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Author: Rocquefeuil, Camille de
Title: A Voyage Round the World, Between the Years 1816-1819
Place Published: London
Publisher:Richard Phillips
Date Published: 1823
Description:

112 pp. (8vo) 21x13.5 cm (8¼x5¼"), cloth-backed boards, printed spine label. First English Edition.

An abridged translation of the two-volume French edition published the same year. Roquefeuil led the first French expedition to the Pacific since Baudin (1800-1804), the hiatus due to the interruptions of the Revolution and Napoleon's concentration on European conquests. He left Bordeaux in the Bordelais, sailing to the Pacific and the west coast of North America, attempting trade in California, Nootka, and Sitka, without financial success. Hill remarks that "Despite lack of profit, however, France now had an up-to-date report on conditions on the west coast of America from California to the Aleutians, on Hawaii, the Marquesas, and on the prospects for trade in each of these areas. In the section on the northwest coast of America, Roquefeuil gives many details of the Indian inhabitants." Printed as part of Phillips' New Voyages and Travels, but often found separately. Warren Heckrotte notes that "pp. 23-27, 39-40, and 107-110 describe his visit to California, mainly San Francisco. On p.25 he relates a conversation with Don Luis Arguello in which Arguello tells him about his voyage up the Sacramento for more than fifty leagues. This voyage took place in 1817 and is related by Fray Duran... It is from Roquefeuil that Brué got his information on the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers that is found in several of his maps dated 1824 and 1825."

Wear, soiling and fading to binding, rubbing to extremities; toning to endpapers and first and last pages, slight darkening to textblock; very good.