It Was Made, Too, In The Age Of Voltaire, When The Great Man
Was Living At Lausanne; And When, Too, Another Of Equally Enduring Fame,
Edward Gibbon, Was, In The Same Neighbourhood, Polishing Those Balanced
Periods In Which He Has Related The Degeneracy Of The Successors Of The
Caesars.
It was an age of intellectual ferment.
Rousseau was writing his
Contrat Social (1760), the Encyclopedie was leavening Gallic thought.
There was a particular proneness to accept fresh ideas; a new sense of
national consciousness was awakening.
The effect of the President's work was almost immediate. De Brosses
published it in 1756; and in 1766 Louis de Bougainville sailed from
France in command of La Boudeuse and L'Etoile on a voyage around the
world.* (* See the Voyage du Monde par la frigate du Roi La Boudeuse et
la flute L'Etoile en 1766, 1767, 1768, 1769, by Louis de Bougainville,
Paris, 1771.) A eulogy pronounced on De Brosses before the Academy of
Inscriptions by Dupuy* (* Memoirs of the Academy of Inscriptions 42 177.)
hardly put the case too strongly when it was said that before he died he
had the satisfaction to see in Europe men animated by his spirit, who had
gone forth, braving the risks of a long voyage, to make discoveries;
though the prophecy that centuries to come would doubtless count to his
glory the achievements of navigators has not been verified. The world is
perhaps too little inclined to accord to him who promulgates an idea the
praise readily bestowed upon those who realise it.
Bougainville discovered the Navigator Islands, re-discovered the Solomon
group, and was only just forestalled by the Englishman, Wallis, in the
discovery of Tahiti. He produced a book of travel which may be read with
scarcely less interest than the wonderful work of his contemporary, Cook.
The voyage of Nicholas Marion-Dufresne (1771) differed from the other
French expeditions of the series in that one of the ships belonged to the
commander, and part of the cost was sustained by him. He was fired by a
passion for exploration, which led him to propose that he should take out
his vessel, Le Mascurin, in company with a ship of the navy, and that a
grant should be made to him from the public funds. The French Government
acquiesced, and gave him Le Marquis de Castries. He did some exploring in
southern Tasmania, but his career was cut short in New Zealand, where, in
the Bay of Islands, he was killed and eaten by Maories in 1772.* (*
Rochon, Nouveau Voyage a la Mar du Sud, Paris 1783.) One of the objects
of the voyage was to take back to Tahiti a native woman, Aontouron, who
had been brought to Paris by Bougainville to be shown at the court of
Louis XV; but she died of smallpox en route.
Again, in 1785, the expedition commanded by the ill-fated La Perouse
sailed from France on a discovery voyage.* (* See the Voyage de la
Perouse, redige par M. L.A. Milet-Mureau, volume 1 Paris 1797.) The
appearance of his two ships, La Boussole and l'Astrolabe, in Port Jackson
only a fortnight after Governor Phillip had landed in Botany Bay to
establish the first British settlement in Australia, was an event not
less surprising to the governor than to La Perouse, who had left France
before colonisation was intended by the English Government, though he
heard of it in the course of the voyage. The French navigator remained in
the harbour from February 23 to March 10 (1788), on excellent terms with
Phillip; and then, sailing away to pursue his discoveries, "vanished
trackless into blue immensity, and only some mournful mysterious shadow
of him hovered long in all heads and hearts." His remark to Captain King,
"Mr. Cook has done so much that he has left me nothing to do but admire
his work," indicated the generous candour of his disposition. His fate
after he sailed from Sydney remained a mystery for forty years, Flinders,
on his voyage inside the Barrier Reef in 1802, kept a lookout for
wreckage that might afford a key to the problem. He wrote: "The French
navigator La Perouse, whose unfortunate situation, if in existence, was
always present to my mind, had been wrecked, as it was thought, somewhere
in the neighbourhood of New Caledonia; and if so the remnants of his
ships were likely to be brought upon this coast by the trade winds, and
might indicate the situation of the reef or island which had proved so
fatal to him. With such an indication, I was led to believe in the
possibility of finding the place; and though the hope of restoring La
Perouse or any of his companions to their country and friends could not,
after so many years, be rationally entertained, yet to gain some
knowledge of their fate would do away with the pain of suspense, and it
might not be too late to retrieve some documents of their discoveries.*
(* Flinders, Voyage 2 48.) The vigilance of Flinders to this end
indicates the fascination which the mysterious fate of the French mariner
had for seamen, until doubts were finally set at rest in 1827, when one
of the East India Company's ships, under Captain Dillon, found at
Manicolo, in the New Hebrides, traces of the wreckage of the vessels of
La Perouse. Native tradition enabled the history of the end of the
expedition to be ascertained. The French ships, on a dark and stormy
night, were both driven on the reef, and soon pounded to match-wood. A
few of the sailors got ashore, but most were drowned; and the bulk of the
remainder were lost in an unsuccessful attempt to make for civilised
regions from the coral isolation of Manicolo. A monument to the memory of
the gallant La Perouse, on the coast a few miles from Sydney, now fronts
the Pacific whose winds wafted him to his doom, and beneath whose waters
he found his grave.
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