Landfalls (49 page)

This had come to him most forcefully some ten years earlier when a Monsieur Dufresne called on him during a rare furlough in Paris. Thin and stooped, with unkempt white hair that fell over his eyes, Dufresne had perched on the edge of a chair and breathlessly related the ups and downs—mostly downs—that had befallen him since leaving the expedition in Macao. He'd apparently bounced between various posts in the controller's office of the Navy, lost all his family wealth during the Revolution, and shown an unusual aptitude for attaching himself to men about to lose their influence, their money, or their heads. He asked Lesseps for help securing a post, and when Lesseps demurred, asked for a loan. Afterward, Lesseps stood at the window watching the man's retreating gray figure and reflected that although the visit should have confirmed for him the reality of the expedition, it had done the opposite. For he'd had absolutely no recollection whatsoever of the man who introduced himself as his onetime shipmate on the
Astrolabe
.

Yet here, before him, carefully laid out on tables and over the floor, was tangible evidence that it
had
happened. Perhaps even evidence that
he
had been there. It grieved him. It comforted him. He allowed a tear to fall—it seemed the polite thing to do, given Dillon's show of restraint. And wouldn't it be a nice detail for Dillon's book?

He stood up and held out his hand. “Congratulations, Mr. Dillon,” he said.

 

EPILOGUE: FOLIE À PLUSIEURS

 

We were explorers on a voyage of discovery. Our charge from His Majesty, God rest his soul, was to complete and perfect the globe. We understood that to mean finding new places. Naturally, along the way it might fall to us to fix the coordinates of locations that lesser navigators had mismapped. We might fill in the dotted shorelines that others had seen but dimly, hampered by winds or fog or laziness. We might even disprove the existence of islands reported long ago and drawn ever since on our maps though never confirmed. But the real excitement, the promise of
glory
, lay in discovering places no European had ever seen, places that had been empty on the world's maps—terra incognita or blank expanses of ocean—until
we
found and measured and named them.

We were patient. It took a long time to get anywhere that hadn't been traversed by scores of expeditions before us. We knew the work of that first year would consist mostly of fixing rather than discovering. Our first task was to locate Isle Grande in the South Atlantic, reported by La Roche more than a hundred years earlier and not seen since. La Roche had described a large, uninhabited island supplied with trees and water and fish and an excellent port on its east coast—an ideal base for French whaling ships. Forty days we looked for it—forty days of heavy seas and gales and squall after squall during which we forgot what it meant to be dry or warm. We called our captain Noah behind his back and referred to our ship as the Ark. We cursed La Roche for his fanciful sighting. Wishful Thinking Island, we began to call our quarry. It was with relief more than disappointment that we declared the island imaginary and made for Cape Horn.

Less arduous was dispatching that persistent myth of a “Davis Land” off the coast of Chile. That one had been cluttering up charts of the southeast Pacific for two hundred years, ever since some English pirate named Davis claimed to see a low, sandy island five hundred leagues offshore and named it after himself. We wondered about men like La Roche and Davis. Were they liars or bad navigators? Forgers or confused observers? Maybe they'd mistaken cloud banks or fog for landmasses, some of us suggested. Others scoffed at this—surely any shipload of seasoned sailors can tell the difference between a cloud and terra firma. We argued for a while, but it was good-natured debate. For we were now sailing into the open and, we believed, still explorable Pacific, and we were ready to discover—ready below with maps outspread and the journals of our predecessors open to the relevant pages, ready on deck and aloft with our keen young eyes and burnished telescopes.

Only there was almost nothing left to find. Captain Cook, that greedy bastard, had made off with most of what was left besides Antarctica. We surveyed the Hawaiian Islands—we called them the Sandwich Isles back then—and created our own charts, but they didn't improve much on the existing ones. We did land on Maui, the first Europeans to do so, and that bay still bears our captain's name—La Perouse Bay. We pressed him to claim the island in the name of France. Claiming territory for our king seemed very much of a piece with completing the globe for him—especially territory the English had seen first but not bothered to walk around upon. Our captain declined, however. “Who are we to take possession of this place?” he said. “These people have lived here for hundreds of years. Do they have no rights, simply because we have muskets?” We felt chastened and puzzled and, to be frank, a little cheated by this response.

Making charts that just confirmed the greatness of Cook's accomplishments didn't quite fit our notions of fulfilling work either. Not that Cook's work was perfect. His people had charted Pylstaert Island, a tiny outlier of the Friendly Archipelago first spotted by Abel Tasman in 1643, and placed it almost two leagues too far south. We set that to rights, of course. The Friendly Isles did very well by us, in fact, for we also corrected the location of Vava'u, one of its biggest islands, a place with a decent harbor and fresh water. A Spanish captain, Francisco Mourelle, had discovered it just a few years earlier but located it six degrees too far west. A mistake of that magnitude could consign one to sailing a long time in vain in search of safe anchorage and refreshment. We were forever correcting the work of the Spaniards, who for all their colonies and missions and galleons seemed unable or unwilling to create an accurate chart.

But who among us aspires to be the great cavilers and naysayers of the high seas? We began with Isle Grande and proceeded to erase more from the world's maps than we added. It was one thing to be rid of Davis Land—the name itself lacked inspiration. And it's true most geographers were already suspicious of Nuestra Se
ñ
ora de La Gorta, an island no respectable eighteenth-century sailor had ever seen. But what a pity to lose Los Mojos—or was it Los Majos, Las Mojas, or Los Mauges? We sank not only the islands but the entertaining controversy over their proper name. And when we expunged Rica de Oro and Rica de Plata, said to be wealthy islands inhabited by civilized and friendly white people, east of Japan—at that point we weren't in the business of completing the globe so much as laying waste to dreams. We lost a man during that search—a young sailor from Saint-Brieuc who fell into the sea from the fore-topmast, drawn there, like so many of us, by the captain's promise of a reward for the first man to sight land. It was a shame to lose him. And the islands. “Rich with Gold.” “Rich with Silver.” Every map should offer a few such temptations. Sometimes we felt less like explorers than like inquisitors rooting out cartographic heresy.

Do not misunderstand. We did make some discoveries of our own. Like Frenchman's Bay in southeast Alaska, though it's not called that any longer, a terrible place where an errant tidal current swept twenty-one of us away, the first calamity of the expedition. And Necker Island, a tumorous, uninhabited rock outcropping northwest of Hawaii, which we found one moonlit November evening. Two nights later, we veered away just in time from a mostly submerged atoll that our captain called—and which we are pleased to say are
still
called—the French Frigate Shoals. And Moneron Island, a tiny speck off the southern tip of Sakhalin, all steep cliffs and raucous birds and sea lions. We also added a few pieces to the Samoan archipelago (we called them the Navigators), site of our second calamity, twelve of us massacred by natives. Still we hoped to find something wondrous, a large landmass with people, a place to rival Tahiti or Hawaii or New Zealand. We discovered Vanikoro, of course, one of the Solomons, although no one would know that for many years. No sooner had we seen it than our third and final calamity was upon us.

Perhaps it was our passion for discovery that doomed us, drawing us too close to the Vanikoran reefs when the weatherglass was falling and the sky boiling with storm. Making us beat into the wind when we should have borne away. Inuring us to risk. Wasn't it what had led twenty-one men to their watery deaths while surveying a new bay? And tempted a young sailor too far out a yardarm? And blinded a watering party to the hostility of the islanders? Our immoderate desire eroded caution.

But we are getting ahead of ourselves.

For before our undoing in Vanikoro, before the melee in Samoa, there was the hallucination.

It was June 16, 1787. We had come north through the Sea of Japan and were exploring the Strait of Tartary. Fog obscured the continent, but around us, the day was clear and pleasantly warm, with a cooperative breeze. Around four in the afternoon, the lookout cried that he spied land, and there in the south appeared a great landmass lying nearly perpendicular to the mainland, the gap between them very narrow. Drawing nearer, we could make out every detail of its terrain—mountains, ravines, coast, even curls of smoke that spoke of human habitation. Our hearts soared. Perhaps here—
west
of Japan, not east—was the fabled island of wealth and white people. Most likely it was nothing so wonderful. But surely it would be a discovery to rival any of Cook's. We held to the wind and made for the south-southeast. As we approached, however, the island began to shift, its forms and colors blending into one another, peaks swirling skyward, mountainsides collapsing into canyons, the shoreline draining into the ocean. We watched, despairing, as our discovery resolved itself into the most extraordinary fog bank any of us had ever seen, and then it dissipated like a conjurer's trick, leaving empty blue water and a clear view of the Tartary coast. We sailed all night in the ocean space our phantom island had seemed to occupy, though there was no need to confirm its nonexistence. It was a sad, defeated exercise, like trying to console oneself while holding a dead lover's dress.

The illusion was complete and shared by us all. So was the disillusion. Something faltered that day in the Strait of Tartary. For it turned out we were no better than the La Roches and Davises whose cartographic fantasies we'd laughed off the world map. And if nearly two hundred experienced sailors could mistake mist for land, then there was no misapprehension to which we were not vulnerable. Suddenly, every outcome seemed equally possible and equally unreal. So when we first spied Vanikoro between the angry dark of sea and sky, a ribbon of green that appeared on no charts in our possession, we didn't know whether to believe our eyes. When the full power of the storm fell on us, we were loath to accept its lashing reality; it could so easily have gone the other way. We were still in doubt as the waters closed over us, the globe we had tried so hard to complete swallowing us whole.

 

AFTERWORD

Peter Dillon was only the first of many to begin unraveling the mystery of the Lap
é
rouse expedition's disappearance. The Dumont-d'Urville expedition arrived in Vanikoro just a few months after Dillon, collecting more artifacts from the wrecks and largely corroborating what Dillon had learned from the islanders. For the next century and a half, most expeditions to Vanikoro were undertaken by missionaries, some of whom suggested on entirely paltry evidence that the survivors of the wrecks had been cannibalized by the islanders—a “fact” that got repeated over and over, even in otherwise careful treatments of the Lap
é
rouse expedition, well into the twentieth century.

It wasn't until the late 1950s, when scuba diving technology had advanced sufficiently to allow for sustained and more mobile underwater explorations, that substantial new relics of the shipwrecks were recovered from the ocean floor. In the decades since, numerous expeditions, some mounted by the French Navy and the Association Salomon in Noum
é
a, New Caledonia, have turned up more and more evidence about where and how the
Boussole
and the
Astrolabe
came to grief.

I relied on the work of numerous scholars to piece together the factual elements of this story. The single most important source was
The Journal of Jean-Fran
ç
ois de Galaup de La P
é
rouse, 1785–1788
, translated and edited by John Dunmore and published by the Hakluyt Society in two volumes in 1994. Dunmore's comprehensive introduction and footnotes provided historical context and suggested many of the ideas for the tales in this book.

The most helpful source in French, besides the French-language edition of the journal itself, was Catherine Gaziello's exhaustive 1984 study of the expedition,
L'Expedition de Lap
é
rouse 1785–1788
, published by Comit
é
des Travaux Historiques et Scientifiques. The Mus
é
e Lap
é
rouse in Albi, France, and the relevant rooms in the Mus
é
e National de La Marine in Paris also provided helpful facts and visuals. The curious and compulsive reader may find a more comprehensive bibliography for this project at my website: www.naomijwilliams.com.

I am, of course, indebted to numerous individuals and organizations for their artistic, material, professional, and moral support of this project and its creator. Thanks first and foremost to my agent, the warm, witty, and wise Nicole Aragi, and to my gently persistent editor, Eric Chinski. Also thanks to Duvall Osteen at Aragi, Inc.; Peng Shepherd, Frieda Duggan, Sarah Scire, and everyone at FSG; Clare Smith, Rachel Wilkie, and everyone at Little, Brown, UK; and the excellent people at the Abner Stein Agency and the Marsh Agency.