Current Literature
BOUGAINVILLE By Maurice Tillery
It was natural that M. Maurice Thiery- should follow up his recent study of Captain Cook with a memoir of Bougainville: Soldier and Sailor (Grayson, 15s.), for the brilliant Frenchman was an exact contemporary and in many respects the counter- part of our great navigator. M. Thiery's book, translated by Miss Anne Agnew, is not improved by the imaginary conver- sations introduced here and there to meet the demand for " romantic " biography. But he records the facts clearly and brings out the worth of the man who to most English readers is a mere name. Bougainville, born in 1729, and so eminent as a mathematician as to be elected a Fellow of our Royal Society in 1756, served as a soldier under Montcalm at Quebec when his "opposite number," Cook, born in 1728, was acting as navigator to Admiral Saunders in the squadron which sup- ported Wolfe's besieging army. It was ill-luck and not bad management, according to M. Thiery, that enabled Wolfe to effect a landing below the Heights of Abraham on September 13th, 1759, and take Bougainville's outposts by surprise. After the war the soldier took to the sea, founded a short- lived colony on the Falkland Islands, and then, like Cook, made a famous voyage round the world. This voyage (1766-69) is fully described in several pleasant chapters. Bougainville served under De Grasse at the surrender of Yorktown and shared in his defeat by Rodney off the Saintes in 1782. He survived the Terror, became a Senator under Napoleon, and died in 1811, more than forty years after Cook's death.
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