Saint-Maur · 1769

Journal historique d’un voyage fait aux îles Malouines

dom Antoine-Joseph Pernety · Berlin, Étienne de Bourdeaux · two octavo volumes, eighteen folding plates

The day-by-day log of the voyage that carried Bougainville to the Falkland Islands in 1763, kept by the expedition’s chaplain — a Benedictine of the Congregation of Saint-Maur who was also its naturalist. Winds and bearings, sea wolves and birds, and a hillside of shattered rock he could not cut his name into.

A chaplain who was also the naturalist

Pernety was a monk of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, the house of Mabillon’s successors, and it was in its library that he found the hermetic books which later reordered his life. In 1757 he had published a portable dictionary of painting, sculpture and engraving. In August 1763 he was at Solidor, where the two ships were blessed and Mass was said aboard the frigate l’Aigle between two salvos. He sailed in her — a hundred men and twenty guns, under Duclos-Guyot of Saint-Malo — with the corvette Sphinx in company.

The departure took a month. The ships left Solidor at five in the morning on 1 September and anchored in the Rance roads at ten; they got under way again at nine on the morning of 15 September, the date usually given for the departure from France; then westerly gales held them under Cap Fréhel until about the twenty-fourth. Étienne de Bourdeaux, bookseller to the king and the court, published the result at Berlin in 1769. A notice at the end of the second volume tells the binder to gather the plates there — Avis au Relieur. Les 19 Planches doivent être mis à la fin du Tome 2. The notice says nineteen; eighteen is what survives.

He had brought his libraries with him

The natural history fills much of the second volume: sea wolves of ten to twenty feet; a bird he introduces by admitting that nobody can say what genus or species it belongs to, whose feathers feel like fine silk until you pull one out, whose cry is a braying donkey, and which at a hundred paces, he writes, you would take for a choirboy in a camail. He compares as he goes. In the preliminary discourse he weighs the discovery of the islands against Frézier’s Relation du voyage de la mer du Sud, Paris 1716, page 264, and against Frézier’s chart of the Patagonian coast; at sea, with a tuna harpooned in the tropics, he holds the fish against Valmont de Bomare’s Dictionnaire d’histoire naturelle, taken after Lémery, and finds the description will not fit.

On Friday 6 April 1764, the day after the flag went up, he went out in the longboat with Bougainville’s officers to survey the bay, landed at its head — the inlet lettered D on Plate IX — and climbed the height lettered E. There he found the stone runs. He was mortified, he writes, to have neither the time nor the instruments to draw the whole scene; a painter would have made one of the finest of all ruin pieces out of it, and the plate gives only an idea of it. He tried to cut his name into a slab a foot and a half thick, ten feet long and six wide; neither knife nor punch would bite. He struck a corner off with another stone instead, and the splinters were a kind of porphyritic sandstone.

What is not his own

The last section of the second volume is headed Observations sur le Détroit de Magellan, & sur les Patagons, and it is not his. He printed extracts from officers’ journals — among them that of Alexandre Duclos-Guyot, lieutenant de frégate aboard l’Aigle — covering voyages made to the strait in 1765 and 1766, after he had come home; he published them, he says, to settle the uncertainty of several learned men about the real existence of the giant Patagonians. He never stood on that shore himself. The extracts he chose record the shortest man at five feet seven inches; the pages around them still call them giants.

The settlement, and afterwards

France took possession on 5 April 1764; Pernety sailed for home three days later and landed on 26 June. By the time the book appeared the settlement it describes had been given up: under the convention dated at Saint-Ildefonse on 4 October 1766, Bougainville acknowledged compensation of 618,108 livres and Felipe Ruiz Puente took administrative charge the same day, the physical handover following in the Río de la Plata on 31 January 1767. Port Saint-Louis became Puerto Soledad.

The book went to sea again. Both volumes stood in the library of HMS Beagle, and Darwin, who saw the same stone runs in 1833 and 1834, wrote that Pernety had devoted several pages to a hill of ruins whose successive strata he had justly compared to the seats of an amphitheatre. A revised Paris edition followed in 1770, an English translation in London in 1771, reissued in 1773. Pernety had by then left the congregation; the title page calls him abbot of Burgel and librarian to the king of Prussia.

Why it is here

Because it shows the same training turned on an unfamiliar object. A monk who had spent years among manuscripts describes a bird he cannot classify by saying so, and a rock he cannot draw by admitting he had neither the time nor the instruments. That is the habit the research programme asks of everyone working on this abbey: record what is there, say what you could not establish, and leave the reader able to go back to the thing itself.

SourcesThe title page is from the copy of the Berlin edition digitised by the Internet Archive; the four plates are reproductions published on Wikimedia Commons, all in the public domain. The collation follows the catalogue record of the John Carter Brown copy. The quotations and the episode of 6 April 1764 are from the text of the second volume, pages 525-526, readable at the Internet Archive. Darwin’s remark is in the Journal of researches; both volumes are listed in the Beagle library.