Voyage to the South Pole and Oceania, Volume I: Toulon, Tenerife, Rio de Janeiro and the Strait of Magellan

Toulon, 7 September 1837, at noon precisely: a gout-ridden captain, whose own sailors say he will not take them very far, bids farewell to his wife and children.

Out of favour with the ministry since 1830, Jules Dumont d'Urville had asked for a new campaign in Oceania; King Louis-Philippe added a thrust towards the southern pole, in the wake of the sealer Weddell. But before the ice there is the voyage. Gibraltar passed by night, the Zélée driven towards the coast of Tangier; an absurd quarantine at Tenerife, at the foot of the Peak; the ceremony of crossing the Line; a brief call off Rio de Janeiro to leave behind a young midshipman, ill since Toulon and slowly fading.

Then, at 52 degrees south, a gamble: rather than Staten Island, the Strait of Magellan. Two anchors that refuse to give way on a night of heavy weather, a barrel of letters hanging from a tree at Port Famine, the hill of Philippeville where Sarmiento's colony starved to death, a mountain at Port Gallant where hands freeze. At Peckett Harbour at last, the Patagonians, and among them a Swiss watchmaker who lives in their tribe.

Twenty-seven days in the strait, told by a precise, melancholy and readily polemical commander, who fully intends to show his crews what this "old fellow" is still worth. To the south, the pack ice is waiting.