La Pérouse: the French expedition that vanished in the Pacific

On 10 March 1788, two French ships left Botany Bay in Australia and vanished into the vastness of the Pacific. For nearly 40 years, nobody knew what had happened to them. This was the expedition of Jean-François de Galaup, comte de La Pérouse, which had already sailed around the Pacific for two and a half years.

In the footsteps of Cook

According to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, La Pérouse was born on 22 August 1741 near Albi in southern France and joined the French navy as a teenager. By 1780 he had become a captain. Britannica writes that in 1783 France began preparing an expedition to carry forward the discoveries James Cook had begun in the Pacific, and made La Pérouse its leader.

According to the Australian Dictionary of Biography, two ships, La Boussole and L’Astrolabe, left the French port of Brest on 1 August 1785. La Pérouse commanded La Boussole and his colleague de Langle commanded L’Astrolabe. According to the website of the French organisation Association Salomon, the ships carried about 220 sailors, craftsmen, artists and scientists, of whom 19 were scientists.

From Easter Island to Alaska

The ships rounded Cape Horn, entered the Pacific and carried out repairs in Chile. According to Britannica, they reached Easter Island on 9 April 1786, where, according to the Association, they stayed only one day. They then sailed north to Hawaii and landed on the island of Maui on the morning of 31 May 1786. From there, searching for a north-west passage, they headed towards the west coast of North America and in June 1786 reached the southern coast of Alaska near Mount St Elias.

The Lituya Bay disaster

On 3 July 1786, the two ships entered a narrow bay in Alaska, now called Lituya Bay, which La Pérouse named Port des Français. According to Association Salomon, three small boats set out on 13 July to survey the mouth of the bay. A strong, powerful tidal current caught them at the entrance, and only one boat returned. Twenty-one officers and sailors drowned. None survived, and no body or piece of a boat was found. In late July, a memorial was built on an island in the bay, and a list of their names was placed in a bottle and buried. The island came to be called Cenotaph Island, meaning the “island of the empty grave”.

Monterey, Macau and the coasts of Asia

From there the ships went south to California. According to the Association, they reached Monterey on 15 September 1786 and left on 24 September. They then crossed the Pacific and reached Macau on the Chinese coast on 3 January 1787, staying until 5 February, before going on to Manila in the Philippines.

According to the Australian Dictionary of Biography, La Pérouse left Manila in April 1787, surveyed the coasts north of Korea and sailed through the Sea of Japan to the Tartary Strait in the north, where he learnt that Sakhalin is an island. According to Britannica, the strait between Sakhalin and the Japanese island of Hokkaido is now called the La Perouse Strait after him.

A letter from Kamchatka to Paris

In September 1787, the ships reached Petropavlovsk on Russia’s Kamchatka peninsula. From there, La Pérouse sent Barthélemy de Lesseps, a member of the expedition, to France overland with the journals and maps made so far. According to Association Salomon, de Lesseps’s journey across Siberia lasted about a year. These papers preserved the account of the expedition, which, according to Britannica, was published in four volumes in 1797.

From there the ships sailed south to Samoa. According to the Association, they stayed in the islands from 9 to 14 December 1787. According to the Australian Dictionary of Biography, a clash broke out on the island of Tutuila between a party that had gone ashore for water and local people. De Langle and 11 other men were killed.

Botany Bay and silence

The ships went on to Australia via Tonga and Norfolk Island. According to the Australian Dictionary of Biography, the coast came into view on 24 January 1788, and because of bad weather they could enter the bay only two days later. The British fleet had arrived a few days earlier, and one of its officers, John Hunter, helped the French ships to anchor. La Pérouse camped on the northern shore of the bay and kept good relations with the British during a stay of six weeks. The ships left on 10 March 1788, and nothing more was heard of them. In 1791, the French government sent an expedition to search for them, but it failed.

The mystery of Vanikoro

According to Britannica, in 1826–1827 an English captain, Peter Dillon, found evidence that both ships had reached the area of Vanikoro, an island in the Santa Cruz group of the Solomon Islands. According to the Solomon Islands Historical Encyclopaedia, Dillon had found the hilt of a silver sword and other items on the nearby island of Tikopia. In 1828, the French navigator Dumont d’Urville reached Vanikoro, saw the wreckage of a ship and questioned local people. According to the same encyclopaedia, the accounts Dillon gathered said that both ships were wrecked, some men reached the shore, and they built a small boat and sailed north, after which nothing was known of them.

According to Association Salomon, the ships were probably wrecked in May or June 1788. La Boussole struck a rock and sank, and L’Astrolabe became trapped in a narrow channel. According to the Solomon encyclopaedia, a French expedition identified the wreck of L’Astrolabe in 1959. Alain Conan founded Association Salomon in Nouméa, New Caledonia, in 1981, and by 2008 it had sent eight expeditions to Vanikoro with the help of the French navy. In 1999, the site on the island where the French sailors had camped was found, and on 22 November 2003 a human skeleton was recovered from the wreck of La Boussole. Many of the items found on these expeditions are now kept in the maritime history museum in Nouméa.

Next instalment: Mungo Park: the River Niger.