LOUIS XVI. AND THE SCIENCE OF NAVIGATION--VOYAGE OF LAPÉROUSE--ARRIVAL
AT EASTER ISLAND--ADDRESS OF THE NATIVES--OWHYHEE--TRADE
AT MOWEE--SURVEY OF THE AMERICAN COAST--A REMARKABLE
INLET--DISTRESSING CALAMITY--SOJOURN AT MONTEREY--RUN ACROSS THE
PACIFIC--THE JAPANESE WATERS--ARRIVAL AT PETROPAULOWSKI--AFFRAY
AT NAVIGATORS' ISLES--LAPÉROUSE ARRIVES AT BOTANY BAY, AND IS
NEVER SEEN AGAIN, ALIVE OR DEAD--VOYAGES MADE IN SEARCH OF
HIM--D'ENTRECASTEAUX--DILLON--D'URVILLE--DISCOVERY OF NUMEROUS RELICS
OF THE SHIPS AT MANICOLO--THEORY OF THE FATE OF LAPÉROUSE--ERECTION OF
A MONUMENT TO HIS MEMORY.
Louis XVI., King of France, became at this period deeply interested in
the study of the science of geography and navigation. Upon the perusal
of the voyages, discoveries, and services of Cook, he conceived the
idea of admitting the French nation to a share in the glory which
the English were reaping from maritime adventure and exploration. He
drew up a plan of campaign with his own hand, ordered the two frigates
Boussole and Astrolabe to be prepared for sea, and gave the command of
the expedition to Jean-François Galaup de la Pérouse,--better known
as Lapérouse. The vessels were supplied with every accessory of which
they could possibly have need. The instructions and recommendations
received from the Academy of Sciences fill a quarto volume of four
hundred pages. The fleet sailed from Brest on the 1st of August, 1785,
and arrived at Concepçion, in Chili, late in February, 1786.
After a short stay here, the two frigates again put to sea, and,
early in April, anchored in Cook's Bay, in Easter Island. Here the
two commanders landed, accompanied by about seventy persons, twelve
of whom were marines armed to the teeth. Five hundred Indians awaited
them at the shore, the greater part of them naked, painted, and
tattooed, others wearing pendent bunches of odoriferous herbs about
their loins, and others still being covered with pieces of white and
yellow cloth. None of them were armed, and, as the boats touched the
land, they advanced with the utmost alacrity to aid the strangers in
their disembarkation. The latter marked out a circular space, where
they set up a tent, and enjoined it strongly upon the islanders not
to intrude upon this enclosure. The number of the natives had now
increased to eight hundred, one hundred and fifty of whom were women.
While the latter would seek, by caresses and agreeable pantomime,
to withdraw the attention of the Frenchmen from passing events, the
men would slyly pick their pockets. Innumerable handkerchiefs were
pilfered in this way; and the thieves, emboldened by success, at last
seized their caps from their heads and rushed off with them. It was
noticed that the chiefs were the most adroit and successful plunderers,
and that though, for appearance' sake, they sometimes ran after an
offender, promising to bring him back, it was evident that they were
running as slowly as they could, and that their object was rather to
facilitate than to prevent their escape. Lapérouse was not saved from
spoliation by his rank: a polite savage, having assisted him over an
obstruction in the path, removed his chapeau and fled with the utmost
rapidity. On re-embarking to return to the ships, only three persons
had handkerchiefs, and only two had caps. Lapérouse stayed but a day
on this island, having nothing to gain and every thing to lose. There
was no fresh water to be found, the natives drinking sea-water, like
the albatrosses of Cape Horn. In return for the hospitality with which
they had been received, Lapérouse caused several fertile spots to be
sown with beets, cabbages, wheat, carrots, and squashes, and even with
orange, lemon, and cotton seeds. "In short," says Lapérouse, "we loaded
them with presents, overwhelmed with caresses the young and children
at the breast; we sowed their fields with useful grains; we left kids,
sheep, and hogs to multiply upon their island; we asked nothing in
exchange; and yet they robbed us of our hats and handkerchiefs, and
threw stones at us when we left." The following reflection, which
concludes Lapérouse's account of Easter Island, could only have
proceeded from a Frenchman:--"I decided to depart during the night,
flattering myself that when, upon the return of day, they should find
our vessels gone, they would attribute our departure to our just
resentment at their conduct, and that this conclusion might render them
better members of society."
Lapérouse now sailed to the northeast, intending to touch at the
Sandwich Islands,--a distance of five thousand miles. He hoped to make
some discovery during this long stretch, and placed sailors in the
tops, animated by the promise of a prize to discover as many islands
as possible. In the furtherance of this design, the two frigates
sailed ten miles apart,--by which the visible horizon was considerably
extended. Lapérouse was destined, however, to owe his celebrity to his
misfortunes and not to his discoveries: he arrived, on the 28th of
May, at Owhyhee, without once making land. "The aspect of the island,"
he writes, "was charming. But the sea beat with such violence upon the
coast, that, like Tantalus, we could only long for and devour with our
eyes that which it was impossible for us to reach." This prospect was
aggravated by the sight of one hundred and fifty canoes laden with pigs
and fruit which put out from the shore: forty of them were capsized in
attempting to come alongside while the frigates were under full sail.
The water was full of swimming savages, struggling pigs, and tempting
cocoanuts; but the necessity of making an anchorage before nightfall
compelled them to seek another portion of the island.
On the 30th of May, Lapérouse landed upon the island of Mowee,
where he found the savages mild, polite, and commercially inclined.
Exchanges of pigs and medals were made with great success. Lapérouse
abstained from taking possession of the island in the name of the
King of France,--Cook not having visited Mowee,--inasmuch as he
considered European usages in this respect extremely ridiculous.
"Philosophers must often have wept," he writes, "at seeing men, simply
because they have cannon and bayonets, count sixty thousand of their
fellow-creatures as nothing, and look upon a land which its inhabitants
have moistened with their sweat and fertilized with the bones of their
ancestors for centuries as an object of legitimate conquest."
On the 23d of June, in latitude 60° north, Lapérouse struck the
American coast: he recognised at once Behring's Mount St. Elias,
whose summit pierced the clouds. From this point southward as far as
Monterey, in Mexico, lay an extent of coast which Cook had seen but
not surveyed. The exploration of this coast was a work essential to
the interests of navigation and of commerce; and, though the season
only allowed him three months, he undertook and executed it in a manner
creditable to the navy of France. He discovered a harbor that had
escaped the notice of preceding navigators. This harbor or bay seems
to have been a remarkable place. The water is unfathomable, and is
surrounded by precipices which rise perpendicularly from the water's
edge into the regions of eternal snow. Not a blade of grass, not a
green leaf, grows in this desolate and sterile spot. No breeze blows
upon the surface of the bay: its tranquillity is never troubled except
by the fall of enormous masses of ice from numerous overhanging peaks.
The air is so still and the silence so profound that the noise made by
a bird in laying an egg in the hollow of a rock is distinctly heard at
the distance of a mile and a half. To this wonderful bay Lapérouse gave
the name of Frenchport.
A painful accident occurred as the vessels, after a somewhat prolonged
stay, were about departing from the spot. Three boats, manned by
twenty-seven men and officers, were sent to make soundings in the bay,
in order to complete the chart of the survey. They had strict orders to
avoid a certain dangerous current, but became involved in it unawares.
Two boats' crews perished, consisting of twenty-one men, the greater
part of them under twenty-five years of age. Two brothers, by the name
of Laborde, whom their superior officers never separated, but always
sent together on missions of peril, were among the victims of the
disaster. A monument was erected to their memory, and a record buried
in a bottle beneath it. The inscription was thus conceived:--
"At the entrance of this bay twenty-one brave sailors perish'd:
Whoever you may be, mingle your tears with ours."
[Illustration: LAPÉROUSE'S DISASTER AT FRENCHPORT.]
On the 13th of September, Lapérouse arrived at Monterey, after a
cursory examination of the coast, determining its directions, but
without exploring its sinuosities and inlets. The Spanish commander of
the fort and of the two Californias had received orders from Mexico to
extend all possible hospitality to the adventurers. He executed his
instructions to the letter, sending immense quantities of fresh beef,
eggs, milk, vegetables, and poultry on board, and then declining to
hand in the bill. On the 24th, every thing being in readiness, the
vessels started upon their route across the Pacific, the intention
of Lapérouse being to make for Macao, on the Chinese coast. He hoped
on his way to make many discoveries of islands upon this unknown
sea,--the Spaniards, in their single beaten track from Acapulco to
Manilla, never varying more than thirty miles to the north or south
of their usual and average latitude. He also hoped not to find, in
the longitude marked against it, a very doubtful island named Nostra
Señora de la Gorta, that he might erase it from the charts. This he was
unable to do, for the winds did not allow him to pass within a hundred
miles of its supposed position. When half-way across the Pacific, he
discovered a naked, barren rock, to which he gave the name of Necker,
after the French Minister of Finance. He arrived at Macao on the
3d of January, 1787, after a voyage entirely free from incident or
adventure. He spent three months here and at Manilla, and finally, on
the 10th of April, started for the scene of the most important portion
of his mission,--the coasts of Tartary and of Japan,--the waters which
separate the mainland of the former from the islands of the latter
being very imperfectly known to Europeans.
Early in June, Lapérouse entered a sea never before ploughed by a
European keel; and, as it was only known from Japanese or Corean
charts, published by the Jesuits, it was his first object either
to verify their surveys or to correct their errors. As the Jesuits
travelled and made their calculations by land, Lapérouse added
hydrographic details and observations to their data, which he found
quite generally correct. His voyage in these latitudes set many doubts
at rest. After several months spent in these labors, the expedition
arrived at Petropaulowski in September of the same year. The officers
were grievously disappointed in not finding letters and despatches from
France, but one evening, during a Kamschatka gala ball, the arrival
of a courier from Okhotsk was announced, and the ball was interrupted
that the mail might be opened and delivered. The news was favorable for
all, though, after so long an absence, it was natural that there should
be evil tidings for some among so many. Lapérouse learned that he had
been promoted in rank; and the Governor of Okhotsk caused this event
to be celebrated by a grand discharge of artillery. M. de Lesseps, the
interpreter attached to the expedition, was detached from it at this
point by Lapérouse and sent across the continent by way of Okhotsk,
Irkoutsk, and Tobolsk to St. Petersburg, and thence to Paris, with
the ships' letters and Lapérouse's journal. It is from this journal,
published at Paris, that we have obtained the details of the expedition
as we have thus far chronicled them.
The track of Lapérouse was now directly south, through the heart of the
Pacific Ocean. He touched, on the 9th of December, at Maouna, one of
Navigator's Isles. The vessels were at once surrounded by a hundred or
more canoes filled with pigs and fruit, which the natives would only
exchange for glass beads, which in their eyes were what diamonds are to
Europeans. Delangle, the captain of the Astrolabe, went ashore with the
watering party. The islanders made no objection to their landing their
casks; but as the tide receded, leaving the boats high and dry upon the
beach, they became troublesome, and finally forced Delangle to a trial
of his muskets. For this they took a sanguinary vengeance. Delangle was
killed by a single blow from a club, as was Lamanon, the naturalist.
Eleven marines were savagely murdered, either with stones or heavy
sticks, while twenty were seriously wounded. The rest escaped by
swimming. Lapérouse did not feel himself sufficiently strong to attempt
reprisals. The natives hurled stones with such force and accuracy that
they were more than a match for as many musketeers. Besides, he had
lost thirty-two men and two boats, and his situation generally was
such that the slightest mischance would now compel him to disarm one
frigate in order to refit the other. It was late in January, 1788, that
he arrived at Botany Bay, in New Holland,--the last place in which he
was ever seen, alive or dead.
His last letter to the Minister of Marine was dated at Botany Bay,
the 7th of February. In this he stated the route by which he intended
to return home, and the dates of his anticipated arrivals at various
points. His plan was to visit the Friendly Islands, New Guinea, and Van
Diemen's Land, and to be at the Isle of France, near Madagascar, at
the beginning of December. His letter arrived in due course at Paris,
where the public mind was too much agitated by the throes of revolution
to pay much heed to matters of such remote interest. At last, in the
year 1791, the Society of Natural History called the attention of the
Constituent Assembly to the fate of Lapérouse and his companions. The
hope of recovering at least some wreck of an expedition undertaken
to promote the sciences induced the Assembly to send two other ships
to Botany Bay, with orders to steer the same course from that place
that Lapérouse had traced out for himself. Some of his followers, it
was thought, might have escaped from the wreck, and might be confined
on a desert island or thrown upon some savage coast. Two ships were
therefore fitted out, and placed under the command of Rear-Admiral
d'Entrecasteaux.
The ships returned in two years, without having obtained the slightest
clue to the fate of Lapérouse: their commander had died of scurvy at
Java. At the Friendly Islands, the first landing that Lapérouse was to
make after leaving Botany Bay, the inhabitants, who remembered Cook
perfectly, and who knew the difference between French and English,
declared that Lapérouse had not visited them. As they were the most
civilized and hospitable of all the Pacific islanders, it was thought
improbable that he had ever sailed as far as the very first station of
his route,--an opinion which was confirmed by finding no trace of him
at any subsequent point of his intended track. No floating remnants
of wood or iron work were anywhere discovered; and the public mind
gradually settled into the conviction that the two unfortunate vessels
were lost upon their passage from Botany Bay to the Friendly Islands.
The cause was supposed to be neither fire, nor leakage, nor the effects
of a stress of weather,--causes which could hardly be fatal at the same
moment to two vessels. It was generally believed that, as the Boussole
and Astrolabe were accustomed to keep as near each other as possible
during the night, they both simultaneously dashed upon a hidden
quicksand. In this manner, one vessel would not have been able to take
warning in time by the disaster of the other.
In the year 1813, one Captain Dillon, in the service of the British
East India Company, putting in at one of the Feejee Islands, found
there two foreign sailors, one of whom was a Prussian, the other a
Lascar. At their request he transported them to the neighboring island
of Tucopia, where he left them, the natives expressing no hostility
toward them nor objections to their stay. In 1826,--thirteen years
afterward,--Captain Dillon again touched at Tucopia, where he found
them comfortable and contented. The Lascar sold the armorer a silver
sword-hilt of French manufacture and bearing a cipher engraved upon it.
It resulted from Dillon's inquiries that the natives had obtained many
articles of iron and other metals from a distant island named Manicolo,
where, as they said, two European ships had been wrecked forty years
before. It immediately occurred to Dillon that this circumstance was
connected with the loss of the vessel of Lapérouse, whose fate still
remained involved in uncertainty. Aware of the interest felt in Europe
in the fate of the unfortunate navigator, he sailed with the Prussian
to Manicolo, but, being prevented from landing by the surf and the
coral reef, bore away to New Zealand and proceeded on his voyage.
[Illustration: REMNANTS OF THE WRECK.]
In 1827, Dumont d'Urville was sent out by the French Government in
the sloop-of-war Astrolabe to explore the great archipelagoes of
the Pacific, with incidental authority to follow up any clue he
might discover to the fate of Lapérouse. At Hobart Town, in Van
Diemen's Land, he heard some account of the efforts made by Dillon,
and determined to conclude what he had begun. He sailed at once for
Manicolo, and, after examining the eastern coast of the island without
success, proceeded to the western. Here he found numerous articles of
European manufacture in possession of the savages, who steadfastly
refused to say whence they had obtained them or to point out the scene
of any catastrophe or shipwreck. At last, the offer of a piece of red
cloth induced a painted islander to conduct a boat's crew to the spot
which is now regarded as that at which the lamented commander and his
vessels met their untimely fate. Scattered about in the bed of the sea,
at the depth of about twenty feet, lay anchors, cannon, and sheets
of lead and copper sheathing, completely corroded and disfigured by
rust. They succeeded in recovering many of them from the water,--an
anchor of fourteen hundred pounds, a small cannon coated with coral,
and two brass swivels, in a good state of preservation. Thus possessed
of evidence which after the lapse of forty years must be considered
as conclusive, d'Urville erected near the anchorage a cenotaph to
the memory of the hapless navigator. It was placed in a small grove,
and consecrated by a salute of twenty-one guns and three volleys of
musketry.
[Illustration: CONSECRATION OF THE CENOTAPH.]
The islanders were now profuse in their explanations of the
circumstances attending the calamity. As far as d'Urville could
interpret their language and their pantomime, the ships struck upon the
reef during a gale in the night. One speedily sank, only thirty of her
crew escaping; the other remained for a time entire, but afterwards
went to pieces, her whole crew having been saved. From her timbers they
constructed a schooner, in which labor they occupied seven moons or
months, and then sailed away and never returned. What befell them after
their second embarkation, what was the fate of their daring little
vessel,--if indeed any such was ever built,--no one has survived to
tell. It is safe to believe that both vessels were lost upon the island
of Vanikoro, now one of the archipelago of the New Hebrides. It is
supposed that Lapérouse was the first European navigator that visited
it, Dillon the second, and d'Urville the third.
[Illustration: SCENE IN TERRA DEL FUEGO.]