author
Alfred Hagen
A French naval doctor and traveler, this late-19th-century observer wrote vividly about Melanesia after journeys through the New Hebrides and Solomon Islands. His work blends firsthand travel narrative with the colonial world he witnessed.
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About the author
Born in Maxey-sur-Vaise on January 10, 1860, and later dying in Nice on May 21, 1941, Alfred Hagen was a French physician whose career took him far beyond metropolitan France. Sources describe him as a naval or colonial doctor, and his writing grew out of those postings and expeditions.
He served in the Pacific from the 1880s, and in 1891 the government of New Caledonia charged him with overseeing the recruitment of labor in the New Hebrides and the Solomon Islands. Those travels gave him material for the travel writing he is best known for today, including Reis naar de Nieuwe Hebriden en de Salomons-eilanden and the later piece Un voyage en Corée.
Hagen's books are useful both as adventure-filled travel accounts and as historical documents from the age of empire. They capture landscapes, encounters, and systems of colonial power in a direct, on-the-spot voice that still makes his work interesting to modern readers.