Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
The man entrusted with this expedition was Jean François de
Galaup La Perouse, a seasoned and experienced captain. He sailed
from Brest on 1 August 1785 in command of
La Boussole
and
L'Astrolabe.
Since his major objective was the North Pacific, he ig-
nored Cook's route and reverted to the old westabout circumnavig-
ation. By the following June he had reached roughly the same point
on the American coast that Cook had reached before he, too, was
forced to turn south. He explored the coastline and islands right
down to Monterey in California, crossed to Macao and, in the sum-
mer of 1787, worked his way up the Asiatic coast of the Pacific. He
reached the region of 62°N. Realising that contrary winds would
again force him to abandon his search for the Straits of Anian, he de-
cided to send a report back to Paris overland. From Petropavlovsk-
Kamchatskiy, the extreme outpost of the Russian empire, he des-
patched Jean, Baron de Lesseps, on the 8,000 mile trans-Siberian
journey to France.
De Lesseps was the only member of the expedition to complete
the circumnavigation. La Perouse sailed away before the harbour
iced over for the winter. In Samoa the captain of the
Astrolabe
was
murdered with ten of his men. The ships sailed on, calling at Tonga,
Norfolk Island and then at Port Jackson, the newly-established Brit-
ish penal settlement on the coast of New South Wales. La Perouse
and his companions left there in February 1788 and were never seen
again. Several expeditions were despatched to look for the missing
men but it was thirty-eight years before evidence was found that
La
Boussole
and
Astrolabe
had both come to grief on the vicious reefs of
Vanikoro, an atoll in the New Hebrides.
Businessmen, like Nature, abhor a vacuum. As Europe passed
from the age of Enlightenment into the era of unbridled commercial
expansion, merchants sought ways of exploiting the newly-dis-
covered regions on the surface of their planet. The Australian settle-
ments grew, not just as penal colonies, but as places where massive
