The Sea Has No End: The Life of Louis-Antoine de Bougainville

Olaf Uwe Janzen is a professor of history at Memorial University,
reviews editor of The Northern Mariner, and the editor of Northern Seas.

Victor Suthren has a fascination for the great 18th-century maritime
explorers, a fascination undoubtedly shaped by his own seafaring
experience in traditional ships. Five years ago he wrote To Go Upon
Discovery, a study of James Cook’s “Canadian” career. Now he turns
his attention to one of Cook’s contemporaries, Louis-Antoine de
Bougainville, who commanded a circumnavigation of the globe under the
French flag from 1766 to 1769. While he accomplished much less than
Cook, Bougainville led a particularly colourful life, one that placed
him frequently at the centre of momentous events: the Conquest of New
France by the British, the discovery of the seemingly paradisaical world
of the South Pacific, the intellectual ferment of the European
Enlightenment, the British failure to suppress the American Revolution,
the political and social turbulence of the French Revolution.

The life of Bougainville has been examined before. Suthren, however,
makes no pretense at offering an academic treatment of his subject. His
book, as he explains in his introduction, is “a popular retelling of
this remarkable man’s life.” This is both a strength and a weakness.
It is a strength because it offers an account in accessible language,
with particular attention given to Bougainville’s Canadian experience
(three chapters; four if you include his efforts to settle Acadians in
the Falkland Islands after 1763), the Pacific voyage (two chapters), and
his naval career during the War of American Independence (one chapter).
The final decades of his life during the French Revolutionary and
Napoleonic era are quickly covered in the final chapter. Yet Suthren’s
approach is also a weakness, because he depends too heavily on a limited
number of secondary sources; far too many key works on the people and
places that figured prominently in Bougainville’s life are not used,
making this book very derivative. Buy it for the “popular
retelling,” yes, but look elsewhere for original insight into
Bougainville’s life.