Pacific Exploration by Nigel Rigby & Pieter van der Merwe & Glyn Williams

Author:Nigel Rigby & Pieter van der Merwe & Glyn Williams [Rigby, Nigel]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781472957719
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2018-09-05T16:00:00+00:00

MONUMENT TO MONR DE LA PÉROUSE AND HIS COMPANIONS, ERECTED AT BOTANY BAY; lithograph by William Spreat after R.M. Westmacott, from the latter’s Sketches in Australia (1848). The monument was erected in 1825 at the instigation of Hyacinthe de Bougainville (son of the explorer Louis-Antoine) and P.-A. de N. du Camper, both of the French navy, during their round-the-world voyage in the Thétis and the Espérance, 1824–26.

The journals sent back from Kamchatka and Botany Bay were edited by an army officer, Baron de Milet-Mureau, and published in 1797 as part of an arrangement that would have provided a pension for Lapérouse’s widow. But, being incomplete and lacking most of the scientific observations that were the voyage’s primary purpose, and with the expedition’s fate still unknown, the book did not grasp the public imagination and was not a financial success. Lapérouse’s achievements have always been overshadowed by his disappearance in much the same way that Cook’s third voyage was by his death on Hawaii. Those achievements were, in fact, considerable, although necessarily diminished by the voyage’s abrupt end. Lapérouse consciously adopted many of the practices established by Cook, and with similar success: in just under three years he lost only one man to scurvy, although, like Cook, he was no nearer to understanding the underlying causes of the disease. He used similar navigational and cartographical techniques to Cook and the resulting charts were produced to a high degree of accuracy – the shortcomings in his survey of the American coast were due largely to bad weather and lack of time. While most of the scientific data were lost with the shipwreck, the information that was sent back from Spanish America, Macao and Port Jackson was valuable and the indications are that, although Lapérouse undoubtedly had his problems with the civilian scientists, this did not affect the quality of their work. Perhaps the single most significant achievement was, as the French historian Alain Morgat has observed, that ‘Lapérouse ushered in the era of scientific navigation in France and played a role analogous to that represented by Cook in the history of exploration’. While his expedition can be seen as a continuation of an already well-established tradition of French maritime activity in the Pacific, of which Louis Antoine de Bougainville’s voyage is the most well-known example, Lapérouse’s was the first of a number of large state-sponsored voyages that would make important contributions to Europe’s knowledge of the Pacific. These voyages would also eventually usher in colonisation when Aubert Dupetit Thouars annexed the Marquesas and Tahiti in the 1830s, laying the foundations for France’s Pacific empire.

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