[BEHRENS, Carl Friedrich.]

Histoire de l'expedition de trois vaisseaux, envoyés par la Compagnie des Indes Occidentales des Provinces-Unies, aux Terres Australes en MDCXXI.

A La Haye, aux dépens de la Compagnie, 1739. 2 vols bound together, 8vo (160 x 100 mm), pp. [xii], 224; [iv], 254; titles printed in red and black; vol. I half-title frayed at margins; contemporary vellum; slightly soiled and possibly recased. First French edition. Behrens sailed as a marine on Roggeveen’s Pacific expedition of 1721–2. The present version of his narrative is derived from the 1737 German edition and was ‘the most famous publication’ concerning the voyage before the discovery of Roggeveen’s journal in 1836 (see Andrew Sharp, The Journal of Jacob Roggeveen, 1970, pp. 13–18); if Behrens’s account is fanciful and imprecise concerning dates and events in comparison to the latter, it should be read as the story as it was available to his contemporaries and to navigators in the crucial ensuing century of Pacific exploration.‘Though some attribute the translation to Charles de Brosses, Fleurieu believed that the style of language revealed the efforts of a non-native speaker. With the text often more a paraphrasing of the German version than a direct translation, Fleurieu and others credit Behrens himself with the translation’ (Hill).The only voyage of Oceanic discovery between 1700 and Byron’s in 1764: Roggeveen’s objective was the discovery and exploitation of the supposed Great Southland, following the leads given by the buccaneer Edward Davis and by Roggeveen’s countrymen, Schouten and Le Maire. Unsuccessful in its primary aim, the expedition nevertheless made several major discoveries, notably Easter Island and Samoa, and although ‘what Roggeveen had really done was to establish a northern limit to the extension of any Terra Australis’, for contemporaries ‘the net result of his voyage was to confirm a belief in its existence; there were also optimistic readings of Behrens’s inflated views on the potential of Juan Fernández as a seat of colonisation . . . ’ (Spate II, p. 227).Alden 739/21; Borba de Moraes I 95; Hill 99; Kroepelien 70; O’Reilly & Reitman 230; Sabin 4379.

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• libraire: Bernard Quaritch Ltd. (GREAT BRITAIN)