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This large-scale copper-engraved chart, originally published as plate 15 of the hydrographic atlas that accompanied Louis-Isidore Duperrey’s official account of the voyage of La Coquille (Paris, 1826-1830), offers the first complete, scientifically surveyed plan of Ascension Island. The title cartouche at upper right specifies that the work was executed in January 1825 during the corvette’s homeward passage from the Indian Ocean to France.
The map captures the volcanic topography in meticulous hill-shading. Prominent cones—Green Mountain, Sister Peak, Weather Post—rise from an interior dotted with subsidiary craters and lava flows, while gullies and intermittent stream-beds radiate toward a deeply indented coast. Soundings in fathoms encircle the island, thickening at the principal anchorage of Sandy Bay on the west side and at the smaller roadstead under Boatswain Bird Hill in the east.
Although Ascension Island had been a British possession since 1815, Napoleon’s death-sentence exile on neighboring St Helena had drawn renewed naval interest to this mid-Atlantic staging post. Duperrey’s officers spent several days triangulating the perimeter, taking astronomical observations, and tracing inland routes to the central plateau. Their measurements corrected the scant outlines left by earlier Portuguese, Dutch, and British visitors and were quickly adopted by Admiralty chartmakers.
The map also reflects the scientific ambitions of the Coquille expedition (1822-1825), one of the great French circumnavigations of the nineteenth century. Naturalist René-Primevère Lesson climbed the rugged eastern slopes shown here to collect plant specimens and describe the nesting habits of the sooty tern; lieutenant Jules Dumont d’Urville sketched the physiognomy of the island while supervising the inshore sounding parties. Together, their notes and this plan fed into the Voyage autour du monde volumes that cemented France’s reputation for Pacific and Atlantic exploration in the Restoration era.
