Dumont d'Urville, Jules Sébastien César (1790-1842).
Voyage de la corvette l'Astrolabe ... pendant les années 1826-1827-1828-1829. Paris: J. Tastu, Editeur-Imprimeur, 1830-1834.
The Astrolabe was sent out in 1826 to search for the lost ship and crew of Jean François La Pérouse, missing since 1788. The commander was Jules Dumont d’Urville, who had been on the voyage of the Coquille (see item 21), and in fact, the ship he took back out was none other than the Coquille itself, renamed Astrolabe because that was the name of the lost ship of La Pérouse. The naturalists on board were those who had served on the voyage of the Uranie in 1817-20 (see item 20), Jean René Constant Quoy and Joseph Paul Gaimard. The Astrolabe returned in 1830, having found the final location of La Pérouse, but also having gathered a huge assortment of specimens and drawings, and the narrative was the grandest yet for any French voyage, with thirteen volumes of text and eight folio atlases. We include the work here, rather than in the section on voyages, because of the wealth of information it provided on invertebrates. The images of barnacles, corals, sponges, mollusks, and starfish are simply gorgeous. We show here a sea hare, a shell-less mollusk with two appendages that resemble rabbit ears, and a sea anemone called Actinia. Both were drawn by a zoological artist who is known only as Prêtre.