D'urville's Islands

The French explorer Dumont D’Urville spent a lot of time in the Pacific and around Australia and Antarctica in the first half of the 19th century. These illustrations, taken from a four-volume set, are from those various voyages aboard his ships the Astrolabe and the Coquille, including a map of the Bay of Islands from 1834. The model of the outrigger canoe from the Santa Cruz Islands in the Solomons is somewhat younger, made in 1968, but not unlike the kind of local vessels Dumont D’Urville would have seen and been fascinated by over a century earlier.