A Voyage Round the World…in the Years 1766, 1767, 1768 and 1769

1772

Hocken Library Bliss KU Bo

London: Printed for J. Nourse

In 1766, the voyage of the Boudeuse and L’Etoile under Bougainville became the first official French circumnavigation. Entering the Pacific by way of the straits of Magellan, Bougainville was determined to find the lost continent. He visited the Tuamotu Archipelago, Tahiti (naming it Nouvelle Cythère, after the birthplace of the Greek goddess of love), the islands of Samoa, the New Hebrides, and the Solomon Islands. His journal painted the South Seas as a paradise, where the ‘noble savage’ lived in a state of blissful innocence. It was a bestseller, and although Johann Rheinhold Forster is given as the translator in this English edition, much of it was done by his son Johann Georg. Both Forsters travelled with Cook on his second voyage.