Fiona Pardington

European explorers of the Pacific in the 18th and early 19th centuries faced a problem - how to describe the people they met and report what they had seen and found. From Cook onwards, a serious expedition included artists and scientists in its ship’s company. An ambitious journey of the 19th century was the third voyage of the French explorer Dumont d’Urville, from 1837 to 1840. It was just before the invention of photography, when phrenology, the study of people’s skulls, was the latest thing. D’Urville chose to take on the voyage an eminent phrenologist, Pierre-Marie Dumoutier, to preserve likenesses of people by making life casts. When the expedition returned to France, the casts were displayed, and later stored in the Musee de l’Homme in Paris, to be joined eventually by other casts from Dumoutier’s collection, including those of the d’Urville and Dumoutier families. All were overtaken by photography and history.