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From Venus to AntarcticaThe Life of Dumont D’UrvilleJohn DunmoreJules-Sebastien-César Dumont D’Urville (1790–1842) undertook three global voyages of exploration and is the navigator who made the single greatest contribution to perfecting the map of the Pacific in the nineteenth century. Learned and energetic, he explored the Pacific from Guam to Antarctica, and from New Guinea to Chile, collecting a vast number of natural history specimens and recording extensive hydrographic information. His achievements brought him national recognition in the form of the Legion of Honour, while his scientific contributions earned him the gold medal of the Société de Géographie. Yet despite his intelligence and expertise, D’Urville was not an easy or likeable man. A classic workaholic, he often seemed cold and aloof, yet he earned the respect of his men through his humane and fair leadership. Always sympathetic to the island people he met, he even wrote a novel about the New Zealand Maori. His detailed account of his final voyage, eagerly awaited by the public, had to be completed by others when he, his wife and son were tragically killed in a railway accident in 1842. Reviews"This is about the life of Dumont d'Urville, a biography, even though written by an academic, is readable and flows very much like a novel holding my interest throughout ... an adventure as exhilarating as any I have read and told in fine style". Hawkes Bay Today, November 2007 "Jules Sebastien Cesar Dumont d'Urville, to give him his full blue-blood name, has stamped his name on our country. There's the big island off the top of the North Island, a valley further south, a peninsula and street names in five New Zealand towns ... d'Urville was one of the great figures of the 18th and early 19th century era of European discovery and exploration when France tried to compensate for the naval superiority it surrendered to Britain with the excellence of its scientific exploration ... Modern readers will probably warm to one character trait his contemporaries deplored, a love of working in old clothes. He was the early 19th century equivalent of the computer geek in cargo shorts, but he got things done ... d'Urville's life is the stuff of movies, full of action, clashes and outrage - imagined and justified." Sunday Star Times, December 2007 'This is the first substantial English language story of a man whose memory is enshrined in one of our islands - French Pass and D'Urville Peninsula too. His botanical expertise and role in recovering the Venus de Milo helped send him round the world 3 times. With its consistent attention to relevant details this is certainly another Dunmore tour de force' Wairarapa Times-Age March 2008 Read an extract from this book >>
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