Storms and Dreams

Louis-Antoine Comte de Bougainville is best known for his circumnavigation of the globe from 1766 to 1769. Throughout a long and distinguished life, however, he participated in many of the turning points of world history: the birth of the United States, the fall of French Canada, the opening of the Pacific, the French Revolution and Revolutionary Wars, the crowning of Napoleon, and the modernization of France. Bougainville was also a witty and charming courtier, becoming one of Napoleon's senators. A true Man of the Enlightenment, he was gifted in navigation, seamanship, soldiering, mathematics, longitude and latitude--many of the arts that made his age one of the most productive and creative in history. John Dunmore, a distinguished historian and an expert in French Pacific exploration, brings the man and his era to life in this vivid and elegantly written biography.