[6] In 1871, Emperor Pedro II offered to the French scientist Emmanuel Liais the directorship of the Imperial Observatory of Rio de Janeiro, who accepted the invitation on the condition that he be allowed to modernize the institution and train its employees.

In his itinerary, Almeida visited places such as Naples, Port Said, Aden, Sri Lanka, Malacca, Singapore, Cochinchina (now known as Vietnam), Hong Kong, Yokohama, Nagasaki and Tokyo.

[11][9][12] In his 48-day trip eastward, Almeida stopped by various ports and faced, unharmed, a typhoon in Hong Kong that killed around eight thousand people, according to English newspapers of the time cited in his account.

On December 8, Janssen sent some of the members of his party to Kobe as insurance, in case bad weather made it difficult to observe the transit, but kept Almeida and other collaborators with him in the city of Nagasaki.

[15] On the way back from Japan, Almeida and the rest of the crew spent a few days in Shanghai and then, aboard the Messageries Maritimes packet boat La Provence, made the trip home, with stop overs in Saigon, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Aden, Suez, Naples and eventually Paris, after a nine-month sojourn in Asia.

While the former is a scientific work on astronomy, the latter describes not only the experiments done in 1874, but also offers an ethnographic and sociopolitical account of regions such as the Persian Gulf, India, Indochina, the Philippines and localities along the coasts of China and Japan.

With the onset of the First Brazilian Republic, he was nominated for various civil servant positions: director of the 2nd Section of the Statistics Bureau of the State of Rio de Janeiro in March 1890;[25] engineer at the Companhia Cantareira e Viação Fluminense in April 1890;[26] member of the Governance Board of Niterói on the recommendation of Governor Francisco Portela from April to July 1890;[2][27][28] director of Brazil's official gazette, the Diário Oficial, between July and November 1891[29][30] and chief of police of Niterói.

[32][33][12][b] In April of the same year, Rui Barbosa filed for a habeas corpus in the Supreme Federal Court to plead for the release of Senator Admiral Eduardo Wandenkolk and other citizens (among them, Almeida),[34] but had his petition denied.

The mission to China, planned since 1892, suffered from delays due to a bubonic plague epidemic in Hong Kong and the outbreak of the First Sino-Japanese War, and was finally terminated.

"[52] Despite the criticism, Francisco Antônio de Almeida acquired some prestige following the publication of From France to Japan, an easy-to-read book filled with exoticisms[12] of countries that were completely unknown to most Brazilian readers.

[54][7] Almeida's voyage has, according to researcher Argeu Guimarães, sparked the curiosity of Brazilian authorities and contributed to the dispatch of the first diplomatic mission to Japan and China in 1879–1880.