Adelie Penguins, Antarctica
Shortly after returning to France from a three-year circumnavigation as lieutenant in Louis de Freycinet's L'Uranie, Louis I. Duperrey (right) and his colleague Dumont d'Urville presented a proposal for a new circumnavigation to the Minister of Marine, the Marquis de Clermont Tonnerre. The twin aims were scientific - including studies of terrestrial magnetism and meteorology - and geographic, with a view especially to confirming or correcting the position of islands and other landmarks essential to safe navigation.The vessel chosen was a horse barge named La Coquille (The Shell) which was later refitted and renamed Astrolabe in honor of one of La Perouse's ships which had disappeared in 1788. Departing Toulon on 11 August, 1822, Coquille sailed via Ascension Island, St. Catherine Island (arriving the week that Brazil declared its independence from Portugal), and the Falklandswhere the shipwrecked L'Uranie still lay before rounding Cape Horn. Once in the Pacific, Coquille sailed along the coast of South America as far as Paita, Peru, and then headed west through the Tuamotus to Tahiti, arriving on 3 May.
The expedition continued westward through the Society, Friendly (Tonga), and Fiji Islands. Though bound for Australia, horrendous weather forced them to steer northwest, and they passed the Santa Cruz and Solomon Islands before landing at Louis de Bougainville's Port Praslin, New Britain. From there Coquille continued across the top of New Guinea to the Dutch port at Amboina where the French spent most of October.
Coquille sailed to Port Jackson via the west and south coasts of Australia, and after a two-month layover continued to New Zealand in April 1824. After two weeks visiting with the English missionaries, who had been established there for nine years, the French sailed north through the Ellice and Gilbert Islands and west through the Carolines to New Guinea, where they arrived at the end of July. After a stop at the Dutch settlement of Surabaya, Coquille turned for France via the British island of Mauritius - formerly the French Ile de France- and St. Helena, where the British had imprisoned French emperor Napoleon Bonaparte from 1815 to his death in 1821. The ship arrived at Marseilles on 24th March 1825.
Upon returning to France from its voyage of exploration into the Pacific, Coquille was renamed L'Astrolabe, in honor of one of La Perouse's ships which had disappeared in 1788. Under Dumont d'Urville (right), whose interests were more geographic and ethnographic than Duperrey's, Astrolabe would undertake two further voyages of discovery. The first, from 1826 to 1829, was concentrated in Australian and western Pacific waters, with a view especially to locating any trace of the La Perouse expedition. After a survey of Australia's south coast, Astrolabe sailed to New Zealand, where her crew made extensive ethnographic and zoological studies. The French continued to Tonga and Fiji Islands, where they charted 120 islands - many of them previously unknown - before heading west to the waters around New Guinea. After repairs to the ship at Amboina, Dumont d'Urville sailed east through the Torres Strait and south to Tasmania, where Dumont d'Urville learned that the English captain Peter Dillon had found relics of La Perouse's expedition on Vanikoro. Sailing to the New Hebrides, the French confirmed these findings and gathered artifacts with which they returned to Marseilles on 24th February, 1829, after further stops at Guam, in the East Indies, and at Ile de France. (Dillon had returned earlier and Charles X appointed him to the Legion of Honor.)
Although English and American whalers and sealers had been hunting in the Southern Ocean for the half century since Cook's 1774 voyage into the ice in Endeavour, and Bellingshausen had sailed near Antarctica in 1820/21 in Vostok and Mirny, the French had played no active role in the exploration of the South Seas. In 1836, France's Emperor Louis-Philippe decided to mount an expedition to locate the south magnetic pole, with Dumont d'Urville as its leader in Astrolabe. Unlike the ship's previous two expeditions, she would be accompanied by La Zelee, under Charles Hector Jacquinot, a veteran of the previous expedition; between them, the ships embarked seven scientists and naturalists. Departing Toulon on 7th September, 1837, the two ships sailed via Tenerife and Rio de Janeiro for the Strait of Magellan where they remained from December through January 1838, taking aboard a Swiss and an Englishman who had been living among the Patagonians. On 22 January, the ships were confronted with an impenetrable mass of ice.
The ships were unable to make much progress southward, although they sighted the previously named Palmer Peninsula, and sailed for Chile in April 1838, where two men died of scurvy and twenty-two others either deserted or were too ill to continue. From South America the expedition sailed through the many of the larger Pacific Island groups - the Marquesas, Tahiti, Samoas, Tongas, Fiji, then northwest through the Santa Cruz Islands, Solomons, and Carolines before coming to the Spanish island of Guam. Astrolabe and Zelee continued to the Philippines, the Dutch East Indies, and then westabout to Tasmania where they arrived in November 1839. On the first of the new year, the two ships sailed south and on 19th January they saw the part of Antarctica they called Terra Adelie (for d'Urville's wife), though they were unable to land. They also crossed the path of USS Porpoise, one of the ships in the expedition led by Captain Charles Wilkes in USS Vincennes.
After determining approximately the position of the south magnetic pole, the ships returned to Tasmania where they re-embarked some of their sick crew before sailing for New Zealand. The French were also chagrined to find that the English had made significant advances in settling the land they had once considered for a French colony. From there the ships made their way back to France, arriving at Toulon on 7th November, 1840. Although twenty-two crew had died, and another twenty-seven had left the expedition because of illness or desertion, the ships had brought back the largest quantity of natural history specimens ever garnered in a single expedition.
Although Dumont d'Urville died before its publication, his account of Astrolabe's third voyage ran to twenty-three volumes, with five atlases. The ship's previous two voyages resulted in seven volumes and four atlases by Duperrey and fourteen volumes and five atlases by Dumont d'Urville. This celebrated small ship had circumnavigated the globe 3 times, each voyage lasting 3 years, and always with D'Urville on board. Converted into a corvette and still named La Coquille she made a first scientific voyage under the command of Duperrey from 1822 to 1825. This ship rode out terrifying storms and ran aground 6 times but somehow managed to avoid sinking.
