Le Cook de la Jeunesse, ou Extrait des voyages les plus récens dans les régions les plus éloignées

A beautiful set of this charming and popular French account of various voyages for children. As the title suggests, much of the material here is taken directly from the voyages of Captain Cook. The three folding engraved plates, all after Webber, respectively depict a Māori war canoe, a walrus hunt and a Tahitian human sacrifice.

There were a number of juvenile editions based on Jean-Pierre Bérenger's popular collections of voyage accounts which first appeared in 1780. Bérenger was a Swiss polymath; politically active, he was exiled from Geneva and spent much of his adult life in Lausanne. He wrote several important books on geography and the voyages to the Pacific. This Paris edition is largely devoted to the voyages of Cook and has chapters describing Tahiti, New Zealand, Unalaska, and the Sandwich Islands, followed by an abridged life of the navigator. Forbes notes that the second volume of this work includes a lengthy section, some fifty pages, devoted to Hawaii.

Attractively for such a juvenile edition, this set was awarded as a prize to one Mademoiselle Nathalie Guillemet in 1825, for her proficiency in the English language, with the original printed prize label on the front endpaper. A second award from 1828 to Mlle. Guillemet is tipped in to the front of the second volume.

No copy of this version is recorded by Forbes in Hawaiian National Bibliography, though its existence is noted in the entries for two Avignon editions (370 & 495).