LA POPELLINIERE (Lancelot-Voisin, Seigneur de).

L'Amiral de France, et par occasion, de celuy d'autres nations, tant vieiles que nouvelles.

PROMOTING THE FRENCH COLONIZATION OF THE NEW WORLD

First edition, first issue. Woodcut vignette to title-page. Small 4to. A fine copy with wide margins in original vellum. [14], 92, [6]ll. (A-C4, a2, A-Z4, a4, b2.) Paris, Thomas Perier, 1584.

£19,500.00

A lovely copy of a rare early work remarking on Columbus and Vespucci, by a vocal advocate of French expansion into the New World.

L’Amiral de France was published just two years after La Popellinière’s seminal Les Trois Mondes, a collected history of the first French and other European expeditions to the Americas. In that work, he discussed the voyages of Columbus, Pizarro, Ribaut, Villegagnon, Vespucci and Magellan, and proposed that France should despatch expeditions to colonise the lands in the New World and the Pacific. This was fifteen years before Pedro Fernández de Quirós asked the same of Spain.

The three worlds of La Popelinière are that of the past, the world known by antiquity; that of his own days, the New World discovered and explored in the last 150 years; and that of the future, to be discovered, explored, and colonized by France. And in this imbricated geographical and historical sequence, it is no accident that in the third book of the Trois Mondes, after analyzing the French failure in Florida (1562-1568), La Popelinière discusses the Brazilian colonizers’ experience (1555-1560). In spite of the strong ideological currents underlining the Trois Mondes, the work, as Beaulieu puts it, remains a remarkable synthesis of the history of the world and of 150 years of discoveries” (Yardeni).

Ostensibly a history of the French navy from the very earliest times, L’Amiral de France gives exact details of naval regulations and an accurate account of the position of an Admiral, both in France and abroad. However, it was “evidently written as a companion piece for Les Trois Mondes, [and] shares with the earlier work the call to Frenchmen to take to the seas and participate in the parcelling out of the overseas world, and emphasizes the importance of geographical knowledge in accomplishing these goals” (Gordon).

In the dedication to Anne de Joyeuse, Admiral of France, La Popellinière refers to the kindness with which the Duc de Joyeuse had received the project of his Les Trois Mondes. On ff 91v, he appeals to him directly, emphasizing the opportunity to enrich France with the singular things to be found in these strange lands.

Furthermore, on ff. 83-4, La Popellinière remarks on America. He cites the early discoveries of Amerigo Vespucci and Christopher Columbus; he condemns the Spanish and Portuguese as foul-mouthed cowards; and while deriding their treatment of the Indigenous populations, notes the huge profits to be gained from gold and the “lustre de ses beaux exploits.”

Born in Gascony in 1541, La Popellinière is regarded foremost as a Protestant historian and, per Beaulieu, a geographe de cabinet. Having said that, he is believed to have set out on an expedition from La Rochelle in May 1589 with three small ships for his third world in the Pacific. Alas, “they got no further than Cap Blanc in West Africa, where dissensions and despondency made him abandon the expedition and return to France. The captains of the two other ships, Richardiere and Trepagne, decided to continue to South America, but only succeeded in reaching the coast of Brazil” (Dunmore). His ongoing interest in geography is also perhaps under-reported. He was, in fact, responsible for the first translation from Latin into French of the Mercator-Hondius Atlas (1609) and the smaller format Atlas Minor the year prior.

OCLC locates copies at Deutsches Schiffahrtsmuseum, Oldenburg and BL (2 copies). Not in Brunet, not in Sabin, not in Palau. This is the same copy that appeared in our 1928 catalogue.

Beaulieu, Anne-Marie, Les Trois Mondes de la Popelinière (1997); Dunmore, John, French Explorers in the Pacific, vol 1, (1969) p.196; Gordon, Amy Glassner, “Mapping La Popelinière’s Thought: Some Geographical Dimensions” in Terrae Incognita, vol 9, 1977; Nowell, Charles E., “The French in Sixteenth-Century Brazil” in The Americas, vol. 5, no. 4 (April, 1949) pp. 381-393; Yardeni, M, “Les Trois Mondes de La Popeliniere…” in The Sixteenth Century Journal, vol. 29, no. 3 (Autumn 1998), pp.850-852.

Stock No.
186574