Author Description

This book includes many exquisite watercolours from the Lesueur Collection at the Museum d'Histoire Naturelle Le Havre and explores the story behind the Baudin expedition which produced these remarkable images. The 46 watercolours and drawings forming the core of Terre Napolon are but a small part of the vast visual record of one of the most extraordinary scientific enterprises of our early colonial period -- the Baudin expedition of 1800 to 1804. A voyage born of revolutionary times, these images by Charles-Alexandre Lesueur and Nicolas-Martin Petit are what remains of Napoleon's ambition to establish a new scientific empire in the Antipodes.