Rare observations taken on the last grand voyage under sail.
The thirty-two gun corvette La Capricieuse sailed underthe command of Gaston Rocquemaurel (1804-78), who already had a distinguished career in the navy and was second-in-command on Jules Dumont d’Urville’s voyage to the Pacific on the Astrolabe, 1837-40. “Officially, it was a political mission to China, but Rocquemaurel also had some scientific assignments. He explored unknown parts of the Sea of Japan, reconnoitred the coasts of Indochina, and, by following Lapérouse’s route along the coasts of Korea and Kamchatka, he filled in some of the last uncharted areas on 18th-century maps” (Caffarel).
Ernest Mouchez (1821-92) served as lieutenant on board and took responsibility for hydrographic and astronomical observations as they sailed along the coasts of Vietnam, Korea, China and Macao correcting many of the errors they found on the English maps they brought with them. He further elaborates on these observations in the accompanying pamphlet, which concerns the Brunner portable telescope which he used on board. An official account doesn’t appear to have been published and so these are two of the few contemporary sources on the voyage.
Mouchez also served on voyages to South America and the Indian Ocean, and later became the director of the Paris Observatory.
OCLC locates copies at US Naval Observatory, Observatoire de Paris, BnF, Defesiebibliotheken, and the Kungliga Biblioteket in Sweden.
Not in Hill; not in Howgego, Caffarel, S., “A disillusioned explorer: Gaston de Rocquemaurel or the culture of French naval scholars during the first part of the 19th century” in Terrae Incognitae, Vol 45, no. 2 (October, 2013) pp.113-127; Xie, J., The French in Macao … (Macmillan, 2022) p. 103.
