Louis-Antoine comte de Bougainville's Voyage 1766-1769
Bougainville was already preparing the second edition of the account of his voyage when Captain Cook returned to England from his first voyage in the Endeavor. Joseph Banks, the naturalist who went with Cook, sent an abridged extract of his journal to the Academy of Sciences in Paris, and Bougainville added it as a supplement to his own work, praising the accomplishments of Cook’s expedition. Popular attention focused instead on the descriptions by Bougainville, Cook, Banks, and others of the perceived open sensuality of the Tahitian people. [an error occurred while processing this directive]	Title Page from Joseph Banks' Supplément au Voyage de M. de Bougainville. . Neuchatel: Imprimerie de la Société Typographique, 1773.
The savant Denis Diderot even wrote his own Supplément au Voyage de Bougainville in 1796, which was a diatribe against artificial social restrictions. Inspired by the Tahitians, Diderot invited France to pursue even greater heights of sensuality than the French already had reached.
Bougainville: Page 6 of 6.	back   next