Journal de la navigation autour du globe de la frégate La Thétis et de la corvette L'Espérance pendant les années 1824, 1825 et 1826. Publié par ordre du Roi sous les auspices du Département de la Marine

First edition of the official account of the circumnavigation undertaken by La Thétis and L'Espérance, published by Arthus Bertrand in 1837, eleven years after the expedition's return.

The atlas, complete as issued, comprises 56 plates and maps, including 13 hand-coloured plates: engraved views after the drawings of the Vicomte Edmond de La Touanne, hydrographic charts, a large folding map tracing the route of the voyage, and natural history plates coloured by hand at the time of publication, among them a pair of seals and the celebrated heteradelph Ake.

The two text volumes are preserved in their contemporary half midnight-blue calf bindings, smooth spines decorated with gilt and blind fillets and gilt rolls at head and foot, marbled paper-covered boards, marbled endpapers. Minor rubbing to the joints, edges and corners. The atlas is bound in contemporary half purple calf over corners, smooth spine decorated with gilt and blind fillets and gilt rolls, matching marbled paper-covered boards. Joints split at head and foot, corners worn. Some foxing, chiefly in the text volumes, together with a clean tear to page 81 of Volume I.

The expedition was carried out by two vessels: the frigate La Thétis, commanded by Hyacinthe de Bougainville, leader of the expedition and son of the celebrated navigator Louis-Antoine de Bougainville, and the corvette L'Espérance, under the command of Paul de Nourquer du Camper, later Governor of French Guiana and of the French Settlements in India. Departing Brest on 2 March 1824, the expedition returned there on 24 June 1826 after a circumnavigation that took it to Bourbon Island, Pondicherry, Singapore, the Philippines, Macao, Tourane, Australia, across the South Pacific, around Cape Horn, and on to the Falkland Islands, Chile, and Brazil. The work reproduces the official instructions issued to Bougainville before departure, together with the complete list of the expedition's officers.

The second volume opens with the Vicomte Edmond de La Touanne's account of his overland journey from Valparaiso to Buenos Aires across the Andes and the Pampas, one of the earliest French narratives of this crossing. It is followed by his commentary on the historical plates, the natural history section by René Primevère Lesson, and the astronomical and meteorological observations recorded throughout the voyage.

A graduate of the École Polytechnique, Hyacinthe de Bougainville had already taken part in the Baudin expedition to the Pacific in 1800 before commanding the frigate Cérès, captured by two British ships of the line in 1814. He was promoted to the rank of Rear Admiral in 1838.

One of the great French accounts of circumnavigation published during the Bourbon Restoration, remarkable both for the richness of its narrative and for its scientific atlas, which ranks among the finest produced by the major French maritime expeditions of the first half of the nineteenth century.