Jules de Blosseville

Jules Poret de Blosseville (1802-1833), geographer, navigator and explorer, was a junior officer on the Coquille, which, under the command of Louis Isidore Duperrey, conducted a voyage to Oceania and South America between 1822 and 1825. Despite being under instruction to assess the suitability of the coast of Western Australia as a site for a French settlement, Duperrey sailed to Sydney, where de Blosseville decided to make a study of British colonisation techniques. He subsequently spent a month in New South Wales in 1824, working with Sir Thomas Brisbane at the latter’s Parramatta observatory and gathering information on the colony’s history and progress. Much of this work was incorporated into the book written by de Blosseville’s brother, Ernest Poret de Blosseville: Histoire des colonies pénales de l'Angleterre dans l'Australie, published in Paris in 1831. After returning to France in 1825, de Blosseville maintained correspondence with acquaintances in New South Wales, and came to be considered an authority on the colony. In 1826 he was invited to realise the original, overlooked task of Duperrey’s voyage, reporting to the French government on whether the west coast of Australia might provide a suitable site for a French penal colony; and he also presented a proposal for the colonisation of New Zealand. In the late 1820s, de Blosseville was engaged in French explorations of India, Burma and the Mediterranean before, in 1833, being appointed to the command of an expedition to the Arctic aboard the Lilloise, which disappeared at sea. A stretch of Greenland coast is named after him.

Collection: National Portrait Gallery
Purchased 2014