There is an intriguing story behind a rare book - about a bogus early voyage to New Guinea - which strangely contained the first illustration of an Australian Kookaburra , below, in print , on offer by Douglas Stewart Fine Books , Melbourne.
Sonnerat , it says , was the nephew of the French colonial administrator and explorer , Pierre Poivre, and became his private secretary in the Mascarene Islands in the Indian Ocean.
From there ,Sonnerat was stationed in Pondicherry . He made several trips to China and South East Asia, where he collected natural history specimens.
The book contained an extraordinary range of natural history specimens , some scarcely expected to be found in tropical jungles.
There were three types of Antarctic Penguins , as well as the common Australian Kookaburra , not found in New Guinea.
In reality, Sommerat never visited New Guinea .The book was a work of fiction based on natural history specimens largely gathered in the Philippines and Indonesia !
Douglas Stewart says the penguins and kookaburra were given to Sonnerat by the famous naturalist and botanist Joseph Banks at the Cape of Good Hope in 1770.
Banks was on his way home after the voyage on Captain Cook's Endeavour and asked Sonnerat to deliver them to widely travelled French naturalist Dr Philibert Commerson , based in Mauritius.
The skins were sketched by Commerson’s artist, Paul Philippe Sanguin de Jossigny, and upon the death of Commerson in 1773, Sonnerat retained Jossigny’s illustrations, signed them, and passed them off as his own work, including them in his fake voyage to New Guinea.
Sonnerat's book is still regarded as an important early achievement in recording newly discovered species .
