L'Amiral de France, et par occasion, de celuy d'autres nations, tant vieiles que nouvelles.

£18,750 · Offered by Maggs Bros Ltd

A lovely copy of a rare early work remarking on Columbus and Vespucci, by a vocal advocate of French expansion into the New World. L’Amiral de France was published just two years after La Popellinière’s seminal Les Trois Mondes , a collected history of the first French and other European expeditions to the Americas. In that work, he discussed the voyages of Columbus, Pizarro, Ribaut, Villegagnon, Vespucci and Magellan, and proposed that France should despatch expeditions to colonise the lands in the New World and the Pacific. This was fifteen years before Pedro Fernández de Quirós asked the same of Spain. “ The three worlds of La Popelinière are that of the past, the world known by antiquity; that of his own days, the New World discovered and explored in the last 150 years; and that of the future, to be discovered, explored, and colonized by France . And in this imbricated geographical and historical sequence, it is no accident that in the third book of the Trois Mondes , after analyzing the French failure in Florida (1562-1568), La Popelinière discusses the Brazilian colonizers’ experience (1555-1560). In spite of the strong ideological currents underlining the Trois Mondes , the work, as Beaulieu puts it, remains a remarkable synthesis of the history of the world and of 150 years of discoveries” (Yardeni). Ostensibly a history of the French navy from the very earliest times, L’Amiral de France gives exact details of naval regulations and an accurate account of the position

• Binding: Hardcover

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