[America - PAULMIER DE COURTONNE (Jean). Memoirs concerning the establishment of a Christian mission in the third world, otherwise known as the Southern, Meridional, Antarctic and Unknown Lands. Dediez à Nostre S. Father Pope Alexander VII. Par un Ecclésiastique Originaire de cette mesme Terre. Paris, Claude Cramoisy, 1663. In-8 of [18] ff. 215-[1] pp. post mottled vellum. Some foxing. Very rare first (and only) edition of this important account of the voyage of Binot Paulmier, sieur du Bucquet, known as the capitaine de Gonneville, a Norman navigator who is said to have been the first Frenchman to arrive in Brazil, in 1504. He left Honfleur on 24 June 1503 aboard the ship l'Espoir, with 60 crew members, for the East Indies but, perhaps after rounding the Cape of Good Hope and missing the "loop", he was pushed towards an unknown land and ended up on 6 January 1504 in the Southern Lands (renamed Brazil), where he spent six months in refit. On 3 July, he sailed back to France with Essomericq, the son of the chief of the native tribe. After a nightmarish odyssey, on 7 May 1505, his ship ran aground in Guernsey, where it was pillaged. After arriving in Honfleur on foot on 20 May, only twenty-seven people survived, including the Indian Essomericq, who was baptised during the crossing and adopted by Gonneville; he married him to one of his relatives, Marie Moulin, who gave him fourteen children. After his wife's death, Essomericq remarried another young girl from Honfleur, who gave him seven daughters. The story did not appear until 1663, when Jean Paulmier de Courtonne, a relative of Binot and canon of Saint-Pierre Cathedral in Lisieux, published this work in which he claimed to be the great-grandson of an Indian brought to France by Binot Paulmier in 1505. Jean Paulmier de Courtonne asserted that French patriotism had been affected by the Dutch and English discoveries in the South Pacific, and used the account of the voyage to justify the settlement of the French and to claim precedence. This grievance gained ground in the eighteenth century and justified the French expeditions of Bougainville and Bouvet (source Wikipedia). The authenticity of the story has long been the subject of controversy (until recently, according to recent research, which is still contradictory), with no definitive proof having been found for or against it. Handwritten bookplate to title Anquetil-Perron (who states "Le Journal des SS. de mars 1739 dit que ce livre est rare."). Ex-libris JM. (Leclerc 1628; Brunet III 1595 "Let us add to these details that the edition having been printed and put on sale without the author's knowledge, he did not learn of it until six weeks after it was made public, and that then, unable to obtain the seizure of the edition, because of the privilege with which it is covered, he consented to its circulation, after, however, it had been accompanied by a warning in which his grievances are set out. This warning, which occupies nine pages and is followed by an errata, is therefore not to be found in the first copies sold", but it is present).