Hydrographie contenant la theorie et la practique de toutes les parties de la navigation. Composée par le Père Georges Fournier de la Compagnie de Jesus.
A Paris: Chez Michel Soly, rue Saint Jacques, au Phoenix, M. DC. XLIII [1643]. First edition. Eighteenth-century printed Collège d’Harcourt prize certificate awarded to François de Montpezat, completed in manuscript and dated 1744, signed by Thomas-Gilles Asselin, principal of the college, and retaining its original red wax seal. 18th-century calf, covers with a large central gilt supralibros of the Collège d’Harcourt, spine gilt in compartments with the letter “H” and title, edges stained red. [24], 420, [2 (blank)], 421–859, 372 [i.e. 860], 875–922, [20] pp. (Complete.). Binding somewhat rubbed and marked, with minor wear to the extremities. A few leaves closely trimmed, touching only occasional marginal annotations or running headlines. Occasional stains and a light waterstain in the lower gutter. Small wormhole through gatherings D–E and 3A–3B, without loss of text. Gatherings 2Z of five leaves, 3O of two leaves, 5Q of two leaves, and 6B of six leaves, as issued. Overall in very good condition.
The first French maritime encyclopaedia, combining navigation, maritime science, commerce, and extensive material on the Americas, the great voyages of discovery, and European overseas expansion.
Published in 1643, Georges Fournier’s Hydrographie stands among the great monuments of seventeenth-century maritime literature. Produced under Cardinal Richelieu’s programme to reform French navigation and hydrography, it has been described as the first systematic treatise of maritime knowledge in French and, more broadly, as the first great French encyclopaedic synthesis of maritime science. Written in the vernacular for practical use rather than in Latin, it was intended not only for scholars but also for pilots, captains, naval officers, merchants, and administrators engaged in maritime affairs. Modern scholarship has further regarded it as one of the earliest comprehensive syntheses of what would later develop into oceanography, uniting the physical phenomena of the sea with the practical sciences of navigation. Its influence was immediate: the work was reissued in enlarged later editions and remained a standard point of reference for French hydrography well into the eighteenth century.
Its author, Georges Fournier (1595–1652), entered the Society of Jesus in 1619 and taught mathematics at Caen and later at the Jesuit college of La Flèche. During the 1630s he served as chaplain aboard the royal fleet and undertook extensive voyages, including to the coasts of Asia. The combination of mathematical training and practical maritime experience gave the Hydrographie an unusually solid foundation, reflected throughout in its reliance on observation, the experience of mariners, and methods tested at sea.
Although presented as a treatise on hydrography, the work is in reality an encyclopaedia of the maritime world. Navigation, naval architecture, cartography, astronomy, winds, tides, currents, shipbuilding, naval artillery, maritime law, commerce, fisheries, naval administration, geography, exploration, and the history of seafaring are treated as parts of a single body of knowledge. The text is extensively illustrated with diagrams, geometrical figures, charts, tables, and representations of contemporary navigational instruments, while also incorporating the latest geographical discoveries, navigational observations, technical innovations, and overseas enterprises known in the early 1640s.
Equally distinctive is the attention devoted to maritime culture. Alongside mathematics and navigation, Fournier discusses the language, customs, reputation, music, entertainments, discipline, and religious life of seamen, presenting the sea as a distinct professional and cultural world. Practical instruction is interwoven with legal, historical, scientific, religious, and cultural material throughout the work.
The work is also remarkable for its genuinely global outlook. Fournier combines histories of the great voyages of discovery with surveys of the maritime powers, overseas commerce, missionary expansion, and colonial administration, treating the sea as the network that linked Europe with Africa, the Atlantic world, the Americas, the Indian Ocean, and East Asia. Columbus, Vasco da Gama, Magellan, Cortés, Pizarro, Drake, Hudson, Baffin, Champlain, Laudonnière, and many other explorers and navigators appear alongside discussions of the Dutch, English, Swedish, and French chartered trading companies, commercial routes, and royal colonial policy. Particularly rich are the sections on New France and the French Atlantic, including the Compagnie de Canada, the Compagnie des Îles de l’Amérique, royal commissions, commercial privileges, settlement, fortification, fisheries, and colonial administration. Canada, Acadia, Québec, Port Royal, the Caribbean, Florida, Brazil, Guinea, Cape Verde, Madagascar, India, China, Japan, and the Moluccas recur throughout the work, making it an important source for the history of European overseas expansion.
The Hydrographie also preserves an exceptional body of documentary material on the administration of the sea. Rhodian maritime law, Admiralty jurisdiction, prize law, wrecks, convoy regulations, tariffs, naval discipline, missionary activity, royal ordinances, colonial charters, commercial monopolies, fisheries, settlement, fortification, and judicial authority are all reproduced or discussed. More than a navigation manual, it is one of the most comprehensive contemporary surveys of the maritime world and of the scientific, commercial, legal, colonial, and cultural forces that shaped it.
Provenance: Contemporary armorial binding of the Collège d’Harcourt; awarded as a prize by the Collège d’Harcourt, Paris, on 13 August 1744 to François de Montpezat for the second prize in Latin oratory (alterum praemium orationis Latinae), with the printed prize certificate completed in manuscript, signed by Thomas-Gilles Asselin, principal of the college, and retaining its original red wax seal.
Not in Sabin; Polak 3575; Chadenat I, 69; Goldsmiths F 424; Bibliotheca Nautica 2063; JCB 678/76
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Price: €15,000.00