Bougainville and Tahiti
Arnold Whitridge describes how, in April 1768, Bougainville reached ‘an enchanting island’ in the South Pacific.
It is ironic that while to most people today the too rampantly over everything, to his own name ‘Bougainville’ suggests only an un- generation in England as well as in France distinguished tropical plant which climbs all Admiral Bougainville was a man of the most varied and striking accomplishments. In 1754, at the age of twenty-five he had been elected a member of the Royal Society in London on the strength of his treatise on calculus. Thanks to D’Alembert, a devoted friend as well as teacher, he was already well-known as a mathematician in Paris. Not long after his election to the Royal Society he was fighting against the British in Canada.
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