Dumont d'Urville

Rear Admiral Jules Sebastien César Dumont d'Urville (1790-1842), French explorer, made two journeys passing through the Pacific in the years between 1826 and 1840. Having trained in the French navy, on a survey of the Greek archipelago in 1820 he was fortuitously responsible for the French acquisition of the Venus de Milo. In 1822 he was second-in-command of an expedition on the Coquille, with the ultimate aim of making a French claim on part of New South Wales. From this expedition he returned with a large collection of Pacific and Australian plants and animals. On the new Astrolabe from 1826 to 1829 he sailed around southern Australia, to New Zealand, Tonga, Fiji, New Guinea and beyond, again returning with an impressive array of scientific reports and coining the terms Micronesia and Melanesia. On a second voyage on the Astrolabe he made for the South Magnetic Pole, intending to claim it for France. He pulled into Hobart in December 1839 to seek treatment for his moribund crew. Heading south a fortnight later, he hoisted the Tricolor at Pointe Géologie in Terre Adélie on 21 January and was back in Hobart by mid-February 1840. By the end of that year he was back in France, but he was killed in a train accident eighteen months later. His was to be the last major French voyage of exploration.