"Ma liberté avant tout"

Autograph postcard, signed "Alain", addressed to Lucien Daniaux in Papeete, Tahiti, written on the reverse of a photographic portrait of a smiling young Polynesian woman. Stamp of Australian Papua, postal marks, English censorship stamp ("passed by censor").

Sent a few months before his death, this postcard documents the final journey of the French traveller, undertaken amid the hostile climate of the Second World War.

When war broke out, the French skipper who had become famous for his achievements of the 1920s - his solo crossing of the Atlantic and circumnavigation of the globe - was living in Polynesia, to which he had grown deeply attached over some six years. Refusing to fight for a civilization he did not love, he opposed the idea of sending Tahitians to the battlefields of Europe and sided with the losing camp of Marshal Pétain. On 1 September 1940, the population of French Polynesia voted to rally to Free France; no longer feeling he belonged, Alain Gerbault left the island and began wandering across the Pacific. His final journey is known only through three postcards, including the present one, and one long letter, all addressed to his friend Lucien Daniaux; all were transcribed in Patrick O'Reilly's article in the Journal de la Société des océanistes in 1961.

In his letter sent on 21 February 1941 from Nukuʻalofa, capital of the only independent kingdom in Polynesia, ruled by Queen Sālote, Gerbault shares his observations on the Japanese threat to the Pacific: "The Japanese are infiltrating more and more. Here they are buying copra at derisory prices and, further west, are taking over every market". In the present postcard, written during his stay in Port Moresby, Papua, Gerbault refers back to his previous, strongly political letter, in which he had shared his view of the conflict then tearing the world apart: "Did you receive my letter from Toga [Tonga]. I told you that at this little game only S [Stalin] could win. H [Hitler], which I hardly expected logically, is trying to eliminate S. So all danger is averted and now the game is up...". This coded passage attests to the precautions taken with wartime correspondence, necessary to get past the censor. Each time, Gerbault's hypotheses about how the situation would unfold were shattered by harsh reality - in his final postcard, sent to Daniaux on 17 September 1941 from Timor, he admits his weariness and shares his growing doubt: "Everything is now unpredictable. Will the world be fascist or communist?".

After this coded reference to Hitler and Stalin, he adds: "I am leaving for Timor, Dilli, where an airmail letter could reach me". Portuguese Timor would be Alain Gerbault's final destination; he succumbed there to malaria on 16 December 1941, the day before Dutch and Australian troops landed to occupy the island preemptively, before it fell under Japanese control in February 1942. The postcard closes on a melancholy admission, yet one perfectly representative of the great adventurer's nature - "Dreadfully sad to be far from Tahiti, but my freedom above all" - which he ends with a farewell in Tahitian: "Aue te reora e : meitai ia oe".

On the eve of Pearl Harbor, a rare testimony to the final voyage of a bold explorer, a free and unconventional spirit, fleeing the war looming over the Pacific.