eyriès. Brunet V, 1041; Quérard X, 472; Gay 299; Hoefer XLVI, 498.

Contemporary half red Russia morocco with corners, spines with five raised bands, boards framed with blind fillets, marbled paper sides, endpapers and pastedowns, top edges gilt, the remaining edges untrimmed. A few scuffs to some boards, several spines slightly faded, occasional foxing.

The set is illustrated with three folding maps drawn by Auguste-Henri Dufour under Walckenaer’s direction and placed at the end of volumes XVI, XVII, and XVIII: Sénégambie et Côte occidentale d'Afrique depuis le Cap Blanc jusqu'au Cap Sainte-Anne (1828); Congo, Angola et Benguella (1829); and Guinée entre la Sierra Leone et le passage de la Ligne (1830). Far from serving merely as illustrations, the maps form an integral part of Walckenaer’s attempt to bring the geographical content of the work up to date.

The scale of the project was considerable: to reorganise the vast existing corpus of travel narratives and extend it through the most recent explorations. All twenty-one published volumes were devoted to Africa. Walckenaer gathers together the earliest Portuguese, Venetian, and English voyages along the African coasts, followed by accounts by Le Maire, André Brüe, Villault de Bellefonds, Adanson, the Abbé Demanet, La Jaille, Pruneau de Pommegorge, des Marchais, Golberry, Mungo Park, Geoffroy de Villeneuve, Mollien, and many others.

Its scope, however, extends well beyond itineraries alone. European trade, geography, natural history, religions, customs, and descriptions of African societies are interwoven with the narratives of exploration. The result is a vast synthesis of European knowledge of the continent, assembled from several centuries of testimony and reconsidered in light of the geographical advances of the early 19th century.

Volume IV notably preserves the remarkable story of Ayuba Suleiman Diallo, known in Europe as Job Ben Solomon. A learned Muslim Fulani from a prominent family in Boundou, he was captured in Senegambia in the early 1730s, transported to Maryland, later freed, and after a period in England returned to Africa in 1734. His story, transmitted notably through Thomas Bluett’s published account, is one of the earliest biographies of an African victim of the Atlantic slave trade and an exceptionally early instance of return to Africa after enslavement in America.

Responsibility for the undertaking eventually passed from Walckenaer to Eyriès for the final four volumes, but the universal programme announced at the outset was never carried beyond Africa. This very incompleteness gives the series its distinctive character today: conceived as the opening section of a general history of the world through its travellers, it became in practice an extensive historical and geographical encyclopaedia of Africa.

Provenance: from the library of the Château de Rosny, with the Stern-engraved bookplate reading “Château de Rosny - La Solitude”, a mark associated in institutional provenance records with the Lebaudy family library. The estate was acquired in 1869 by Gustave Lebaudy, and the library was subsequently preserved and enlarged by successive generations of the family until the château was sold in 1955. In the absence of a second, individually named ownership mark, the present copy is best associated with the Rosny library and the Lebaudy family as a whole rather than with any single member.

Conceived as a universal history of travel, Walckenaer’s undertaking never progressed beyond Africa; these twenty-one volumes therefore stand as the unexpected monument of an unfinished project, bringing together within a single synthesis several centuries of European navigation, exploration, and knowledge of the African continent.