[1] His father, Gabriel Charles François Dumont, sieur d'Urville (1728–1796), Bailiff of Condé-sur-Noireau, was, like his ancestors, responsible to the court of Condé.

His mother Jeanne Françoise Victoire Julie (1754–1832) came from Croisilles, Calvados, and was a rigid and formal woman from an ancient family of the rural nobility of Lower Normandy.

Meanwhile, ashore at Toulon, he learnt about botany and entomology in long excursions in the hills of Provence and he studied in the nearby naval observatory.

[4] In 1819, Dumont d'Urville sailed on board Chevrette, under the command of Captain Gauttier-Duparc, to carry out a hydrographic survey of the islands of the Greek archipelago.

The French ambassador's representative arrived just as the statue was being loaded aboard a ship bound for Constantinople and persuaded the island's primates (chief citizens) to annul the sale and honour the first offer.

This earned Dumont the title of Chevalier (knight) of the Légion d'honneur, the attention of the French Academy of Sciences and promotion to lieutenant; and France gained a new, magnificent statue for the Louvre in Paris.

[note 3] On his return from the voyage of Chevrette, Dumont was sent to the naval archive, where he encountered Lieutenant Louis-Isidore Duperrey, a past acquaintance.

[7] Two months after Dumont d'Urville returned on La Coquille, he presented to the Navy Ministry a plan for a new expedition, which he hoped to command, as his relationship with Duperrey had deteriorated.

[8] Astrolabe visited Fiji, then Dumont executed the first relief maps of the Loyalty Islands (part of French New Caledonia) and explored the coasts of New Guinea.

Astrolabe returned to Marseille on 25 March 1829, with an impressive load of hydrographical papers and collections of zoological, botanical and mineralogical reports, which were destined to strongly influence the scientific analysis of those regions.

Dumont d'Urville passed a short period with his family before returning to Paris, where he was promoted to captain and he was put in charge of writing the report of his travels.

In his report, he criticised harshly the military structures, his colleagues, the French Academy of Sciences and even the King – none of whom, in his opinion, had given the voyage of Astrolabe due acknowledgment.

He looked again at Astrolabe's travel notes, and found a gap in the exploration of Oceania and, in January 1837, he wrote to the Navy Ministry suggesting the opportunity for a new expedition to the Pacific.

His objectives were to reach the most southerly point possible at this time in the Weddell Sea; to pass through the Strait of Magellan; to travel up the coast of Chile in order to head for Oceania with the objective of inspecting the new British colonies in Western Australia; to sail to Hobart; and to sail to New Zealand to find opportunities for French whalers and to examine places where a penal colony might be established.

Dumont thought there was sufficient time to explore the strait for three weeks, taking into account the precise maps drawn by Phillip Parker King in HMS Beagle between 1826 and 1830, before heading south again.

[note 8] Conditions on board had rapidly deteriorated: most of the crew had obvious symptoms of scurvy and the main decks were covered by smoke from the ships' fires and bad smells and became unbearable.

Dumont's moral conduct was irreproachable, but he provided a highly summarised description of some incidents of their stay in Nuku Hiva in his reports.

During the voyage from the East Indies to Tasmania some of the crew were lost to tropical fevers and dysentery (14 men and 3 officials); but for Dumont the worst moment during the expedition was at Valparaíso, where he received a letter from his wife that informed him of the death of his second son from cholera.

Adélie's sorrowful demand that he return home coincided with a deterioration in his health: Dumont was more and more often hit by attacks of gout and stomach pains.

Seeing the consistent reduction of the crews, decimated by misfortunes, Dumont expressed his intention to leave this time for the Antarctic with Astrolabe only, in order to attempt to reach the South Magnetic Pole around longitude 140°.

The first days of the voyage mainly involved the crossing of twenty degrees and a westerly current; on board there were further misfortunes, including the loss of a man.

After completing the crossing of the Antarctic Convergence, on 16 January 1840, at 60°S they sighted the first iceberg and two days later the ships found themselves in the middle of a mass of ice.

[13] The two ships slowly sailed to the West, skirting walls of ice, and on 22 January,[note 11] just before 9 in the evening, some members of the crew disembarked[14] on the north-westernmost and highest islet[15][16] of the rocky group of Dumoulin Islands,[17][18] at 500–600 m from the icy coast of the Astrolabe Glacier Tongue of the time, today about 4 km north from the glacier extremity near Cape Géodésie, and hoisted the French tricolour.

[22] In the following days the expedition followed the coast westward then led for the first time some experiments to determine the approximate position of the South magnetic pole.

They sighted the American schooner Porpoise of the United States Exploring Expedition commanded by Charles Wilkes on 30 January 1840, but failed to communicate due to a misunderstanding.

On his return Dumont d'Urville was promoted to rear admiral and was awarded the Gold Medal of the Société de Géographie (Geographical Society of Paris), later becoming its president.

Dumont d'Urville himself named Pepin Island in New Zealand and Adélie Land in Antarctica after his wife, and Croisilles Harbour for his mother's family.