Jean-Baptiste Charles Bouvet de Lozier

Who is Jean-Baptiste Charles Bouvet de Lozier?

Jean-Baptiste Charles Bouvet de Lozier was a French naval officer and colonial administrator, born on 14 January 1705 and orphaned as a child before training in navigation at Saint-Malo. In 1731 he became a lieutenant of the French East India Company and later persuaded the company to fund an exploratory voyage into the South Atlantic in search of the hypothesized southern continent, Terra Australis. Commanding the ships Aigle and Marie, he sighted a small, ice-covered, volcanic island on 1 January 1739, the Feast of the Circumcision, and named the headland he saw Cape Circumcision, believing it to be part of a larger southern landmass. A navigational error in his recorded longitude caused the island to be effectively lost to later expeditions, including James Cook's, for nearly seventy years, until it was confirmed again in the early nineteenth century. Illness among his crew forced Bouvet to abandon further exploration and return to France by way of the Cape of Good Hope. He went on to a distinguished naval career, commanding the ship of the line Le Lys and twice serving as governor of the French Mascarene Islands, Bourbon and Île de France, before his death in 1786.

Sources: Wikipedia, "Jean-Baptiste Charles Bouvet de Lozier" · Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Jean-Baptiste-Charles Bouvet de Lozier" · south-pole.com, "Antarctic Explorers: Jean-Baptiste Charles Bouvet de Lozier"