In the early years of the new millennium, a considerable fortune was raised in the Brazilian city of São Francisco for a monument commemorating the arrival there of a French navigator, Binot Paulmier de Gonneville, five hundred years earlier. But is Gonneville, often designated as the ‘true’ discoverer of the much dreamed-of ‘Terre Australe’, a historical figure, or was he rather, together with the account of his journey, a complete fabrication by a seventeenth-century cleric, the Abbé Jean Paulmier?

The question is not definitively resolved, but the sifting of evidence by this group of impressively lively scholars makes for intriguing reading. William Jennings’s astute comparison of the Gonneville expedition with other, fully authenticated discovery accounts makes the case for fakery more than plausible but not quite watertight, while other studies examine the role of politics, personal interest and social circumstances in what turns out to be a tale of high tension between myth and reality. Forger or not, Paulmier moreover remains attention-worthy: a passionate advocate of French missionary activity, he was also, Sankey demonstrates, an atypically enlightened defender of the human rights of the newly ‘discovered’ populations and a sharp critic of commercially motivated colonialism.

Two essays deal more generally with historical French interests in the Pacific, and in particular with the Marist missions in New Zealand. The appendices, transcriptions of two documents relating to Paulmier, will be of value to specialist scholars, but the volume as a whole contains much to stimulate the curiosity of a wider readership, albeit perforce a francophone one.