Nouveau Voyage aux Indes Orientales (1786-1813).

• Author: Rocher, Rosane
• Position: Book review

Nouveau Voyage aux Indes Orientales (1786-1813) by PIERRE SONNERAT. Edited with notes by JEAN DELOCHE and MADELEINE LY-TIO-FANE. Collection Indologie, vol. 115. Pondicherry: INSTITUT FRANCAIS DE PONDICHERY and ECOLE FRANCAISE D'EXTREME-ORIENT, 2010. Pp. xl + 377, 3 maps, 31 plates. Rs 750, [euro]32.

Sonnerat's Voyage aux Indes Orientales et a la Chine, a report on a journey he undertook from 1774 to 1781, immediately published in 1782, and promptly translated into English, has long been treasured as one of the most notable eighteenth-century travel accounts of India, with particular significance for naturalists. By contrast, a manuscript stemming from a new voyage to the East Indies, from 1786 to 1813, disappeared at Sonnerat's death one year after his return, until 1978, when naturalist Madeleine Ly-Tio-Fane, author of a biography of Sonnerat (1976), learned that it was preserved in the Library of New South Wales in Sydney. Sonnerat is described in the prefatory biographical sketch to the new volume, as in the prior biography, as having spent his entire second sojourn in southern, coastal India, first posted in Pondicherry (1786-1789) and Yanam (1790-1793), and the last two decades (1793-1813) in captivity in Pondicherry and Madras. Yet, he also resided in Calcutta at some juncture, to which he alludes in a diatribe against the British judicial system of which he had a personal experience when a prisoner of war (pp. 15658). Records of the English East India Company preserved in London ought to help establish if, as appears probable, he was, as French chief at Yanam, first taken to Calcutta after the British forces took the enclave.

The editors have chosen to publish only parts of a hefty manuscript in three volumes and forty-five chapters, for a total of 1082 folios, on the grounds that much of the material, particularly in the latter two volumes, is known from other sources, which Sonnerat read during his long captivity and had no compunction to copy or translate. Yet, internal evidence shows that even the first chapters of the first volume were written during his captivity, with events of 1795 mentioned in chapter 2 (p. 44), of 1807 in chapter 3 (p. 55), and of 1811 in chapter 4 (p. 102). The editors' selection consists of all ten chapters of volume 1, and chapters two and three and a "livre III" on fauna and flora in volume 2. Readers are treated to invaluable vignettes in quintessential Sonnerat genre, with added personal musings, but...