Le Puy du Fou - La Pérouse sails again...

The new La Pérouse attraction opened at Le Puy du Fou theme park in April.  The most impressive and widely cited fact about it is the tremendous cost of construction - a cool 10 million euros.  This has mostly gone into recreating a state-of-the-art computer-controlled mock-up of La Boussole, tossing to destruction on the stormy seas of the South Pacific.

A unique survivor? La Pérouse's Banksia

In 2012 modern science attempted to bring back to life a unique survivor from the La Pérouse expedition, when the Conservatoire botanique national  - a specialist botanical conservation facility located in Brest - sought to germinate six seeds salvaged from the wreck of the Boussole.  

The seeds in question - from the Banksia tree, discovered on Cook's first voyage and named for Joseph Banks - were collected by La Pérouse's naturalists in Botany Bay in 1788. In December 2010, they finally completed the journey  home to France, 222 years after they set sail.  

Massacre Bay - conflicting visions

To a large extent, what happened at Massacre Bay is riddle without a key;  We have La Pérouse's account, but the viewpoint of the Samoans is lost.  It can only be guessed at from a mixture of oral tradition, anthropological insights and oblique references in later accounts of Samoan culture.  Among modern studies, the crucial research is that of the French anthropologist Serge Tcherkézoff, Professor Emeritus at the Australian National University in Canberra .  His book First Contacts in Polynesia (2008) is freely available on JStor.  What follows is mostly summarised from his conclusions.

Massacre Bay - the death of Fleuriot de Langle

Nicolas Marie Ozanne, Massacre of MM de Langle, Lamanon and ten others,
plate 68 of Atlas du Voyage de La Pérouse (1797) [detail]

Anonymous miniature of Langle, his only 
known portrait

The discoveries in Vanikoro have encouraged renewed interest in other members of the expedition, notably, La Pérouse's second-in-command, and friend ("mon vicaire"), the commander of the Astrolabe, Paul-Antoine-Marie Fleuriot de Langle. 

Jean Claude Thomas, a local historian in Langle's birthplace, Quemper-Guezennec in Brittany, recounts how in September 2003, he was telephoned from distant Nomea by Jean Gillou of the Association Salomon, with a request for information.  This sparked off a campaign to secure recognition for Langle, an "oublié de l'histoire", which culminated on 3rd July 2004 in the inauguration of a memorial stele.

 Langle's death at the hands of natives in Samoa in December 1787 cast a sombre shadow over the final months of the voyage, eclipsed only by the final catastrophe that engulfed the whole expedition.

Louis-Philippe Crépin: disaster in Lituya Bay, 1786

Louis-Philippe Crépin, Shipwreck off the Coast of Alaska 
Oil on canvas, 104 cm x 149 cm.

Seattle Art Museum

In 2017 the Seattle Art Museum pulled off the considerable coup of acquiring this iconic painting by Louis-Philippe Crépin, which depicts a tragic incident from the voyage of La Pérouse which took place in Lituya Bay in Alaska on 13th July 1786. Against an awe-inspiring backdrop of mountains and glaciers, two ship's boats were dramatically overwhelmed by the sea, with the loss of twenty-one lives.  Among those drowned were the  two sons of the wealthy financier, the marquis Jean-Joseph de Laborde, sponsor of the expedition and a personal friend of La Pérouse.  The elder brother Edouard-Jean-Joseph de Laborde Marchainville (b.1762), "tall, blond, and well instructed in navigation"  was a lieutenant on board the Astrolabe; the younger Ange-Auguste-Joseph de Laborde de Boutervilliers (b.1766) a naval cadet.  According to legend Marie-Antoinette herself had prevailed on La Pérouse to take them both with him.  Lengle as commander of the Astrolabe, made it his "inviolable rule" never to allow them in the same party, but on this occasion he had made an exception; he saw the excursion "as little more than a party of pleasure, in which the boats would be no more exposed to danger than in Brest Road in fine weather". In a letter of 22 September 1786, he wrote to his mother, "I had the indelible pain of seeing perish  MM. de Laborde, the brothers, M. de Flaissan and seven men from my crew in the same boat." 

La Pérouse at Monterey - an early image of California

Copy of Duché de Vancy's painting, now in the  Museo Naval Madrid
https://www.akg-images.co.uk/archive/-2UMEBM61RYEB.htm

This little picture, a copy of an original watercolour by Duché de Vancy, depicts the visit of La Pérouse and his officers to the Mission San Carlos in the Carmel Valley in September 1786. It is usually credited with being the very first artistic representation of the state of California. 

A new portrait of La Pérouse??

Jean François de Galaup, comte de Lapérouse,  1778.  

By Marie Renée Geneviève Brossard de Beaulieu/ Jean-Baptiste Greuze. Oil on canvas, 83.8cm x 66cm. 

Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

This striking portrait is not quite a new acquisition, since it was given to the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco in 2008, but it has only very recently appeared on the internet and does not seem to have been previously documented.  The image on Wikipedia was uploaded on 26th September 2017.  It was uploaded to "FineArtAmerica" on 30th October 2017 (so now you can buy a La Pérouse tote bag or yoga mat.....).

In search of La Pérouse.... in Albi

By an odd quirk of fate the main museum dedicated to La Pérouse in France is far from the sea, in La Pérouse's home town of Albi.  In the mid 18th-century Albi had a population of 9,000, a hundred or so of whom belonged to the nobility of Languedoc. The family Galaup de La Pérouse traced their pedigree back to the 16th century - the navigator's father had been consul of the town. Until the age of fifteen La Pérouse was educated by the Jesuits of Albi, on the site now occupied by the Lycée Lapérouse. The Château du Gô, where he was born, is still owned by his descendants:

The town has a central place Lapérouse with a bronze commemorative statue by Nicolas Raggi which dates from 1853. Bones from Vanikoro were ceremonially deposited in its base in 1988.

The La Pérouse's Voyage: the plates

The artists

He will direct the draughtsmen embarked on board the frigates, to take views of all remarkable places and countries, portraits of the natives of different parts, their dresses, ceremonies, games, buildings, boats and vessels, and all the productions of the sea and land, in each of the three kingdoms of nature, if he shall think that drawings of them will render the descriptions more intelligible.
Instructions to La Pérouse (Voyage, vol 1, p.38 of English translation):
https://archive.org/stream/voyageroundworld00lapr_0#page/38/mode/2up

La Pérouse's Voyage - publication history

French edition

Jean-François de Galaup, La Pérouse, comte de
Voyage de La Perouse autour du monde, publié conformément au Décret du 22 avril 1791 et rédigé par M.L.A. Milet-Mureau … A Paris, de L’lmprimerie de La République. An V [1797]

On Gallica:
http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k1098831

The first edition was published in Paris in 1797 in four quarto volumes with an accompanying folio atlas containing 69 plates, maps and plans.

First edition in original pink leather binding
On sale for £17,500 with Shapero of Mayfair
https://shapero.com/shop/bookshop/91034-la-prouse-jean-franois-de-galaup-comte-de

La Pérouse - highlights of the 2008 Expo

From 19th March to 20th October 2008, to coincide with the final expedition to Vanikoro, the musée de la Marine in Paris, in co-operation with the Association Salomon, staged an ambitious temporary exhibition Le mystère Lapérouse, enquête dans le Pacifique sud. As well as artefacts from the shipwrecks, the exhibition brought together a comprehensive set of paintings, maps  drawings and documents - 700 objects in all from a dozen different collections. Since the brochure and a few dossiers remain on the on the internet, I thought I would use the outline of the exhibition to pull together a few notes.

The mysterious end of La Pérouse

On 2nd March 1788 the two ships of the La Pérouse expedition, the most prestigous French voyage of exploration ever launched, left Botany Bay and were never heard from again. It was not until 1828 that it was discovered that they had been wrecked off the  remote island of Vanikoro in the Solomon Islands.   What had happen?  Were there survivors, and what was their ultimate fate?