Between 1766 and 1769 Louis-Antoine de Bougainville led the frigate Boudeuse and the storeship Étoile around the globe, by way of the Falklands, the Strait of Magellan and the Pacific islands. His narrative records winds, coasts and charts alongside the peoples he met, above all the Tahitians, whose island he described as a new Cythera, here in Johann Reinhold Forster’s English translation of 1772.
The voyage that fed Diderot’s dreams of the South Seas and shaped European ideas of the Pacific for a generation. Download the free EPUB.