Looking For La Pérouse

Frank Horner

• Publisher: Melbourne University Press Digital
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780522847581
• eBook ISBN: 9780522865448
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

In the third year of the French Revolution the National Assembly sent the d'Entrecasteaux expedition to the Pacific to search for the missing explorer La Prouse. Like the nation itself the expedition was divided by politics; there were both republicans and monarchists aboard. And besides servicemen there were civilians—the naturalists, whose interests often cut across those of mariners.
The archives of the expedition, which include a wealth of candid and amusing private journals, reveal how d'Entrecasteaux, despite tensions that strained personal friendships, commanded enough respect to keep the expedition operational. Though it found no trace of La Prouse it made valuable discoveries in geography, botany and anthropology.
The voyage, however, ended at Sourabaya in irreversible division with d'Entrecasteaux dead, the arch-monarchist d'Auribeau in command and the French receiving after two years their first news from home of regicide, terror and war. The narrative concludes by tracing the adventurous paths taken by survivors to reach home, and the stratagems they used to save the records of the expedition.

1

The Assembly Orders a Rescue Mission

Revolutions do not banish a nation’s other concerns. In the fateful Paris summer of 1789, a number of the town’s citizens were becoming anxious not only about what was happening there, but about what might have happened to La Pérouse in the Pacific. The explorer had written to the Minister of Marine from Botany Bay on 7 February 1788; since then no word had been received, either from him or about him. The letter, written three weeks before the expedition left the new English colony, had been conveyed to the French ambassador in London by Lieutenant Shortland, who had sailed from Port Jackson in the Alexander in July.¹ La Pérouse revealed in it that he hoped to reach Isle de France (Mauritius) by December; he could therefore be expected back in France by mid-1789.

From this letter and other sources we know how the expedition spent that last month before all European contact was lost, and what its leader had planned to do next. The First Fleet which had arrived at Botany Bay only five days before the Boussole and the Astrolabe had now begun their move to Port Jackson. They offered all help within their power, but could spare no food, supplies or sails.² La Pérouse made no complaint; he did not expect a colonizing expedition so far from Europe to succour other navigators. He needed only wood and water, and these could be found at Botany Bay.

Though 9 miles away from the English settlement, now removed to Port Jackson, his camp was kept informed on its activities by frequent visits from absconding convicts trying to join the expedition.³ Their demands were invariably refused, despite the inducement they offered—to bring with them some females. With visiting English officers the French enjoyed friendly relations. Captain Tench thought La Pérouse should long be remembered with admiration and gratitude by the English for his humanity in the last war. After destroying their Hudson Bay forts and capturing the garrison and traders there, he had left food and ammunition for the absentees away in the forest, so that they could survive the winter and resist the Indians.⁴

There had been some concern among the English visitors at Botany Bay when they heard that French guards had fired on the Aborigines near their camp, since this could have led to indiscriminate retaliation.⁵ But the Englishmen were prepared to believe that there must have been provocation, as they had been told about the extremely humanitarian nature of the French instructions concerning relations with indigenous people.

They also knew of the tragedy the expedition had suffered at Samoa only a few weeks before, in which two officers and ten men had been clubbed to death without warning.⁶ (This was the second of the expedition’s disasters; at Lituya Bay, Alaska, it had lost eight officers and twenty-five men, drowned in a tide race.) Now at Botany Bay the carpenters were assembling two longboats from parts brought with them, to replace those lost in the Samoan attack. La Pérouse’s trust in the goodwill of indigenous people had come to an end. At Botany Bay spears had been thrown without warning, after the initial presents and embraces had seemed to be well received. The longboats were now being constructed inside a wooden stockade.

When he had finished his letter to the Minister La Pérouse wrote at greater length to Claret de Fleurieu, author of his instructions and architect of the voyage.⁷ To this old friend he opened his heart. He was obsessed with personal guilt for the events in Samoa. As leader of the expedition he could have prevented the tragedy, of which he had had a ‘secret presentiment’. But he had failed to overrule a subordinate while knowing him to be wrong. The captain of the Astrolabe, his old friend and former shipmate de Langle, had stubbornly insisted on replacing the water in his casks with fresh water before leaving Samoa, arguing that his crew would otherwise be attacked by scurvy before they reached Botany Bay. La Pérouse knew that the water in the casks was not harmful, and that stale water did not cause scurvy, but he had yielded to his friend’s insistence. To the horror of those watching from the ships, the shore party, caught in a vulnerable position, had found itself suddenly overwhelmed by a crowd of a thousand armed Samoans; de Langle was among the dead. La Pérouse could not forgive himself.

His depression over the attack at Samoa, however, did not prevent him from making plans to complete his commission. He could look back on the work of the past two and a half years with satisfaction. In magnitude it already matched Cook’s third voyage, and he was determined to finish it, whatever the deficiencies he had to contend with. ‘Neither victuals, nor our equipment, nor even our ships’, he wrote to Fleurieu, ‘shall allow me to cut short my voyage . . . I still have very interesting things to do.’ In his letter to the Minister of the same date he spelt out just what he proposed in order to complete his itinerary:

I shall go up again to the Friendly Isles [Tonga], and I shall do absolutely all I am enjoined by my instructions regarding the southern part of New Caledonia, Mendaña’s Santa Cruz Island, the southern coast of Surville’s Arsacides [the Solomons], and Bougainville’s Louisiade, to see whether this is part of New Guinea or separated from it. At the end of July I shall pass between New Guinea and New Holland, by a different channel to that of the Endeavour if there is one. During September and part of October I shall examine the Gulf of Carpentaria and the whole western coast of New Holland right to Van Diemen’s Land, but so as to allow myself to go north again to reach Isle de France [Mauritius] by the beginning of December.⁸

After allowing for La Pérouse’s evident optimism in expecting to complete this enormous programme in so short a time, Fleurieu obviously had, by the second half of 1789, good reason for anxiety. With his usual thoroughness, he began a series of analytical reports on the risks of misadventure likely at various parts of the proposed route, and the chances that traces of the expedition would be found by other ships. By April 1790 he was convinced that La Pérouse’s ships had been wrecked, probably far from the customary routes of European ships in Eastern or Pacific waters. He set out his conclusions in a mémoire to the king and a letter from the Minister of Marine to the Minister for Foreign Affairs.⁹

Fleurieu thought that the Boussole and the Astrolabe had probably been wrecked on one of the islands on the proposed route, and the survivors were building a new boat from the wreckage. If the wreck had occurred on the Louisiade or the Solomons, some English ships, he wrote, could well have learned of it, for homeward-bound ships from the convict fleets often passed there en route for Canton or Calcutta to take on return cargoes. Spanish ships might also be able to help in these waters; a new expedition was to examine the lands discovered by Mendaña and Quiros, which included the Solomons and Santa Cruz. This was the mission of Malaspina, already under way from Cadiz.

On the other hand, Fleurieu wrote, if La Pérouse’s ships had been wrecked anywhere west of Torres Strait they were unlikely to have been seen by any other ships. Accordingly, the special rescue mission that the King was contemplating should begin by visiting New Holland, on the western coast, and then, after refreshing at Botany Bay, should examine the Gulf of Carpentaria before moving eastward to examine Tonga, New Caledonia and the rest of the islands on La Pérouse’s itinerary. Meanwhile the governments of Britain and Spain should be informed of his proposed route and requested to alert their nations’ ships accordingly.

During the next two years, probably unknown to Fleurieu when he wrote his mémoire, three English expeditions were to follow routes through seas in which La Pérouse had intended to sail: Edwards in the Pandora, searching for the Bounty mutineers; Vancouver, with the Discovery and the Chatham, on their way to the north-west coast of North America; and Bligh, with the Providence and the Assistant, on the second breadfruit voyage to Tahiti. These ships will reappear in later chapters of our story.

To mount a rescue mission a large sum of money would have to be appropriated. This step was not taken until ten months after Fleurieu had presented his mémoire to the king. And the initiative came not from Fleurieu (though he had by then succeeded La Luzerne as Minister of Marine), but from a body of scientists.

At its session of 14 January 1791 the Société d’Histoire Naturelle resolved to petition the National Assembly about the missing expedition, arguing that the nation that was to enjoy the fruits of its labours owed it not only concern but assistance. Presented by the deputy Bosc on 22 January, the petition urged the National Assembly to authorize a search mission.¹⁰ Bosc’s address, heard in deep silence, was followed by loud applause.¹¹ The combined subcommittees of Agriculture, Commerce and Marine to which the petition was referred supported it firmly in a report presented on 9 February.¹² To find La Pérouse in the vast seas into which he had sailed might seem unlikely, but it would be unworthy of the French nation not to try. The Minister of Marine had given the subcommittees his estimates of the cost: 400 000 livres for the first year of the expedition, 300 000 for each of the two following years.¹³ The result was a decree made by the National Assembly the same day.¹⁴

The decree requested the king to authorize compensation for nationals of other countries willing to help in the search. It also requested him to commission one or more vessels, on which were to be embarked scientists, naturalists and artists, to search for La Pérouse and to make scientific and commercial inquiries. Even if La Pérouse was found, or news of him discovered, the leader of the expedition was to continue to make investigations useful to navigation, geography, commerce, the arts and the sciences.

One may wonder how such a resolution could be passed so promptly and with such unanimity by the legislature of a country living through the uncertainties of revolution, whose frontiers were widely believed to be threatened and whose financial situation was desperate. But there was nothing inconsistent between the high scientific principles to which the Société d’Histoire Naturelle was appealing and the philosophical ideals of the Revolution on which the National Assembly based its existence. Each originated in a respect for reason, which at that stage of the Revolution could still unite people of different political opinions. Widespread enthusiasm for a voyage of discovery was therefore not surprising.

Patriotism too was a uniting force; La Pérouse’s expedition was a source of national pride, a demonstration to the world that England had no monopoly in glorious feats of maritime exploration. And the National Assembly was no doubt jealous that its pride in the expedition should be seen to be no less than that of the old regime that had launched it.

There was also the emotion with which La Pérouse’s saga had been followed in France. His dispatches and charts had been sent home successively from Macao, Kamchatka and Botany Bay, and news of the expedition’s progress would have reached the literate classes who made up the scientific bodies and the Assembly. Many of these would have known also of La Pérouse’s romantic marriage, two years before he sailed, which added poignancy to his disappearance.¹⁵ (Proceeds of an official narrative of the voyage, ordered by Fleurieu in April 1791, were to go to the explorer’s wife.¹⁶) The subcommittee’s report had been emotional: there could be survivors ‘confined to some beach, their eyes wandering over the far distances of the sea, to discover there the lucky sail which might return them to France, to their families, to their friends’.¹⁷ The National Assembly of the time was easily swayed by rhetorical appeals to nationalism and humanity.

The Société had its own special interests, of course; the botanical, zoological and geological collections of the expedition perhaps lay somewhere in the South Pacific, waiting to be retrieved. Besides, as the Société’s petition showed, a rescue mission could reasonably be expected to be manned and equipped in every way as another expedition of scientific inquiry.

The Minister of Marine, Fleurieu, who in other circumstances would have led the campaign for a rescue mission, seems to have deliberately left the initiative to the Société d’Histoire Naturelle.¹⁸ It was Fleurieu who had planted the seed of the La Pérouse expedition; he had conceived it as a north Pacific exploration intended especially to admit France to the North American fur trade. It had proliferated, and ended as something much larger.¹⁹ As Directeur des Ports et Arsenaux he had secured the command for his friend La Pérouse, who was indeed well qualified by character and record.²⁰ As a leading geographer Fleurieu had himself planned the voyage, drawn the charts to be used, and prepared the detailed historical and geographical notes providing background for the investigation.²¹ He had solicited other institutional papers from scientific societies. He would certainly have felt the disappearance of the expedition more keenly than most of his colleagues. As Minister of Marine from October 1790 he could have initiated action; we have seen that well before the move made by the Société d’Histoire Naturelle he was discussing with the king the routes that should be taken by a rescue mission. His steps to bring it about, however, appear to have been indirect and private: to encourage his scientific friends to submit a plan to the National Assembly.

Fleurieu’s position as Minister at this time was weaker than it appeared. His appointment had not been well received in the Assembly,²² and in fact he was to resign in May 1791. (Fortunately his successor Thévenard still left Fleurieu to continue planning the expedition.) In any case it would have been useless for him to rely on his old source of influence, direct access to the king. Sovereign power, so far as it existed, now lay with the National Assembly.

Nominally, France was governed by a constitutional monarchy, a form of government that was to continue even under the new constitution of September 1791. Legislation was enacted in the name of the king; the Assembly’s decree of 9 February 1791 took the form of requests to the king, and appeared under an imprint bearing fleur-de-lys. But for more than a year, ever since his forced move in October 1789 from Versailles to the Tuileries, the king had been a virtual prisoner. (Before the expedition was to sail, his freedom was to be even more restricted, after his luckless attempt to flee with his family across the border, aborted at Varennes.) The authority of the king may have been illusory, but to some members of the expedition it was still real three years later when the voyage ended at Sourabaya.

There was nothing nominal about the king’s personal support for the rescue mission. Louis XVI was not only an active sponsor of French maritime exploration, he was an energetic and painstaking collaborator in the plans and instructions prepared for his exploring captains.²³ His tutor had been the leading French geographer Philippe Buache. Geography was...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustration
• Preface
• Acknowledgement
• 1 The Assembly Orders a Rescue Mission
• 2 A Commodore’s Career
• 3 Commissioning
• 4 To Van Diemen’s Land: a Change of Plan
• 5 Van Diemen’s Land: a Lucky Error
• 6 The Admiralties: the Diversion
• 7 Amboina: Disunity aboard
• 8 Esperance Bay: Danger and Disappointment
• 9 Van Diemen’s Land again: ‘the First State of Society’
• 10 Tongatapu: Gaiety and Violence
• 11 New Caledonia: ’this Barbarous Land’
• 12 Santa Cruz, Solomons, New Guinea: the Last Surveys
• 13 To Sourabaya: the Leader’s End
• 14 Sourabaya: in Dutch Hands
• 15 Going Home—or into Exile
• 16 Retrieving the Records
• 17 Successes and Failures
• Epilogue
• Officers, midshipmen and scientific staff
• Chronology
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index