Jules Dumont d'Urville

Jules Sébastien César Dumont d'Urville was born on 23 May 1790 at Condé-sur-Noireau, in Normandy, into a family of minor nobility: his father was bailiff of the local high court, and his mother belonged to the old house of Croisilles. The Revolution drove the family from its home; it settled in Caen in 1795, where the father died two years later. The child was then entrusted to his uncle, the Abbé de Croisilles, a canon, who taught him before he entered the lycée in Caen as a scholarship pupil.

He joined the navy in November 1807, aged seventeen, as a midshipman. According to Wikipedia, an initial failure in the entrance examination for the École polytechnique, in 1810, was due to his age. An ensign in 1812, he married Adèle Pépin, a watchmaker's daughter, in Toulon on 1 May 1815. During a campaign in the eastern Mediterranean in 1820, he drew the attention of the French embassy to the statue just unearthed on Milos, and so contributed to the acquisition of the Venus by France. A lieutenant in 1821, he left the following year as second-in-command to Louis Isidore Duperrey on the Coquille (1822-1825), in charge of botany and insects. He then commanded the same ship, renamed the Astrolabe, from 1826 to 1829: he charted New Zealand and New Guinea and found at Vanikoro remains of La Pérouse's expedition.

In 1830 he carried the deposed king Charles X to England, which earned him a long period of disfavour under the July Monarchy. He nevertheless obtained a third campaign. Leaving Toulon on 7 September 1837 aboard the Astrolabe, with Captain Jacquinot's Zélée, he pushed towards the southern ice, then sailed through Oceania; on 22 January 1840 he took possession of Adélie Land, named after his wife. The narrative appeared in Paris, published by Gide, from 1841 under the title Voyage au pôle Sud et dans l'Océanie sur les corvettes l'Astrolabe et la Zélée. He wrote the first three volumes and the beginning of the fourth himself; the hydrographer Vincendon-Dumoulin completed the account.

A founding member of the Société de géographie, which awarded him its gold medal, he took an interest in botany, entomology, ethnography and the languages of the Pacific. He published a flora of the Falklands in Latin, the multi-volume account of the voyage of the Astrolabe, including a volume of philology, and a Voyage pittoresque autour du monde intended for the general public. Above all, he proposed dividing Oceania into Polynesia, Micronesia and Melanesia, a term he coined; this division, now disputed, remains in use. His contemporaries described him as a skilful sailor, austere and proud.

Promoted to rear admiral in December 1840, he died on 8 May 1842 in the first great French railway disaster, between Bellevue and Meudon, together with his wife and the last of their sons. He lies in the Montparnasse cemetery. Copies of his papers on the first two voyages, largely in his own hand, are held at the State Library of New South Wales, in Sydney. A sea, an island in New Zealand and many plants bear his name, and his voyages have been translated into English, notably by Helen Rosenman (Melbourne University Press, 1987).