VAIRASSE D’ALAIS Denis Histoire des Sevarambes, peuples qui habitent une Partie du troisième Continent, communément appellé la Terre Australe.

Sabin, 98299 (for the English edition); Davidson, p. 42-3 "the very rare revised edition of 1716"; Exposition Utopie, Bnf 2000, p. 179-80.

This imaginary journey is part of utopian literature.

The author describes an ideal world in the Southern Lands. The work, of which only the first part, History of Sevarites, was published in English in London in 1675, is illustrated here with 10 new engravings, including the frontispiece repeated in each volume.

Vairasse, a French Huguenot living in London, presented himself as the editor of the manuscript of Captain Siden, a former lawyer, who, after a shipwreck, landed in Sevarambe country, somewhere on the coast of Australia.

The Sevarambes live under an ideal political regime: "L'héliocratie des Sévarambes, c'est en quelque sorte le prestige du Roi-Soleil plus la liberté de conscience. Avec de surcroît, pour le bonheur de tous, l'absence de propriété privée et de noblesse héréditaire" (Exposition Utopie, BnF).To reinforce the plausibility of his account, the author relies on the accounts of those shipwrecked by ships of the Dutch East India Company (VOC), such as the Batavia in 1629 and the Vergrulde Draek in 1656.

A fine copy bearing the arms of the La Rochefoucauld family, with the seal of the Château de la Roche Guyon.