Voyage to the South Pole and Oceania, Volume III: Talcahuano, Valparaiso, Mangareva and Nuku Hiva

8 April 1838, in the morning: in the bay of Talcahuano, the crews of the Astrolabe and the Zélée climb on deck to see land again, and the scurvy patients regain their colour at the mere sight of it.

Jules Dumont d'Urville brings back from the far South corvettes with eaten-away copper sheathing, and forty sick men aboard Captain Jacquinot's Zélée. Six weeks' stay in Chile follow: a hospital ashore, the Astrolabe twice run aground near the watering place to repair her stem, whalers from Le Havre and their deserters, a whale's brain for the phrenologist, Concepción still in ruins after the earthquake of 1835, and the cacique Penoleo, Benavides' companion in arms, now an inglorious pensioner. At Valparaiso, in the mail, a little note from his wife awaits him, which he opens in dread.

Then sixty-four days of a thwarted crossing: Robinson's island, a sailor who could not swim, Easter Island, which has to be given up. At the Gambier Islands, the Bishop of Nilopolis, Father Cyprien and King Mapu-teoa in a blue frock coat receive the French, and a mass is celebrated amid a musket salute; what is learned there about Tahiti secretly decides the route. Then come the Tuamotus and their unfindable islands, and finally, in the Marquesas, a polyglot islander who plays Scapin.

The journal of a commander struck to the heart who chooses to press on, and who looks at the Pacific with the eye of the sailor, the scholar and the judge.