Jean-Francois de Galaup de la Perouse · 1797 · sea

The journals of the 1785 to 1788 expedition, carried overland from Kamchatka to Paris by a young interpreter while the ships sailed on. They reached France; the ships did not. Louis XVI is said to have asked on the morning of his execution whether there was any news of La Perouse.

1. 1
   Brest

   August 1785, and two ships sail on the most carefully prepared scientific voyage France ever mounted - Louis XVI having drawn the route himself and asked, on the morning of his execution, whether there was any news of La Perouse.

2. 2
   Tenerife

   The Canaries, and the first of the observations - ten scientists aboard, including astronomers, a botanist, a physicist and an artist, on an expedition designed to answer Cook rather than repeat him.

3. 3
   Concepcion

   Round the Horn and up the Chilean coast - the Spanish authorities unusually welcoming, and the first proper rest since the Atlantic.

4. 4
   Easter Island

   Eleven hours ashore among the moai, and a careful account of the statues and the deforestation - one of the most valuable early records of the island, made by people who then sailed away.

5. 5
   Maui

   Hawaii, where La Perouse pointedly declines to claim anything for France - writing that the practice of taking possession of inhabited land is one he cannot understand.

6. 6
   Lituya Bay

   Alaska, and the disaster: two boats sounding the entrance caught in the tidal bore and twenty-one men drowned in minutes - an obelisk raised on an island in the bay, and the island named Cenotaph.

7. 7
   Monterey

   California, and the Spanish missions described with an eye that made the account unpublishable in Spain - and then west into the Pacific on the long crossing to Asia.

8. 8
   Macao

   China after a hundred days at sea, selling the furs taken on the American coast and dividing the money among the crews - and repairs before the northern survey.

9. 9
   Manila

   The Philippines, and the last well-supplied port - after which the ships go north into seas no European chart had anything reliable on at all.

10. 10
    La Perouse Strait

    Between Sakhalin and Hokkaido, proving Sakhalin an island and finding the passage that still carries his name - the single most useful piece of geography the voyage produced.

11. 11
    Petropavlovsk

    Kamchatka, and the journals handed to Barthelemy de Lesseps, who carried them overland across Siberia and Russia to Paris - a year's journey, and the reason any of this survives.

12. 12
    Tutuila

    Samoa, and a watering party ambushed - de Langle, the naturalist Lamanon and ten others killed on the beach, which breaks the expedition's confidence for good.

13. 13
    Botany Bay

    January 1788, and the French sail into Botany Bay as the First Fleet is leaving it - six weeks of hospitality, a last packet of letters handed to the British, and then out to sea.

14. 14
    Vanikoro

    And nothing more. Both ships wrecked on a reef in the Santa Cruz group, the survivors gone - which nobody in Europe knew until an Irish captain found the wreckage there in 1826, thirty-eight years later.