Jules Sébastien César Dumont d'Urville (; 23 May 1790 – 8 May 1842) was a French explorer and naval officer who explored the south and western Pacific, Australia, New Zealand and Antarctica. As a botanist and cartographer, he gave his name to several seaweeds, plants and shrubs and to places such as d'Urville Island in New Zealand.
Early life and education
Dumont was born at Condé-sur-Noireau in Lower Normandy. His father, Gabriel Charles François Dumont, sieur d'Urville (1728–1796), Bailiff of Condé-sur-Noireau, was, like his ancestors, responsible to the court of Condé.
His mother Jeanne Françoise Victoire Julie (1754–1832) came from Croisilles, Calvados, and was a rigid and formal woman from an ancient family of the rural nobility of Lower Normandy. The child was weak and often sickly.
After the death of his father when he was six, his mother's brother, the Abbot of Croisilles, played the part of his father and from 1798 took charge of his education. The Abbot taught him Latin, Greek, rhetoric and philosophy. From 1804 Dumont studied at the lycée Impérial in Caen.
In the library of Caen, he read the Encyclopédistes and the reports of travel of Bougainville, Cook and Anson, and he became passionate about these matters.
At the age of 17 years he failed the physical tests of the entrance exam to the École polytechnique and he therefore decided to enlist in the navy.This was to the relief of his mother, who disapproved the idea of her son entering a lay institution characterised by "...maîtres athées, promiscuité des condisciples venus de tous les milieux, contagion des idées philosophiques et révolutionnaires..." ("atheistic teachers, the promiscuity of school-fellows from all parts of society, the contagion of philosophical and revolutionary ideas")(Guillon 1986)
Military career
In 1807, Dumont was admitted to the École navale at Brest where he presented himself as a timid young man, very serious and studious, little interested in amusements and much more interested in studies than in military matters. In 1808, he obtained the grade of first-class candidate.
At the time the neglected French navy was of a much lower quality than Napoleon's Grande Armée, and its ships were blockaded in their ports by the absolute domination of the British Royal Navy. Dumont was confined to land like his colleagues and spent the first years in the navy studying foreign languages.
In 1812, after having been promoted to ensign and finding himself bored with port life and disapproving of the dissolute behaviour of the other young officers, he asked to be transferred to Toulon on board the Suffren; but this ship was also blockaded in port.
During this period, Dumont built on his already substantial cultural knowledge. He already spoke, in addition to Latin and Greek, English, German, Italian, Russian, Chinese and Hebrew. During his later travels in the Pacific, thanks to his prodigious memory, he would acquire some knowledge of an immense number of dialects of Polynesia and Melanesia. Meanwhile, ashore at Toulon, he learnt about botany and entomology in long excursions in the hills of Provence and he studied in the nearby naval observatory.
Finally in 1814, when Napoleon had been exiled to Elba, Dumont undertook his first short navigation of the Mediterranean Sea. In 1815, he married Adèle Pépin, daughter of a clockmaker from Toulon. who was openly disliked by Dumont's mother, who thought her inappropriate for her son and refused to meet her.
In the Aegean Sea In 1819, Dumont d'Urville sailed on board Chevrette, under the command of Captain Gauttier-Duparc, to carry out a hydrographic survey of the islands of the Greek archipelago. During a pause near the island of Milos, the local French representative brought to Dumont's attention the rediscovery of a marble statue a few days before (8 April 1820) by a local peasant. The statue, now known as the Venus de Milo, dates from around the year 130 BC.
Dumont recognised its value and would have acquired it immediately, but the ship's commander pointed out that there was not enough space on board for an object of its size. Moreover, the expedition was likely to proceed through stormy seas that could damage it. Dumont then wrote to the French ambassador to Constantinople about its discovery.”... je fus le premier à en remettre une description détaillée à M. le marquis de Rivière, à Constantinople. Grâce à son empressement, à son amour pour les beaux arts et aux efforts de M. de Marcellus, la France n'a pas eu le regret de voir passer en mains étrangères ce précieux reste d'antiquité...” (“…I was the first one to supply a detailed description to the M. le marquis de Rivière, in Constantinople. Thanks to his enthusiasm, his love of fine arts and to the efforts of M. de Marcellus, France has been able to avoid the regret to see this precious piece of antiquity pass into foreign hands…”) Note on the underground galleries of the island of Milos, by J. Dumont d’Urville, in Nouvelles annales des voyages, de géographie et de histoire, volume XXVII. Paris: Gide, 1825. Chevrette arrived in Constantinople on 22 April and Dumont succeeded in convincing the ambassador to acquire the statue.
Meanwhile, the peasant had sold the statue to a priest, Macario Verghis, who wished to present it as a gift to an interpreter for the Sultan in Constantinople. The French ambassador's representative arrived just as the statue was being loaded aboard a ship bound for Constantinople and persuaded the island's primates (chief citizens) to annul the sale and honour the first offer. This earned Dumont the title of Chevalier (knight) of the Légion d'honneur, the attention of the French Academy of Sciences and promotion to lieutenant; and France gained a new, magnificent statue for the Louvre in Paris.In fact, the recovery of the Venus de Milo was not the work of Dumont only. Moreover, the French ambassador to Constantinople had already received another report on the discovery of the statue sent by the commander of the ship Estafette in the roadstead of Milossome to the French consul to Smyrna.
Voyage of Coquille On his return from the voyage of Chevrette, Dumont was sent to the naval archive, where he encountered Lieutenant Louis-Isidore Duperrey, a past acquaintance. The two began to plan an expedition of exploration in the Pacific,Some years earlier Dumont was an unsuccessful candidate to take part in the voyage of the ship Uranie, under the command of Louis de Freycinet. His failure to gain a place on that voyage became for him a personal issue and influenced his later behaviour. an area out of which France had been forced during the Napoleonic Wars. France considered it might be able to regain some of its losses by taking over part of New South Wales. On 11 August 1822, the ship Coquille sailed from Toulon with the objective of collecting as much scientific and strategic information as possible on the area to which it was dispatched. Duperrey was named Commander of the expedition because he was four years older than Dumont. On the second voyage of the Astrolabe in 1840, Dumont discovered the Adélie penguin, which is named after his wife.Trathan, P. N., & Ballard, G. (2013). Adélie Penguin. In Borboroglu, P. G., & Boersma, P. D. (Eds.), Penguins : Natural history and conservation. University of Washington Press. p. 37. .
René-Primevère Lesson travelled on Coquille as a naval doctor and naturalist. On the return to France in March 1825, Lesson and Dumont brought an imposing collection of animals and plants collected on the Falkland Islands, on the coasts of Chile and Peru, in the archipelagos of the Pacific and New Zealand, New Guinea, and Australia. Dumont was now 35 and in poor health. On board Coquille, he had behaved as a competent official, but disinclined to military discipline and subordination. On the return to France, Duperrey and Dumont were promoted to commander.
Collection On Coquille, Dumont tried to reconcile his responsibilities as second in command with his need to carry out scientific work. He was in charge of carrying out research in the fields of botany and entomology. La Coquille brought back to France specimens of more than 3,000 species of plants, 400 of which were previously unknown, enriching moreover the Muséum national d'histoire naturelle in Paris with more than 1,200 specimens of insects, covering 1,100 insect species (including 300 previously unknown species). The scientists Georges Cuvier and François Arago analysed the results of his searches and praised Dumont.
As a botanist and cartographer, Dumont d'Urville left his mark on New Zealand. He gave his name to the genus of seaweeds Durvillaea, which includes southern bull-kelp; the seaweed Grateloupia urvilleana; the species of grass tree Dracophyllum urvilleanum; the shrub Hebe urvilleana and the buttercup Ranunculus urvilleanus.
First voyage of Astrolabe
Two months after Dumont d'Urville returned on La Coquille, he presented to the Navy Ministry a plan for a new expedition, which he hoped to command, as his relationship with Duperrey had deteriorated. The proposal was accepted and La Coquille was renamed the in honour of one of the ships of La Pérouse, and sailed from Toulon on 22 April 1826, towards the Pacific Ocean, for a circumnavigation of the world that was destined to last nearly three years.
The new Astrolabe skirted the coast of southern Australia, carried out new relief maps of the South Island of New Zealand, including improved surveys of the Marlborough Sounds in which he navigated through the narrow and treacherous French Pass and mapped d'Urville Island, which James Cook had mapped as being part of the mainland.
Astrolabe sailed up the east coast of the North Island, creating comprehensive coastline maps of New Zealand. The ship spent six days in the Bay of Islands taking on food and water before sailing for Tonga.
Astrolabe visited Fiji, then Dumont executed the first relief maps of the Loyalty Islands (part of French New Caledonia) and explored the coasts of New Guinea. He identified the site of La Pérouse's shipwreck in Vanikoro (one of the Santa Cruz Islands, part of the archipelago of the Solomon Islands) and collected numerous remains of his boats. The voyage continued with the mapping of part of the Caroline Islands and the Moluccas. Astrolabe returned to Marseille on 25 March 1829, with an impressive load of hydrographical papers and collections of zoological, botanical and mineralogical reports, which were destined to strongly influence the scientific analysis of those regions. Following this expedition, he invented the terms Malaisia, Micronesia and Melanesia, distinguishing these Pacific cultures and island groups from Polynesia.
Dumont's health was by now weakened by years of a poor diet. He suffered from kidney and stomach problems and from intense attacks of gout. During the first thirteen years of their marriage, half of which passed far apart, Adélie and Jules had two sons. The first one died at a young age while his father was aboard La Coquille and the second, also called Jules, on the return of his father after four years away.
Dumont d'Urville passed a short period with his family before returning to Paris, where he was promoted to captain and he was put in charge of writing the report of his travels. The five volumes were published at the expense of the French government between 1832 and 1834. During these years d'Urville, who was already a poor diplomat, became more irascible and rancorous as a result of his gout, and lost the sympathy of the naval leadership. In his report, he criticised harshly the military structures, his colleagues, the French Academy of Sciences and even the King – none of whom, in his opinion, had given the voyage of Astrolabe due acknowledgment.