The author
Louis Ernest Lesage, known by the pseudonym Sahib or Ned (Paris, January 8, 1847 – May 31, 19191), was a French watercolor painter and caricature illustrator. Lesage studied at the Collège Sainte-Barbe in Paris. He abandoned a maritime and military career and devoted himself to drawing.
He started in 1866 at La Vie Parisienne and provided illustrations to various illustrated periodicals such as Le Frou-frou, Le Rire, L’Éclipse and other newspapers adopting a light tone. He composed a large box of color prints entitled: Paris in the nineteenth century and at the end of the eighteenth, in which each plate is a picture of manners. His watercolors of the 1870 war made a few months after the events published in L’Illustration were not always well received. On the other hand, his maritime sketches met with great success.
His works :
Croquis maritimes Paris, Léon Vanier, 1880; 2nd edition Albert Messein, Paris, 1938.
La Frégate l’Incomprise, voyage autour du Monde à la plume, Paris, Léon Vanier, 18823
La marine. Humorous sketches. Marins et navires anciens et modernes, Paris, Librairie Furne, 1890.
Excerpts from a work (1890) of the marine humorist Sahib (alias Lesage) for the part concerning Lapérouse.
General peace. The king can finally indulge his current taste for geography and gives his own instructions to Galaup de La Pérouse and his companion de Langle
1785 Voyage and discoveries on board the two frigates La Boussole and L’Astrolabe.
Expedition from which no one was to return (except for one, however, the vice-consul de Lesseps, disembarked in Kamchatka and returned by land).
Appointed rear-admiral following a scientific expedition to the
in the southern lands, in 1837, with the frigates the Astrolabe and the
Zélée, victim of the famous Versailles railway accident in 1840, had found the remains of Lapérouse in 1828, with these two same frigates.
De Langle was murdered by the savages and Lapérouse was lost on the coral reefs of Vanikoro. His last letter dates from 1788 and the remains of de Langle have only just been brought back to France in 1889.
