FONTANIER Victor Voyage dans l’Inde et dans le Golfe Persique par l’Égypte et la Mer Rouge.

First edition.

Victor Fontanier (1796-1857) was a naturalist and diplomat who spent many years travelling throughout the Turkish Empire and India. After studying pharmacy, he was appointed to the Museum in 1819 as an assistant naturalist. In 1821 he was sent to Constantinople as a naturalist attached to the French Embassy. He then visited most of the Archipelago, followed by a long journey along the eastern coast of the Black Sea, calling at Sürmene, Copi, Batoum and other places.

In 1834 he was entrusted with a political mission to the Persian Gulf.  “He left Cairo in February 1835, sailed up the Nile and embarked at Kosséir on the Red Sea. It anchored at Jeddah, crowded with pilgrims from Mecca, at Hodeida and Moka, Yemeni ports, and finally at Bombay where the unfortunate V. Jacquemont had died two years earlier. There, Fontanier embarked for Bender Abbas, Ormuz, the island of Kharg, occupied by the English, and Bender Bouchir, the main gateway to Persia. The Chatt-el- Arab will take you to Basra, where the French consulate will offer asylum to travellers. A steamship on the Tigris can take you as far as Baghdad. The only wealth in Mesopotamia seems to be the export of dates. But during his stay in Basra as vice-consul, Fontanier was mainly interested in the political state of Persia, its wars with Turkey and Anglo-American intrigues in the Gulf region. In 1838, Fontanier was appointed French consul in Bombay. He left Basra on 16 January with instructions to visit Muscat on the way. He called at Matrah, the port of Muscat where the French flag was virtually unknown, but where the botanist Aucher-Eloy had just passed through. Shivering with fever, Fontanier had to set sail again without having been able to meet the iman on his journey. Bombay, the capital of one of India’s three presidencies (along with Madras and Calcutta), was a busy port where the English and the Parsis shared the trade. The French were not very active there either, and the passage of the Artémise, which sailed around the world under the command of C. Laplace, was a real event. In 1840, the French consul took a cruise along the Malabar coast, where the old Portuguese trading posts had not lost all their importance: Goa, Cannamore, Calicut, Cochin, Quilon, Trivandrum… He inspected our tiny colony of Mahé and then, remembering that he was also a naturalist, he drew a quick picture of the Malabar coast with its coastal plains of exuberant flora dominated by the Ghâtes escarpments. In 1842, he made another fact-finding trip to Pondicherry. Disembarking in Calicut, Fontanier set off across the southern Deccan via Palghat and Coimbatore. 

 Along the way, he discovered the picturesque Nilgiri mountains, where the English had set up sanitariums (sic) to restore their health. On 12 January, via Salem, he reached Pondicherry, “the prettiest city in India”. The main sights are the cotton mill, the Lazarist mission and the Botanical Gardens. To the south of the French trading post, Fontanier visited Cuddalore on the Trivadi. To the north, he went as far as Madras, a poor port but impregnable fortress, and the Seven Pagodas, an important place of pilgrimage. Fontanier left Pondicherry on 12 July for La Réunion, Sainte-Hélène and Nantes. Absorbed by political, colonial and commercial issues, he does not seem to have seen any of the monuments of southern India…”. (see Nouma Broc).

The Grand Larousse notes that Fontanier’s works on the Orient “which earned him the title of corresponding member of the Institute, are esteemed for their accuracy and the interest of the details”.

The second volume contains supporting documents relating to trade with India, with statistics on the number of ships, imports and exports, etc.

A very fine copy, very clean and attractively bound.