Jean François de Galo de La Perouse was born on August 22, 1741 in Le Jouhaux, near the old town of Albi in the south of France, into a noble family. At the age of fifteen he entered the school of midshipmen in Brest, where he showed himself to be a purposeful and inquisitive young man. He read a lot about sea travel, studied astronomy, mathematics, navigation.
In 1773-1777. La Perouse served in the Indian Ocean, guarding the French colonies from the British. In command of the frigate "Amazonka", he captured an English corvette and a marque. In 1780, promoted to captain of the 1st rank, he added two more English frigates to his trophies.
Equipping a round-the-world sea expedition, King Louis XVI wished that La Pérouse would certainly lead it.
After the death of Captain Cook, the French government, jealously following the success of the British, decided to seize the palm in the exploration of the Pacific Ocean. The circumnavigation route prescribed La Perouse: from Brest to go to the Canary Islands, go around Cape Horn, make a stop on Easter Island, then on the Sandwich Islands, follow the American coast to the north, again descend to the south; from the American coast to Japan and reach China; go north along the Asian coast, then turn south again and sail to New Holland (Australia); return to France via the Moluccas, Ile-de-France (Mauritius) and the Cape of Good Hope. The voyage was supposed to take four years.
The main goal of the expedition was "to develop domestic trade and expand the sea voyages of the French." La Perouse was charged with the duty of winning the favor of the leaders of distant tribes and establishing which goods from France they might like the most, what they could offer in exchange.
On August 1, 1785, La Perouse left Brest with two frigates each with a displacement of 500 tons - the Bussolla, which he commanded personally, and the Astrolabe, which was led by 40-year-old captain Paul Antoine Flerio de Langle. In total, the expedition consisted of 242 people, including 17 scientists of various specialties. Among them were academician astronomers Monge and Lepot Degele, geographer Bernise, botanist and physician de la Martinière, physicist Lamenon, naturalist and natural scientist Dufresne. A 16-year-old student of the Paris military school Napoleon Bonaparte, who was not included in the team's lists for some reason, remained on the shore …
… And now, after a long voyage across the oceans, the Bussol and Astrolabe entered a natural, not yet explored harbor in southern Alaska. “Imagine a pool of water,” wrote La Pérouse, “so deep that it cannot be measured in the middle, surrounded by very high steep mountains covered with snow. I have never seen even a single gust of breeze ripple the surface of these waters. She was worried only from the falling of huge pieces of ice, which, falling down, make a noise that spreads far over the mountains. In the middle of the bay rose a green, wooded island. As a sign of hospitality, the natives brandished pieces of white fur. “We already considered ourselves the happiest of seafarers, but at this time we were in for a big trouble that could not have been foreseen.”
A two-masted sailboat from the Astrolabe and two smaller boats from the Bussoli were tasked with determining the depth of the bay. Sailing between the islands, thirty sailors landed on one of them to hunt - "as much for pleasure as for benefit." But only one boat returned, and its commander, Lieutenant Buten, told about the misfortune that had happened. Carried out of the passage by a tidal wave "rolling at three or four miles an hour," the two boats in front were thrown onto underwater rocks and crashed. Twenty-one people, including six officers, were killed. They were all young people, the oldest of them only thirty-three years old.
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At the end of August 1787, new news from La Perouse arrived at Versailles. The mail was transferred on January 3 to Macau by one of the French ships. The correspondence contained a diary of the voyage to the Macau anchorage and a map of the northwest coast of America, which, as the commander wrote, was "undoubtedly the most accurate of all that has been compiled so far." La Pérouse reported on the discovery of the Necker and La Bass islands, on a visit "to one of the islands to the north of the Marianas, from where he went to China." In early August, he expected to be in Kamchatka, from it to go to the Aleutian Islands, and then sail, "without losing a minute," to the southern hemisphere.
In October 1787, the frigate "Agile", arrived from Manila, delivered new mail.
Moving away from the coast of the Philippines, in the spring of 1787, La Perouse began to explore the coast of East Asia in the temperate zone, gradually moving north. The French mapped - very inaccurately - the shores of the East China and Japan Seas, ascended north to almost 40 ° north latitude.
On July 3, the ships moved northeast. On the morning of July 7, a strip of mountainous land stretching in the meridian direction was noticed from the Bussoli. The highest peak La Pérouse called Peak Lamonon. Soon a thick fog fell on the sea, and the French, believing that in front of them the coast of Yesso (Hokkaido Island), went further north almost at random. Five days later, both frigates dropped anchor in a convenient bay. From the explanations of the locals and the drawing sketched by them, La Pérouse realized that he was on an island called Sakhalin, separated from the mainland and the island of Yesso by the straits.
The ships continued to sail north along the Tatar Strait (the name was given by La Pérouse), approaching the coast of the mainland, then Sakhalin, and on July 23 they discovered a small Bay of Jonquier (later the city of Aleksandrovsk-Sakhalinsky appeared here; the name of the bay given by the French remained behind the cape).
On September 7, 1787, in Avacha Bay, in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, the Bussol was greeted with welcoming cannon shots. The commandant of the Russian fortress received from Versailles, by land transport, dispatches intended for the French captain. There was also a message about the assignment of the rank of squadron commander, signed on November 2, 1786.
… Having once again crossed almost the entire Pacific Ocean, the ships approached in early December to the Seafarers' archipelago and made anchorage on Mauna Island (Eastern Samoa). The natives appeared, girded with algae, like the mythological sea gods. Beautiful natives walked naked. The behavior of the islanders was not belligerent. The sailors were able to get coconuts, guava, bananas, chickens and pigs. La Pérouse found this short parking lot idyllic. The skill of the locals delighted him.
On December 11, before sailing, the captain of the Astrolabe, Flerio de Langle, went ashore to look after the attire of sailors who were stocking up fresh water, and took with him various small gifts to leave the natives a good memory of the French. The islanders started a fight because of them, as a result, the strongest and most decisive captured everything. Those who did not get anything blamed not their neighbors for it, but the donors. They started throwing stones at the sailors. Flerio de Langle could have given the order to open fire, but, remembering the instructions of the king, he preferred to give the order to return to the ship. At that moment, a stone hit him … The sailors accompanying him wanted to protect the captain, but their wet guns were useless. Twelve people, including Flerio de Langle, were killed.
So in two and a half years, the expedition lost thirty-four people.
The ships moved west. On December 17, the island of Savaii, the largest in the Samoa archipelago, was discovered. From there, La Perouse sailed to Australia and at the end of January 1788 anchored in Botany Bay. There, the French met with the English flotilla, which brought the first consignment of exiled settlers to Eastern Australia. The commander of this flotilla, Arthur Philip, who was appointed the first governor of the colony of New South Wales, founded a village of the same name, 25 km north of Botany, near Port Jackson Bay, - the "embryo" of the future Sydney. Through him, La Perouse sent a report to France. After reporting the tragedy, he wrote that he was going to visit the islands of Melanesia, including Santa Cruz, go around New Holland and go to the island of Ile-de-France (Mauritius).
“Well, let’s wait for the next mail,” said the king sadly after reading La Perouse’s report.
But news from La Perouse was never received. They were gone …
In July 1789, revolutionary events overshadowed everything else, and La Perouse was remembered only two years later. The search for the missing expedition was undertaken at the initiative of the Parisian Society of Naturalists, which turned to the National Assembly, which in February 1791 recognized "the need to save La Perouse and his sailors." Seven months later, two corvettes sailed from Brest, Recherche (Search) and Esperance (Hope), under the command of Rear Admiral Joseph Antoine Bruny d'Antrcasteau.
Three and a half years have passed since the last news of Bussoli and Astrolabe arrived. But no one wanted to believe in the death of La Perouse and his companions. They preferred to speak of them as missing, abandoned on some distant island. The squadron commander continued to be listed in the records of the navy, and Madame de La Pérouse continued to carefully receive her husband's salary.
While d'Antrcasteau was preparing for the expedition, he received the first valuable news. English captain George Owen, returning from Bombay, reported that the wreckage of a French ship had been found north of New Guinea, in the Admiralty archipelago. And d'Antrcasteau decided to head there.
At the stop at the Cape of Good Hope, another piece of news gave him confidence: another Englishman, Captain Hunter, insisted that on one of the islands of the Admiralty he had seen people in the uniform of French sailors giving him signals. Great excitement prevented him from approaching the shore.
D'Antrcasto went there around Tasmania. During this voyage, he mapped its southeastern coast, revealing a small bay and the island of Bruni. During a short stop, the naturalists made a series of excursions into the interior of Tasmania. Moving on June 16 to the almost unexplored New Caledonia, d'Antrcasteau mapped its southwest coast; from there he went to the Solomon Islands.
For two years, d'Antrcasteau's expedition searched for traces of La Perouse. The French landed on Bougainville Island, penetrated the strait between New Britain and New Ireland into the New Guinea Sea, and passed the Admiralty Islands. D'Antrcasteau made stops wherever he expected to find traces of the accidental presence of the Bussoli and the Astrolabe, but there were no traces of La Perouse and his companions …
On a May night in 1793, a sailor on watch noticed an island on the port side. In the light of the stars, the foam of the waves crashing against the underwater rocks was visible. D'Antrcasteau, already sick with a fever that soon drove him to his grave, looked at the map: there was no island on it. Without hesitation, the admiral went on. However, he wanted to give this island a name. Putting a dot under 1 G40 'south latitude and 164 ° 37' east longitude, he wrote: Poisk Island - by the name of his corvette.
If not for illness, the admiral, perhaps, would have ordered to inspect this atoll. Then he probably would have called it Nakhodka Island, and he would not have had to wait for 1827 to reveal the secret of La Perouse's disappearance …
… On July 21, 1793, the body of the deceased admiral d'Antrcasteau was lowered with all the honors into the sea off the coast of New Britain. Exactly six months earlier, the head of King Louis XVI of France had rolled onto the scaffold in Paris. Sitting in the carriage that was supposed to deliver him to execution, the king asked his executioner:
- Is there any news from La Perouse?
… Thirty-four years later, the English frigate with the same name "Search" approached the Vanikoro atoll (from the group of islands of Sant Cruz), which after the death of d'Antrcasteau no one called the island of Search. The ship's captain, Peter Dillon, has explored the Coral Sea for many years. There were no more secrets for him in these parts - except for one, which he wanted to reveal.
The fact is that shortly before that, on the island of Tikopia, where he stayed for several months, the natives sold him a silver guard from the hilt of the sword. A coat of arms was engraved on it. Although it was just a royal lily that adorned the swords of all French officers, Peter Dillon somehow decided that it was the coat of arms of La Perouse. The name of the great navigator by that time was known to all the sailors of the world.
Dillon, who sailed in these seas for a long time, spoke many local dialects, and he began to question the inhabitants of the island of Tikopia. They told him that in recent years, fishermen from the distant atoll of Vanikoro often brought silver spoons, axes, and teacups to them. The inhabitants of this islet, selling their treasures, told the story of two ships of white people, who once, very long ago, ran aground along their shores. Some claimed that the sailors from the ships drowned, others that they were killed.
Peter Dillon wanted to go immediately to Vanikoro, but they were waiting for him in Pondicherry, and he dared not deviate from his course. Upon arrival, Dillon recounted everything he had heard, showed his sword guard, and asked the East India Company to send him to the site of the alleged shipwreck. His request was granted. In 1827 the ship "Poisk" left Pondicherry. On board the vessel was the official representative of France, Eugene Chenyot.
On July 7, Poisk approached Vanikoro Island. The natives were reluctant to negotiate, but in the end they told everything.
… Many, many moons ago, two ships guided by the Spirits arrived to them, and one of them crashed on the reefs. "Our ancestors wanted to see these Spirits up close, but they sent fireballs at them, bringing death." Then the gods blessed the arrows, and the ancestors were able to kill all the Spirits from the ship. Another ship threw itself onto a sandy beach. He was not led by warlike Spirits, they were distributing gifts. Their leader, who, like others, had a long nose protruding from two palms in front of his face, spoke to the moon with a stick. Other Spirits, standing on one leg, guarded the camp day and night, where, behind wooden fences, their friends built a smaller boat from the wreckage of a large boat. All the "one-legged ones" were constantly shaking with iron sticks. Five moons after their arrival, the Spirits sailed away in their little boat …
Peter Dillon was able to understand a lot of what the natives said: "long noses" are cocked hats, "a stick used to talk with the moon" is a telescope, "one-legged" - sentries standing motionless on the clock, and "iron sticks" - their guns.
At the bottom of the sea, not far from the coast, the British found bronze cannons and a ship's bell, on which one could make out the inscription: “Bazin cast me. Brest 1785 . The natives sold Dillon a tablet with a royal lily carved on it, a candlestick with a coat of arms (this was, as they later learned, the coat of arms of Colillon, one of the naturalist scientists who participated in La Perouse's expedition) and other small items.
On April 8, 1828, Captain Dillon arrived in Calcutta. There a new assignment awaited him: to personally deliver the collected items to the King of France. In February 1829 he arrived in Paris. Charles X immediately accepted him, awarded him the Legion of Honor, appointed 10,000 francs as a reward and 4,000 francs for life pension.
Meanwhile, on April 25, 1826, at the very time when Peter Dillon received the first reliable news about the fate of La Perouse on the island of Tycopia, Captain of the 2nd rank Jules left Toulon on the ship Astrolabe, so named in memory of La Perouse's expedition. Sebastian César Dumont-Durville, who was officially tasked with finding traces of La Perouse. The basis for the expedition was a rumor that a certain American captain had discovered the cross of St. Louis and other French awards from the Polynesian natives, which could well have gotten to them from the Astrolabe or Bussoli.
The Astrolabe circled the Cape of Good Hope, crossed the Indian Ocean, passed through the archipelagos of Oceania to the Pacific Ocean, reached New Zealand, ascended north to Tongatapu Island and returned south to Van Diemen Land, where in December 1827 she dropped anchor under the walls Hobart Town. During this time, new maps were compiled, anatomical tables were made, samples of minerals were collected, but the fate of La Perouse remained unclear. Dumont-Durville began sorting out the mail from France that was waiting for him in this parking lot. Looking through the already rather old issue of La Gazette, he found an article in which Dillon was telling the story of a silver guard from the hilt of a sword that allegedly belonged to La Perouse and was brought from some Vanikoro atoll.
Dumont-Durville gave the order for an immediate departure. A few weeks later, the Astrolabe dropped anchor off the coast of Vanikoro. It was with difficulty that Dumont-Durville succeeded in provoking the old natives to their frankness. Some of them even knew some French words.
As far as it was possible to understand the stories of the natives, La Perouse's ships crashed on the reefs in a violent storm. Many crew members were killed (their bodies were then thrown ashore by waves), but part of the crew safely reached the shore. Some sailors, so that they would not be washed into the ocean, tied themselves to the masts of sunken ships, which still rose above the water, and in the morning their comrades helped them to escape. The white people built a wooden fortress and started building a large boat. However, they complained that they did not have iron and iron axes. Some of the people got into the boat and sailed away on it, and those who did not fit remained to wait for them, but no one returned for them. A few years later, the wrecked sailors saw two large ships in the sea (they were probably the ships of d'Antrcasteau) and, lighting bonfires, tried to attract their attention,but the ships did not notice these signals.
The French have lived on a secluded island for many years. They died of disease, fought and made peace with the natives. When they ran out of ammunition, the natives took them prisoner, robbed them and left them to live in their villages. The last of La Perouse's companions died just a few years before Dillon visited Vanikoro.
Dumont-Durville found the remains of a fort where La Perouse's companions who survived the shipwreck lived. Seven rickety huts stood behind its wooden walls, in one of which a plaque with the words "Bussol" was found. And among the rocks that surrounded the island, Dumont-Durville and his companions saw the same unfortunate passage in which the ships of La Perouse found their destruction. From a distance it seemed that a large ship could easily pass through this gap in the coral reef, but at the bottom of the passage there were huge pitfalls. They became the cause of the tragedy …
Near the place where La Perouse's ships crashed, a monument was erected - a simple rectangular prism three meters high, topped with a pyramid.
Thus, only 40 years later, evidence was found that both frigates were wrecked off the island of Vanikoro. But the fate of the sailors themselves - about 200 people - remained unclear. Neither Peter Dillon nor Dumont-Durville was able to establish the circumstances of La Perouse's death.
Vanikoro Atoll revealed its last secrets not to navigators, but to the famous Belgian volcanologist Garun Taziev. He went there in 1959 with a group of well-equipped divers. The lagoon gave up the last remnants of an old shipwreck: six anchors, cannons, cannonballs, brass nails. A silver Russian ruble was found with the image of Peter I. Who could have owned such a coin, except for a participant in the La Perouse expedition, the only one in the 18th century. an expedition that reached Kamchatka and the shores of Siberia and then sailed in the southern seas?
Garun Taziev visited Vanikoro again in 1964. He questioned the oldest person on Vanikoro, and he told him an old legend that came down four generations later. It spoke of two large ships, how many white people died on them, and how the surviving people left on a large boat into the sea …
But where did the people who built the boat on Vanikoro Island go? What is their fate? And what is the fate of La Perouse himself? Did he die in a shipwreck, did he go to sea by boat, died on the island, or was he killed by the natives? No one has yet been able to answer these questions.
NIKOLAI DO NOT REMEMBER