Death and Legacy
On 8 May 1842 Dumont and his family boarded a train from Versailles to Paris after seeing water games celebrating the king. Near Meudon the train’s locomotive derailed, the wagons rolled and the tender’s coal ended up on the front of the train and caught fire. Dumont's whole family died in the flames of the first French railway disaster, generally known as the Versailles train crash. Dumont's remains were identified by Dumontier, doctor on board the Astrolabe and a phrenologist.
Dumont was buried in the cemetery of Montparnasse in Paris.
This tragedy led to the end of the practice in France of locking passengers in their train compartments.
He is the author of The New Zealanders: A story of Austral lands - likely to be the first novel written about fictional Maori characters.
Later, in honour of his many valuable chartings, the D'Urville Sea off Antarctica; D'Urville Island in the Joinville Island group in Antarctica; Cape d'Urville, Irian Jaya, Indonesia; Mount D'Urville, Auckland Island; and D'Urville Island in New Zealand were named after him. The Dumont d'Urville Station on Antarctica is also named after him, as is the Rue Dumont d'Urville, a street near the Champs-Élysées in Paris' 8th district.
Dumont d'Urville himself named Pepin Island and Adélie Land in Antarctica after his wife, and Croisilles Harbour for his mother's family.
A French naval transport ship employed in French Polynesia is named after him; as was a 1931 sloop which served in World War II.
Read more about this topic: Jules Dumont D'Urville
Famous quotes containing the words death and, death and/or legacy:
“Death and vulgarity are the only two facts in the nineteenth century that one cannot explain away.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
“Lo! Death has reared himself a throne
In a strange city lying alone
Far down within the dim West,
Where the good and the bad and the worst and the best
Have gone to their eternal rest.”
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)
“What is popularly called fame is nothing but an empty name and a legacy from paganism.”
—Desiderius Erasmus (c. 1466–1536)