Voyage to the South Pole and Oceania, Volume IV: Nuku Hiva, Tahiti, Tonga and the Fiji Islands

26 August 1838, in the evening: the anchor has barely dropped in Taiohae Bay, at Nuku Hiva, when the island's young women swim out to the Astrolabe and the Zelee, and Dumont d'Urville has the boarding nettings hoisted.

For two months he crosses the Polynesia of missionaries, whalers and deserters. In the Marquesas, a funeral feast, a dead man laid out on the toui-papao, Dr Le Guillou reported knocked senseless among the Hapas. At Tahiti, where Du Petit-Thouars's Venus has just obtained redress, he speaks so sternly to Queen Pomare that tears rise to her eyes, before going to see Pritchard. One night, the breakers of Maupelia whiten beneath the rudder. At Apia, the chief Pea has retained only one word of the English port regulations, "dollars", and a pupil stripped in a swamp earns the village of Sava-lelo an ultimatum of twenty-five pigs. At Vavau, he finds Simonet again, the deserter from the first Astrolabe, lost from sight for ten years.

At last come the Fiji Islands, the dreaded archipelago. The great chief Latchika throws himself into the water, despite the cries of his people, to join the French, then guides the corvettes among the corals as far as Pao. The commander has come there to seek justice for Captain Bureau and the Aimable-Josephine, seized by Nakalasse, chief of Piva, while the old king Tanoa, his fearful enemy, hesitates.

The journal of a seaman who already knows these seas, judges quickly, speaks plainly, and knows what the honour of a flag can cost.