Francois Peron

In 1800 Franois Peron, an ambitious young medical student not long released from the French revolutionary army, gained a place as an assistant zoologist on Nicolas Baudins expedition to Australian waters. As his colleagues either deserted or died, he would rise rapidly within the expeditions ranks and even write its official account. In doing so, Peron would seek to destroy Baudins posthumous reputation. The expedition was famously marked by the vexed relationship between Peron and Baudin, but Perons work, as a man of science, profoundly enhanced the achievements of the expedition: he seized valuable opportunities to pioneer zoological, oceanographic and ethnographic studies, and as an ecological observer was remarkably prescient. Edward Duykers meticulously researched biography of Peron takes readers on an engaging and wide-ranging journeyfrom the heart of pre-revolutionary rural France, to the bitter fighting on the Rhineland front in 1793-94, to the late eighteenth-century Paris medical school, to landfalls in the Atlantic and the Indian Oceans, to the little-known shores of Van Diemens Land and New Holland, and back into the very heart of Napoleons Empire. This is both a balanced assessment of the difficult relationship between Peron and Baudin, and an analysis of the conduct of science during some of the most turbulent years in French history.