Imagine To Yourself Six Days Of Fog With
Only Two Or Three Hours Of Clear Weather, In Seas Extremely Confined,
Absolutely Unknown, And Where Fancy, In Consequence Of The Information
We Had Received, Pictured To Us Shoals And Currents That Did Not Always
Exist.
From the place where we made the land on the eastern coast of
Tartary, to the strait which we
Discovered between Tchoka
(Saghalien) and Chicha, we did not fail to take the bearing of every
point, and you may rest assured that neither creek, port, nor river
escaped our attention, and that many charts, even of the coasts of
Europe, are less exact than those which we shall bring with us on our
return."
"The strait which we discovered" is still called Laperouse Strait on
most modern maps, though the Japanese usually call it Soya Strait. It
runs between Yezo, the large northerly island of Japan, and Saghalien.
Current maps also show the name Boussole Strait, after Laperouse's
ship, between Urup and Simusir, two of the Kurile chain of small
islands curving from Yezo to the thumblike extremity of Kamchatka.
At Petropavlovsk in Kamchatka the drawings of the artists and the
journals of the commander up to date were packed up, and sent to France
overland across Asiatic Russia, in charge of a young member of the
staff, J. B. B. de Lesseps. He was the only one of the expedition who
ever returned to Europe. By not coming to Australia he saved his life.
He published a book about his journey, a remarkable feat of land travel
in those days.
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