François Péron : an impetuous life : naturalist and voyager / Edward Duyker.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Duyker, Edward, author.

Series:

Miegunyah Press series. Series 2 ; Number 75.

Miegunyah Press series. Series 2 ; Number 75

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Péron, François, 1775-1810.

Péron, François.

Naturalists--France--Biography.

Naturalists.

Travelers--France--Biography.

Travelers.

Australia--Discovery and exploration--French.

Australia.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xxiii, 349 pages, 16 unnumbered pages of plates) : illustrations, maps.

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Carlton, Victoria : The Miegunyah Press, 2006.

Summary:

In 1800 François Péron, an ambitious young medical student not long released from the French revolutionary army, gained a place as an assistant zoologist on Nicolas Baudin's expedition to Australian waters. As his colleagues either deserted or died, he would rise rapidly within the expedition's ranks and even write its official account. In doing so, Péron would seek to destroy Baudin's posthumous reputation. The expedition was famously marked by the vexed relationship between Péron and Baudin, but Péron's work, as a man of science, profoundly enhanced the achievements of the expedition: he seized valuable opportunities to pioneer zoological, oceanographic and ethnographic studies, and as an ecological observer was remarkably prescient. Edward Duyker's meticulously researched biography of Péron takes readers on an engaging and wide-ranging journey--from the heart of pre-revolutionary rural France, to the bitter fighting on the Rhineland front in 1793-94, to the late eighteenth-century Paris medical school, to landfalls in the Atlantic and the Indian Oceans, to the little-known shores of Van Diemen's Land and New Holland, and back into the very heart of Napoleon's Empire. This is both a balanced assessment of the difficult relationship between Péron and Baudin, and an analysis of the conduct of science during some of the most turbulent years in French history.

Contents:

Intro

Title

Copyright

Contents

Illustrations

Maps

Acknowledgements

Textual note

Introduction

1 Cérilly

2 Revolution and war

3 Medical student

4 Savant

5 To the shoals of Capricorn

6 Ile de France

7 A course for New Holland

8 Shark Bay

9 Timor

10 Van Diemen's Land

11 Uncharted waters

12 Port Jackson

13 King Island

14 Kangaroo Island

15 Nuyts Archipelago

16 King George Sound

17 Back to Shark Bay

18 Final surveys

19 The voyage home

20 Back in France

21 Final years

22 Epilogue

Glossary of scientific terms

Glossary of French terms

Notes

Bibliography

Botanical index

Zoological index

General index.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 296-326) and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9780522870978

052287097X

OCLC:

1499720648