The Journal of Post Captain Nicholas Baudin (First Edition)

A$150 · Offered by Harry Hartog Rare Books

The first publication of Baudin’s own account of his Australian voyage, translated by Christine Cornell and issued by the Libraries Board of South Australia. Nicolas Baudin (1754–1803) sailed from Le Havre in 1800 in command of the corvettes Géographe and Naturaliste . His brief was to complete the French survey of the Australian coast, and he did so with a large natural-history collection, charting the southern and western coasts. In April 1802 at Encounter Bay he met Matthew Flinders, who was making his own survey in the opposite direction. Baudin died at Mauritius in September 1803, before the expedition returned. The official narrative was written by François Péron, whose quarrel with Baudin led him to omit the commander’s name. For more than a century and a half the man who led the voyage had no voice in its history. In 1965 Christine Cornell, a young graduate, was engaged by the Public Library of South Australia to translate Baudin’s Journal de Mer . She worked from microfilms made in Paris in 1963, finishing the journal itself by 1966 and the appendices by 1968. She wrote her preface in 1973. The book was published by the Libraries Board in 1974 with a foreword by Jean-Paul Faivre, funded by a donation from Mabel Somerville. Cornell aimed to stand between Baudin and the reader as little as possible, and her translation preserves his plain, technical and often exasperated voice. The historian Anthony J. Brown credits it with beginning the rehabilitation of Baudin’s repu

• Binding: Hardcover

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