Lot 11. BOUGAINVILLE, Lewis [sic] de; FORSTER, J.R. (translator).

Bougainville founded a settlement on the Falkland Islands in 1764 but was instructed to hand it over to Spain. He afterwards crossed the Pacific, visiting Tuamotu and Tahiti, Samoa, the New Hebrides, and the Louisades. He certainly sighted the Great Barrier Reef, and may have seen the coast of Queensland. This was translated from the first French edition of the previous year by Johann Reinhold Forster. This volume contains a 300 word local Tahitian vocabulary, the first printed account of any Polynesian language. This account aroused great interest in France, resulting in the vision of the noble savage and of the South Seas as a kind of paradise in the minds of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and others.

First edition in English. 4to, xxviii, 476 pp., five folding maps and one engraved plate, light offsetting to text, occasional light spotting, contemporary sprinkled calf gilt, sometime rebacked preserving spine, morocco label, lightly rubbed, a very good example.

[Hill, p31; Kroepelien, 109; Sabin, 6863; BdM I, 115; Dunmore I, pp57-113.]

Sir Stafford H. Northcote (armorial bookplate); Frederick E. Ellis, Shaw Island (bookplate).