Voyage of the French Corvette "L'Heroine" during the years 1844-49

These portfolios by 19th-century sailor-artist Félix Marant-Boissauveur were made as part of his journey on the voyage of the French corvette L’Héroïne between 1844 and 1849. The journey comprised several intertwined loops, with circuits in the America’s, including Chile, Peru, Ecuador, Mexico and California, and an Oceanian circuit including Hawaii, Tahiti, Wallis, Badu and New Caledonia. An accompanying manuscript by an anonymous sailor describes how Marant-Boissauveur decided to take the voyage to ‘satisfy his craving to visit distant countries, to study the customs of their inhabitants, and at the various ports of call, to make use of his skill in drawing and painting’. (‘Relation d’une Campagne dans les Mers du Sud, May 1844 – January 1849’, translated by Sir William Dixson).

Similar to other artist voyagers of the time, Marant-Boissauveur does not document life on board the ship but takes an ethnographic and often exoticising approach towards ‘new’ places and people encountered.