[MANUSCRIPT] Campagne de la Corvette à Voiles l’Alcméne. Commandée par Mr. Coudein, Capitaine de Frégate, à destination des Mers du Sud et Océanie.

A$35,000 · Offered by Douglas Stewart Fine Books

[Libourne, France, between 1882 and 1887]. Folio, 270 x 215 mm, manuscript, [159] pp, in 4 stitched sections of 23, 38, 48 and 50 pages respectively, the third section with 2 pencil and wash drawings in the text, the fourth section with 3 pencil and wash drawings in the text and one laid down on thick paper (a depiction of the wreck of the Alcméne ); the manuscript is very well preserved and complete; [together with] Certificats de mes services à l État . Signed autograph manuscript, Challans, 22 August 1887; folio, [3] pp, being the complete maritime service record of Ernest Gendron, author of the Alcméne manuscript. An unpublished first-hand account of the voyage of the French naval corvette Alcméne in the South Seas, 1848-1852, including extended descriptions of the loss of crew members to cannibalism in New Caledonia in 1850, and of the vessel s infamous shipwreck at Kaipara on the west coast of New Zealand in 1851, whilst en route from Hobart Town to Tahiti. Born in Bordeaux in 1833, Ernest Gendron embarked as a mousse (equivalent to the Royal Navy s rank of boy ) on the three-masted corvette Alcméne in July 1848. Gendron s impeccably handwritten account of the voyage was evidently set down by him at some point in the 1880s, and is drawn from his original shipboard notebooks. The vessel departed the west coast of France for the Marquesas and Tahiti on 15 July, with a complement of 262 crew and 122 passengers, mostly soldiers, missionaries and Sisters of Charity of Saint

• Binding: Hardcover

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