Between April 1791 and January 1794, officers of Alejandro Malaspina’s mission to the Pacific measured gravity at no fewer than 17 different locations. It was the first truly global gravity survey, but how accurate was it?
Jean René Constant Quoy, senior surgeon on the Uranie, is something of a shadowy figure, but he did eventually write his memoirs.
TRANSLATION WORK IN PROGRESS. After their return from the Uranie expedition, Quoy and Gaimard presented a paper to the Académie royale des Sciences on the origin of coral reefs. It was a significant advance on what had gone before but, because they had never seen an atoll with a central volcanic peak, there was little chance that they would achieve the insights gifted to Darwin b his observations of TAhiti and Bora Bora.
As far as the Mendocino water shortage is concerned, Ayn Rand’s former disciple Murray Rothbard has presented his own solution to a similar problem. He came, of course, to his inevitable conclusion. Free, unfettered private enterprise would deliver.
In the past, we learned from people we respected how to do refraction surveys. Now we have committees to tell us what to do.
When it came to writing the account of the voyage of the Uranie, Louis de Freycinet could not give any credit to his wife Rose, because she was not supposed to have been on board, But did she make any contribution to what he wrote?