DOUVILLE, Jean Baptiste (1794-C. 1837), a French traveller born at Hambye, in the department of Manche, whose asserted discoveries in Africa have in large measure been relegated to the region of romance. At an early period his imagination seems to have been fired by narratives of travel and adventure; and accordingly, when he fell heir to a wealthy relation, he at once proceeded to gratify his desire for personal acquaintance with foreign lands. He certainly wandered far and wide; and, according to his own profession, he visited India, Kashmir, Khorassan, Persia, Asia Minor, and many parts of Europe. After spending some time in Paris, and being admitted a member of the Société de Géographie, he proceeded in 1826 to Brazil, with the intention apparently of carrying on scientific explorations: from this purpose, however, he was diverted by the political circumstances of the country; and to replenish his funds he started business at Montevideo in partnership with a Μ. Laboissière. Towards the close of the following year, probably in October, after a short residence at Rio Janeiro, he left Brazil for the Portuguese possessions on the west coast of Africa, where his presence in March 1828 is proved by the mention made of him in certain letters of Castillo Branco, the governor-general of Loanda. In May 1831 he reappeared in France, claiming to have pushed his explorations into the very heart of Africa, as far as the 27th degree of longitude E. of Greenwich, or, in other words, into what is now known as the great equatorial lake region. His story was readily accepted by the Société de Géographie at Paris, which hastened to recognize his services by assigning him the great gold medal, and appointing him their secretary for the year 1832. On the publication of his ...narrative — Voyage au Congo et dans l'intérieur de V Afrique équinoxiale — which occupied four large volumes, and was accompanied by an elaborate atlas, the public enthusiasm might well run high. In company with his wife (a sister of his old Montevidean partner), and attended by about 400 native porters, the happy traveller had advanced from kingdom to kingdom rather like a monarch making a progress through his tributary states, distributing largesses and receiving homage, than like a humble adventurer defraying his expenses from his private purse. Everything went smooth for a time; the interior of Africa was described in text books and depicted in maps according to the discoveries of Douville; but in the August number of the Foreign Quarterly Review for 1832 the most sweeping charges of ignorance and fraud were launched against the author, and this attack wað followed up in the Revue des Deux Mondes for November, by Thomas Lacordaire, who asserted that, during part of the time which he claimed to have spent in Africa, Douville had been a familiar object in the streets of Rio Janeiro. The tide of popular favour turned; and, in spite of the explanations furnished by Douville in Ma defence, 1832, and Trente mois de ma vie, ou quinze mois avant et quinze mois après mon voyage au Congo, 1833, the general decision was openly against him. Mlle. Audrun, a lady to whom he was about to be married, committed suicide from grief at the disgrace; and, after vainly attempting to obtain satisfaction from Lacordaire by duel, the poor adventurer himself withdrew in 1833 to Brazil, and proceeded to make explorations in the valley of the Amazon. According to Dr Gardner, in his Travels in the Interior of Brazil, he was murdered in 1837 on the banks of the São Francisco for charging too high for his medical assistance. His Brazilian manuscripts fell into the hands of Μ. S. Rang, by whom they were transmitted to Μ. Ferdinand Denis. While modern exploration has done nothing to support the wider pretensions of Douville, no less an authority than Captain Burton asserts that his descriptions of the country of the Congo are life-like aud picturesque; that his observations on the anthropology, ceremonies, customs, and maladies of the people are remarkably accurate; and that even the native words inserted into the text of his narrative “are for the most part given with unusual correctness.”
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