Untitled (Ships of the La Perouse expedition BOUSSOLE and ASTROLABE wrecked on the reef at Vanikoro Island)
Artist
Geoffrey Chapman Ingleton
(Australian, 1908 - 1998)
Dateafter 1945
Object number00016477
NameEtching
MediumEtching on paper
DimensionsOverall: 177 x 200 mm
ClassificationsArt
Credit LineANMM Collection
DescriptionThis etching by Geoffrey Ingleton depicts the French ships of the La Perouse expedition BOUSSOLE and ASTROLABE wrecked on the reef at Vanikoro Island.HistoryJean-Francois de Galaup, Comte de la Perouse, was born in Albi, south-west France in 1741; and joined the French Navy in 1756. He served in North America, the West Indies and in the Indian Ocean during the Seven Years War (1756 - 1763) and in the American War of Independence. By 1783 La Perouse was a senior captain ("capitaine de vaisseau"), a Knight of the Order of St Louis and had become an adviser to the senior French naval administrator, Count Claret de Fleurieu.
In the period of peace following the Treaty of Paris (1783), Fleurieu and La Perouse began planning for a major French scientific expedition to the Pacific. King Louis XVI took a personal interest in the planning, ensuring the expedition was extremely well-equipped and manned.
Commanding the expedition ships LA BOUSSOLE and L'ASTROLABE, La Perouse left Brest in August 1785 and sailed for the Pacific by way of Cape Horn. The expedition arrived in Chile in February 1786 and then sailed to Easter Island and the Hawaiian islands before carrying out a detailed survey of the north-west coast of North America. It was during this survey that 21 men were lost when their boat capsized in Lituya Bay.
In September 1786 the expedition left the Spanish settlement at Monterey (California) and sailed west across the North Pacific ocean to Macau where they arrived in January 1787. The expedition then headed for the Philippines and continued north-eastward to survey the seas around Japan and Korea. In early September 1787 the ships reached the Russian settlement of Petropavlovsk (Southern Kamchatka) where La Perouse received revised orders to sail to Botany Bay where a new English colony was about to be settled.
From Petropavlovsk the expedition sailed for Botany Bay in New Holland (Australia) by way of Samoa, Tonga and Norfolk Island. At Tutuila in Samoa the expedition suffered a serious setback when Paul-Antoine Fleuriot de Langle (La Perouse's second-in-command) and 11 others were killed by natives while attempting to obtain fresh water. Despite this tragedy, La Perouse sailed on to Botany Bay, arriving there just as the fleet of British ships carrying the first European settlers was departing for the recently-discovered, superior harbour of Port Jackson a few miles to the north. The French ships remained at Botany Bay until 10 March 1788 when La Perouse sailed north-east into the (South-West) Pacific to complete his ambitious exploration journey. It was thought that La Perouse would pass through Torres Strait before crossing the Arafura Sea to the Indian Ocean and finally return to France.
But when, by 1791, no further news of the expedition had reached France, authorities hurriedly directed Bruny d'Entrecasteaux to lead an expedition in search of La Perouse's missing ships. D'Entrecasteaux's ships LA RECHERCHE and L'ESPERANCE left France in late September 1791. However, despite searching the western Pacific and passing Vanikoro Island, the expedition found no evidence to explain the disappearance of La Perouse. The mystery of what had happened to the expedition remained unresolved until wreckage of the ASTROLABE was discovered at Vanikoro Island in the Solomon Islands by the Anglo-Irish sandalwood trader Peter Dillon in 1826.
About one year later, another French explorer, Jules-Sebastien-Cesar Dumont d'Urville, visited Vanikoro to confirm the identity of the wreckage reported by Dillon. He recovered anchors and cannon from the wreck site on the south-western side of the island and erected a monument to La Perouse on the island. The objects which he recovered were later used to erect a memorial to La Perouse at his birthplace in Albi.
Since the 1980s archaeological expeditions have visited Vanikoro and recovered French material from underwater and on land. The site of LA BOUSSOLE was not identified until 1986 when a French archaeological team working with the Solomon Islands National Museum found more wreckage at a site called 'la Faille', approximately half a mile to the east of the ASTROLABE wreck site.
It is now believed that the La Perouse expedition encountered a cyclone which forced the BOUSSOLE and ASTROLABE onto the fringing reefs around Vanikoro. Archaeological evidence, supported by oral history, indicates some of the crew survived the wrecking and fashioned an escape vessel from the remains of the ASTROLABE; but their ultimate fate remains unclear. At the time of Dillon's first visit in 1826, islanders related that the last of the survivors had only died a few years before Dillon's arrival and that some of them had left the island in a vessel built from some of the wrecked ships' timbers.
SignificanceGeoffrey Ingleton completed numerous etchings depicting famous events relating to Australian maritime history. In this work he interprets the mysterious disappearance of the French ships BOUSSOLE and L'ASTROLABE under the command of La Perouse during his scientific expedition to the Pacific.