Voyage to the South Pole and Oceania, Volume V: Vanikoro, the Solomon Islands, the Carolines and Ambon

At the end of October 1838, the Astrolabe and the Zélée leave the Fiji Islands. Jules Dumont d'Urville looks for a Hunter Island that slips away like a cloud, then returns to Vanikoro, to the shore where La Pérouse was lost.

A long climb northward begins. The corvettes pass beneath the erupting volcano of Tinakoro, follow the coasts of the Solomon Islands and anchor in a cove that is christened Astrolabe Harbour. There the officers sleep in the village, watch the dances and feasts of the chief Pertahi at Opihi, and hear Sahé describe, quite plainly, a meal of human flesh.

Farther on, in the lagoon of Hogoleu in the Carolines, the hospitality of Periadik soon sours: the canoes of Rouk attack a boat from the Astrolabe, and the crew answers with firearms. On 1 January 1839, Guam shows a quite different face, that of the priests, the festivals and the village elections of the Spanish Marianas. Then come Yap, the Pelew Islands where two castaways are taken aboard, Mindanao, and the Dutch Moluccas: the climb of the Ternate volcano, the audience with the sultan, and at last Ambon, its balls, its Seang-Kang cave and the empire of spices.

Woven from the commander's journal and the accounts of his officers, this volume follows a crew between wariness and curiosity, from island to island, at the edge of Oceania. What remains of these encounters once the sails have vanished over the horizon?