MOERENHOUT Jacques-Antoine Voyages aux îles du Grand Océan, contenant des documents nouveaux sur la géographie physique et politique, la langue, la religion, les mœurs, les usages et les coutumes de leurs habitans ; et des considérations sur leur commerce…

O’Reilly, 876 & 6845; Hill, 1170; Forbes, 1065; Sabin, 49829 (4 plates and a map).

First edition, very rare.

This important work on the Pacific was written by the French consul in Tahiti (actually a Belgian national but also acting as US consul in various Pacific islands). This account of his travels among the Pacific islands is rarely found on the market, with O’Reilly-Reitman describing it as “long an unobtainable book”.

The book only regained fame through the twentieth-century facsimile. Moerenhout lived for many years in Chile before setting off for Polynesia with commercial ambitions. He first arrived in Tahiti in 1829 and made two further long stays in the 1830s. O’Reilly-Reitman describes his book as one of the best works on Tahiti in the early period, and notes that Moerenhout was on good terms with a number of Tahitian natives, even living for a time with Tati, the chief of Papara. Moerenhout himself identified an old man in Raiatea, Harepo, as his best informant. He knew all the missionaries, including those who survived the first wave – Nott, Wilson, Henry and Davies – as well as their successors Pritchard, Williams and Darling.

His book is therefore an important record of life on the islands in the late 1820s and early 1830s. The natural history observations in the book are mainly by the Italian naturalist Bertero, who tragically disappeared, along with all his collections and notes, during the shipwreck one of the vessels chartered by Moerenhout for his commercial activities. There are also a few references to Hawaii, and a description of Pitcairn based on Moerenhout’s visit to the island in 1829. One of the plates shows the surviving mutineer from the Bounty, John Adams.

“A very scarce and important work on Tahiti, by a long-time resident who subsequently became United States Consular official. Moerhenhout gives a résumé of the discovery and exploration of Tahiti from the time of Captain Cook to the present, examines all aspects of the native culture, and includes an essay on the origins of the Polynesians. There are occasional references to the Hawaiian Islands…. The author made a trip to Pitcairn” (Forbes).

Slight marginal waterstain to volume I, folding map with old restoration slightly touching left border with some numbering. Else a very good copy of the rare book, in its first, decoratively tooled, binding.