The journal and first-person account of a French trade mission to "Cochinchine" (Ðàng Trong, today southern Vietnam) by the young traveller François Valentin Méniolle (1792-1841). The nephew of the bishop of Adran, Méniolle does not keep his journal like a standard ship's log, but as a gentleman's diary, recording the harrowing typhoon which blew his ship off course, the emergency retreat to Mauritius, and a period of wandering about Sri Lanka and India before finally returning home to Europe.
In one of his most important encounters of his Indian wanderings, he describes meeting the famous French naturalists Pierre-Médard Diard (1794-1863) and Alfred Duvaucel (1793-1824) at the French East India Company trading post of Chandernagore (Chandannagar), who were collecting massive numbers of botanical and zoological samples to ship back to Paris. He describes them as "deux jeunes Parisiens qui habitent [à] Chandernagore, pour y étudier l'histoire naturelle du pays. Ils sont détenus à autres des encursions [!] dans les serres, et se proposent de faire un voyage dans le Nepaul. Ils ont déjà fait beaucoup d'envois au Musée de Paris". Diard and Duvaucel particularly impressed Méniolle with their extensive collection of venomous snakes, with which they were endeavouring to find a cure for snakebite.
Méniolle's ship, called the Julie-Marthe, bore Méniolle and his uncle around the Horn of Africa and into the Indian Ocean to secure French trading agreements in what is now south Vietnam. After the typhoon, their trek through India took them first to Pondicherry (or Puducherry) in June 1818, and from there to Kolkata and up the Hooghly River to Chandannagar.
Méniolle keeps a meticulous record not only of the voyage, but also of those he meets (and the trade deals he does manage to make) along the way, turning his journal in India into a dossier of the notable Europeans in colonial French India, alongside glimpses of Indian festivals, rajahs, and politics.
The present manuscript passed down in the Méniolle family until ca. 1956, with corresponding manuscript annotations on the recto of the first free flyleaf. Further with some contemporary crossing out of text (presumably by the author himself) and some later underlining of parts of the text in blue pencil. The binding is somewhat rubbed and shows clear signs of wear around the edges of the boards and spine, internally bright and clean. In very good condition.