"Dumont d'Urville : homme et la mer brings Australian scholarship to the francophone historiography of a significant french figure and the worlds he traversed. Il should serve as a useful source of biographical infomation not only on d'Urville himself but on the many people he encountered in his personal and professional life-everyday French men and women, members of the navy, colonists, explorers, and Oceanic lslanders-as we11 as on the travails and accomplishments of French scientific expeditions in the nineteenth century, and the history of France and Oceania during this period. "