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George KEATE

Relation des îles Pelew, situées dans la partie occidentale de l'Océan Pacifique, composée sur les journeaux et les communications du Capitaine Henri Wilson, et de ses Officiers, qui en août mil-sept-cent-quatre-vingt-trois, y ont fait naufrage sur l'Antelope, paquebot de la Compagnie des Indes Orientales

Chez Le Jay et Maradan, à Paris 1788, In-4 (20x26cm), xiv (2) 384pp., relié.

First french edition in-4, illustrated with 16 boards (views, portraits, objects) and a large folding map. This edition was published the same year as the English original.
Binding full calf vintage root. Back to nerves adorned. Title piece in red morocco.
The Palau Archipelago is located in the east of the Philippines, in northern Indonesia, in Micronesia; Captain George Wilson and his crew in the service of the East India Company were shipwrecked on an island near Palau in 1783. The book tells how they were received by the natives and their king, and how they lived, until that the king had them build a ship to go to Macau, while entrusting his son to the care of Captain Wilson, so that he received a Western education. Georges Keate, using the captain's notebooks, drew up the voyage narration of the Antelope ship that departed from Macao. The introduction is a research in the literature of the existence of these islands. The book relates, of course, the habits and customs of the inhabitants. At the end of Volume II, a vocabulary of the Pelew language. It is interesting to note an episode which shows the king at war against the inhabitants of other islands, and who borrowed 5 men to the captain to accompany him to the war, the peaceful relations between the English and the king surely draw their origin from this curious diplomatic fact.
The work was a great success, certainly because the testimony it rendered corresponded to this myth of the good savage that raged in Europe; Paul and Virginie de Bernardin de Saint-Pierre appeared on the same date.

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