D'Apres

D’Après de Mannevillette (or Manneville) (1707-1780), French hydrographer and cartographer, during a series of voyages from 1719/20, (whilst still only a boy) produced charts and logs of observations covering a good part of the Indian Ocean and the adjacent coastlines of Africa, India and Ceylon (Sri Lanka), which he published in atlas form in 1745 (revised 1775) as “Le Neptune Oriental”. With a supplement produced by d’Après’ brother in 1781, and also including charts supplied by his friend, the Scottish cartographer Alexander Dalrymple, it provided the sum total of all European nautical knowledge of the Indian Ocean at that time. Most of his work was undertaken as an employee of the French East India Company, however the atlas was published with the support of the French Academie des Sciences, which, like the "Royal Society" in London, was a leading proponent in the quest for knowledge during this later age of discovery.