Louis-Antoine Comte de Bougainville (1729–1811) is best known for his circumnavigation of the globe from 1766 to 1769. Throughout a long and distinguished life, however, he participated in many of the turning points of world history: the fall of French Canada, the birth of the United States, the opening of the Pacific, the French revolution and the Revolutionary Wars, the crowning of Napoleon and the modernisation of France.
Bougainville was also a witty and charming courtier, becoming one of Napoleon’s senators. A true Man of the Enlightenment, he was gifted in navigation, seamanship, soldiering, mathematics, longitude and latitude — many of the arts that made his age one of most productive and creative in modern history.
John Dunmore, a distinguished historian and an expert in French Pacific exploration, brings the man and his era to life in this vivid and elegantly written biography — the first such life of Bougainville to appear for 25 years.
