The Two French Naval Frigates That Vanished in the South Pacific in 1788 and Were Not Located Until Anchor Recoveries on a Solomon Islands Reef in 1827

Jean-François de Galaup, comte de La Pérouse (1741–1788), was a senior French naval captain commissioned by Louis XVI in 1785 to lead a Pacific scientific and exploratory voyage designed as the French response to Captain Cook’s three British expeditions of 1768–1779. The Cook voyages had given Britain primacy in Pacific exploration, mapping, and territorial claim. The French Crown wanted a comparable French achievement.

The expedition’s two ships — the frigates Boussole (under La Pérouse) and Astrolabe (under Paul Antoine Marie Fleuriot de Langle) — departed Brest on 1 August 1785 with approximately 220 men total. The complement included senior officers, naval surgeons, a chaplain, the astronomer Joseph Lepaute Dagelet, the botanist Joseph-Hugues Boissieu de la Martinière, three other scientists, two priests, and a midshipman named Napoleone Buonaparte who had passed the entrance examination but had been excluded from the final list at the last minute by an administrative decision. (The exclusion may have changed European history.)

The voyage

La Pérouse rounded Cape Horn in February 1786 and worked north up the South American coast through Chile and California, then crossed the Pacific to Macao (January 1787), surveyed the Korean coast (May 1787), reached Kamchatka (September 1787), and crossed the equator southward through Samoa in November 1787. At the Samoan island of Tutuila on 11 December 1787, twelve French sailors including Captain de Langle of the Astrolabe were killed in a beach skirmish with the local population — the most significant casualty of the voyage to that point.

La Pérouse reached Botany Bay in New South Wales on 26 January 1788 — the same day the British First Fleet under Captain Arthur Phillip was establishing the convict settlement that would become Sydney. The French and British senior officers exchanged formal visits over the following six weeks while the Boussole and Astrolabe repaired their hulls and provisioned.

On 10 March 1788 La Pérouse sailed north from Botany Bay. He sent dispatches and the expedition’s accumulated scientific reports back to France with the departing British convict-fleet supply ships. The plan was to survey Tonga, the Solomon Islands, New Caledonia, and the Louisiade Archipelago before returning to France by the southern route around the Cape of Good Hope, with an estimated French return date of mid-1789.

The dispatches arrived in France in 1789. The ships did not.

The silence

By summer 1789 the French Revolution had begun. The disappearance of the expedition became, in late 1791, a topic of public concern. The National Constituent Assembly ordered the dispatch of a search expedition under Antoine Bruni d’Entrecasteaux in September 1791. The d’Entrecasteaux expedition searched the southwest Pacific through 1791–1793 without locating the ships, though it twice came within a day’s sailing of Vanikoro without realising it. D’Entrecasteaux himself died of scurvy off New Britain in July 1793.

The Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1792–1815) occupied French naval attention for the next twenty-two years. La Pérouse was officially listed as missing.

Peter Dillon

The Irish merchant captain Peter Dillon of Calcutta had visited the island of Tikopia in 1813 in his trading capacity and had left an Indian lascar (sepoy-naval sailor) named Joe and a Prussian beachcomber named Martin Bushart resident on the island. When Dillon returned to Tikopia in May 1826 he found that Joe and Bushart had acquired, in trade with the neighbouring island of Vanikoro, a sword guard and several other iron and silver items of evidently European 18th-century manufacture. Joe told Dillon that the Vanikoro islanders said the items came from “two great ships” that had wrecked on the Vanikoro reefs many generations earlier, leaving white survivors who had built a small boat from the wreckage and sailed away.

Dillon sailed to Vanikoro in May 1827 in his ship the Research. He found the wreckage of two large European wooden ships on the southeast reef of Vanikoro. He recovered a ship’s bell engraved with the foundry mark of a Paris brass-founder, a clearly French Royal Navy anchor pattern, and millstones of European design. He took the evidence to the French consul at Calcutta.

The French navy sent Jules Dumont d’Urville, commanding the Astrolabe (named for La Pérouse’s lost ship), to confirm Dillon’s identification in February 1828. Dumont d’Urville confirmed it. He recovered additional artefacts including the Boussole’s anchor — which is the central exhibit at the Musée national de la Marine in Paris.

What appears to have happened

The 1959, 1986, 1999, 2003, 2005, and 2008 archaeological expeditions to the Vanikoro reefs by French naval and civilian teams (the Salomon-Vanikoro expedition series) have produced a reasonably detailed reconstruction.

The Boussole and Astrolabe were caught in a cyclone in the southwest Pacific some time after departing the Santa Cruz Islands in approximately April or May 1788. Both ships were driven onto the reefs on the southeast coast of Vanikoro. The Boussole wrecked on the outer reef in deep surf; most of her crew probably died in the wreck or shortly after. The Astrolabe wrecked on the inner shoreline and was at least partly recoverable. Approximately 30 to 60 French survivors lived on Vanikoro for an estimated several months to two years, building a small vessel from the Astrolabe’s salvageable timbers. Local oral history collected in the 1820s and 1990s remembers the French survivors as quiet and hungry. Most of the survivors departed in the small built vessel; the vessel itself was lost at sea (no further trace has been recovered anywhere in the Pacific). A handful of survivors stayed on Vanikoro and died there over the following years.

The 220-man expedition produced no survivors who reached Europe.

The wrecks remain on the Vanikoro reefs. The site is a French naval war grave.