Voyages et Avantures de Jacques Massé.

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chez Jaques l'Aveugle, Bordeaux, 1742. Duodecimo, engraved frontispiece and title vignette; a very good copy in contemporary mottled calf, spine gilt in compartments, some chipping at head and wear at lower rear hinge. The fourth edition (Rosenberg edition 'D'), with the same frontispiece portrait as the third. Friederich comments that the importance of mining and irrigation to the Australians makes it the only work 'to foreshadow what has actually come to pass in modern Australia'.

Tyssot de Patot was a well-known Huguenot free-thinker, whose writings were a continual source of scandal: Voltaire thought that he had 'carried the torch of discord into their homeland'. Certainly the antagonistically anti-religious stance of this novel created much ill-feeling. Atkinson comments that because 'open criticism of the Bible is so frequent' he will have to content himself with listing just a few of the more extreme examples.

Nonetheless, Atkinson's positive summary gives a good sense of the importance of the work: 'a close following of accounts of real travellers, such as Dellon, Tavernier, Mocquet, and Lahontan. There is nothing fantastic, unbelievable or overdrawn in the descriptions of the Austral continent... the realistic presentation of the story, in particular the detailed account of the adventurer's camp in the Austral continent, the building of a raft, and the descriptions of plants and trees, may be compared favourably to similar passages in the Robinson Crusoe of later date...'.

Massé shipwrecks on the Southern continent at '44 South latitude, almost at the point where Kerguelen Island will be found to be on modern maps' (Atkinson). Whilst most of the survivors of the wreck are content to maintain a large presence on the coast, Massé and his friend Moret travel inland where they settle in an enormous and well-organised utopia, 'a plentiful, fruitful country, a land of blessing and peace ... where human blood is sacred and safe from the rage and tyranny of great men'. They become so enamoured of their Australian hosts that they abjure their faith and their European heritage, and it is only when Moret is betrayed by his liaison with a treacherous queen that they reluctantly flee, escaping rather fortuitously by a subterranean river which deposits them close by the original settlement. They remain besieged in the camp for another twelve years before they are finally picked up by a Portuguese ship.Sometimes referred to as the 'nude' because of the title-page vignette of a nude woman, this version was at one time held by Professor Storer to be the probable first printing because she found it to be 'more luxurious and accurate'. Rosenberg takes some time to dismantle this notion, using as his trump card the watermarking of one copy at the University of Wisconsin which bears the names 'J. NOURISSON' and 'AUVERGNE MOYEN 1742'. This watermarking is clearly visible throughout this edition, and cf. p. 183, where '1742' is quite distinct.
Barbier, IV, p. 1103; Gibson, 'St. Thomas More... with a Bibliography of Utopiana', 780; Negley, 1118, Rosenberg, Edition 'D', pp. 86-7.

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