[ Photographs ] (New Caledonia) Exotic album containing 34 photographs, most or all by E. Robin, of the natives and French occupiers of New Caledonia, and featuring 13 strong portraits of the men, women, and children of the region shown in their

[ Photographs ] (New Caledonia) Exotic album containing 34 photographs, most or all by E. Robin, of the natives and French occupiers of New Caledonia, and featuring 13 strong portraits of the men, women, and children of the region shown in their native habitat and dress; a wonderful composite of shell ornaments, combs and beads worn by the women and another of local tools; images of various towns inhabitated by the French and some of the buildings erected and operated by them, including a military compound, a school for local children, the Rue Sebastopol, a gendarme post with uniformed officers posing before it, a Catholic church with its thatched steeple and congregation of Black children and a French priest; as well as several landscape studies, a photograph of a map of the town of Noumea and another of the tombstone of Jean Michel Huon, a French captain who died at New Caledonia in 1793 Albumen prints, various sizes from 3.5 x 2.25 inches to 7 x 5inches or the reverse, all but 4 mounted one per page recto, one with Robin's signature in red ink on recto, and all with period penciled, captions, in French, on mount. Oblong 4to, leather, scuffed. 1860s E3500-4500 A fascinating and early glimpse of this country's native life and early years under French occupation. New Caledonia, located in the southwest Pacific, was taken over by France in 1853, and shortly thereafter, in 1864, became a penal colony for its occupiers. This album, with its emphasis on indigenous life and images of a country which showed limited foreign influence, was certainly made after New Caledonia was taken over, but before it became a penal colony for the French.