Frigate’s coat of arms from the Lapérouse expedition

Inspired by the voyages undertaken by England’s James Cook (1728-1779) and guided by Age of Enlightenment principles, Louis XVI entrusted a circumnavigation of the world to Jean-François Galaup de Lapérouse (1741-1788) in 1785. Under direct supervision from Versailles, preparations were made in Brest in the greatest possible secrecy. The two ships selected, the Boussole and the Astrolabe, were fitted out and provisioned for a four-year voyage. The expedition set out from Brest on 1 August 1785 with a crew of 220 men. An ambitious research programme was implemented by 17 scientists. The naturalist Dufresne, Father Receveur, naturalist and ship’s chaplain, and the physician and botanist Lamartinière studied animals and plants during stopovers. A King’s gardener, Jean-Nicolas Collignon, collected seeds and living shrubs. The astronomer Joseph Lepaute Dagelet carried out work on longitude. Engineers and physicists also took part in the adventure.

Lapérouse had maps made of the northwest coast of America and the northeast coast of Asia. In Alaska, they studied the possibility of setting up a fur-trading post in a bay they baptised “Port des Français”. Following a lengthy reconnoitre off the Siberian coast, Lapérouse mapped the Tartar Strait and discovered the strait that now bears his name, between Sakhalin and Japan. A tropical storm probably sank the two ships in May 1788.

In 1789, Lapérouse’s silence suggested that misfortune had struck. A search mission was entrusted to Bruny d’Entrecasteaux in 1791. It sailed past Vanikoro without stopping there. It was later discovered that some of the expedition’s members were still alive… In 1826, an Irish sailor by the name of Peter Dillon found a French sword guard on one of the Solomon Islands and collected oral testimonies from some of its inhabitants. Apparently, a last survivor had left Vanikoro less than three years before his arrival. Dillon pinpointed the position of the two wrecks and the survivors’ camp, and recovered numerous objects, including this fragment of one of the frigates.

In 1827, the French explorer Dumont d’Urville landed on Vanikoro in his turn. He collected more items and built a cenotaph to the memory of the crew.

Further search missions were launched in the 1950s and 1960s. In 1981, The Solomon Islands Association started on a methodical land and sea excavation campaign that lasted until 2008. Discovery of remains of the survivors’ camp in the village of Paeu in 1999, and of the skeleton of the “Unknown Mariner from Vanikoro” in 2003 were the highlights of these operations. The discovery of scientific instruments in 2005 enabled identification of both wrecks. The Boussole, commanded by Lapérouse himself, had been cast on the reef’s outer fringes while the Astrolabe had run aground in a false passage.