Vue de Sydney 1840: Etudes De Voyages
The translation of a historical document, despite its several factual errors, the concertining and amalgam of separate historical events, and the purely fictitious and melodramatic elements, does manage to convey the point well that Sydney, by the early 1840s, was much more than a penal colony and military garrison or outpost of the British Empire. Sydney was clearly seen by the original French author Berthoud, as having developed its own identity in the South Seas. This translation provides a vividly interesting description of Sydney from a French perspective, and it demonstrates how British imperial history could be widely viewed in France in the mid-nineteenth century.