In my last post, I included a scan of the earliest known image of a cave entrance in Mauritius: but I wasn’t really satisfied by its quality. And so I decided to track down the original source (and why not?): it turned out to be one of a long series of drawings made by the French painter Louis Auguste de Sainson (1801-1887), who travelled on board the corvette l’Astrolabe on its journey around the world in 1826-129 as the voyage’s official painter.
The resulting images – which included splendid depictions of body art observed on numerous Pacific islands – are well worth a look, and were printed in two volumes as:
Voyage de la corvette l’Astrolabe : exécuté par ordre du Roi pendant les années 1826-1827-1828-1829, sous le commandement de M. J. Dumont d’Urville,… publié par ordonnance de Sa Majesté : Histoire du voyage / rédigé par M. Dumont-d’Urville.
The Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle de Toulouse has copies of both of these (shelfmark A 55(1) and A 55 (2) respectively): from its website, you can download PDFs of Volume 1 and Volume 2 for yourself, highly recommended!
Here are scans of the engravings of the drawings de Sainson specifically made on Mauritius, all taken from Volume 2:
Une Grotte au Quartier de la Grande Riviere
Vue des Pamplemousses
Vue de la Montagne de Pieter Bot
Vue Prise sur la Route de Port-Louis
Chute de la Grande Rivière
