Compare maps of North America from the time of Bering’s voyages with those after 1763, and it becomes readily apparent just how badly the French lost the North American continental sweepstakes. In 1741, France controlled—or at least claimed—all of North America along and north of roughly the Ohio, Mississippi, and St. Lawrence Rivers. After the 1763 Treaty of Paris ended the Seven Years War (called the French and Indian War in North America), France was reduced to the tiny Caribbean island of Martinique. As the historian Francis Parkman would later term it, half the continent had changed hands at the scratch of a pen. So France’s influence on Alaska was fleeting, but it did leave one interesting tale of exploration.
At the center of the tale was the French version of the legendary Captain Cook. Born Jean-François de Galaup in Albi in southwestern France on August 23, 1741, he added “de la Pérouse” to his name when he joined the French navy in 1756—taking it from the name of one of his family’s country properties. In time, he was to become known at the French court as the comte de la Pérouse. In between, there were to be many years at sea.
Rising through the ranks, La Pérouse served the Bourbon monarchy ably in ships that roamed the globe. As his early years of service corresponded with France’s defeat in the Seven Years War, he no doubt took a certain comfort in seeing the roles reversed when later the French navy successfully came to the aid of Great Britain’s American colonies. In 1782 as part of this effort, La Pérouse commanded a flotilla of three ships that surreptitiously entered Hudson Bay and destroyed British posts at Churchill and York. By 1783, La Pérouse was a post-captain, decorated and well respected in French naval circles.
Buoyed by its success in assisting the American colonies, France determined to stride forward once more on the world stage. In that era, few actions signaled that resolve more than expeditions to fill in the blank spots upon the world map. Just as Malaspina would do shortly for the Spanish, La Pérouse was to emulate Captain Cook and take the French flag around the Pacific to discover what lay in between the great captain’s landfalls. Of course, it was to be a voyage of science as well as mapping.
La Pérouse took command of the 127-foot Boussole and entrusted command of the Astrolabe to Paul-Antoine-Marie Fleuriot, chevalier de Langle, who had been with him in Hudson Bay. Indeed, much of La Pérouse’s successes during the next two years stem from the fact that he recruited men with whom he was personally acquainted. He also went to great lengths to supervise meticulous preparations to prevent scurvy and ensure a healthy crew.
With a complement of 225 men, the two ships sailed from Brest, France, on August 1, 1785, anticipating a four-year voyage. Following summer into the Southern Hemisphere, they rounded Cape Horn and arrived at Concepcion, Chile, in late February 1786. Here, La Pérouse made a major command decision. To be sure, he had been given great discretion in carrying out his orders, but their focus had definitely been on the South Pacific. Now, La Pérouse decided that he had made such good time in crossing the Atlantic and rounding Cape Horn—turning the latter with “far more ease than I had dared to hope”—that he could afford time to explore the northwest coast of North America. “I knew,” La Pérouse rationalized, “that, if I had not been given such an order, it was only because it was feared I might not have enough time to make such a long voyage before the onset of winter.”11 The ghost of Captain Cook was beckoning.
So the Boussole and the Astrolabe sailed northwest to Easter Island and then north for Cook’s Sandwich Islands. La Pérouse landed a well-armed party on Maui, apparently the first Europeans on that island, but was well received by the islanders. Then after sailing westward for two days, the ships passed through the Kauai Channel and headed north.
The blue skies of the islands soon gave way to the overcast gray of the North Pacific. Fog, cold, rain, and more fog became the norm. Early on the morning of June 23, 1786, about three weeks after leaving Hawaii, the fog parted and La Pérouse and his crew glimpsed the towering heights of Mount St. Elias.
No stranger to the Arctic from his days in Hudson Bay, La Pérouse had written his mother afterward that he wished never to return there. He was similarly unimpressed here, describing a “sterile treeless land…a black plateau, as though burnt out by some fire, devoid of any greenery, a striking contrast with the whiteness of the snow we could make out through the clouds.”12 The black plateau was the moraine and debris strewn about what would later be called the Malaspina Glacier.
On June 26, La Pérouse dispatched three small boats to reconnoiter the bay to the east of the black plateau. Anne-Georges Augustin, chevalier de Monti, Langle’s second in command aboard the Astrolabe, led the survey party, and La Pérouse ordered the bay named after him. As Malaspina would later learn, this was not the Northwest Passage but what would come to be called Yakutat, not Monti, Bay.
While one of the naturalists, a man named Dufresne, wrote notes on the fur trade and speculated about France’s chances of joining the lucrative rush, the cartographers were soon overwhelmed by the complexities of the fog-enshrouded coastline. They couldn’t help but agree with Cook’s lieutenant, Charles Clerke, who had written eight years before that “a thick fog and a foul wind are rather disagreeable intruders to people engaged in surveying and tracing a coast.”13
Sailing gingerly southward along the coast, the ships found clearer weather off Cape Fairweather. As Mount Fairweather towered above them, Tlingit appeared in canoes and on shore. The next day, July 2, a section of smooth shoreline was suddenly interrupted by a wide passage, apparently leading eastward many miles. It was not shown on any of their charts. The Northwest Passage syndrome quickened heartbeats and put a certain look in men’s eyes.
La Pérouse ordered the Boussole and the Astrolabe into the bay, but it was not an easy passage. Two spits of land guarded the entrance, and the opening itself was shallow and blasted by fickle winds and surging tides. Never in his thirty years at sea, La Pérouse later confided, had he seen two ships so near destruction. But once inside, the waters widened and calmed. The ships anchored, and the expedition made camp on a large island almost in the middle of the bay. While the scientific members went about their observations, others probed the bay’s upper limits. But they were soon disappointed. Three massive glaciers ringed its head. There was no passage to the Atlantic here.
La Pérouse called the bay Port des Français (Bay of the Frenchmen). Later whalers long called it Frenchmen Bay, but the Russian derivation of a Tlingit name, Lituya, is what remains. Of this uncharted bay, La Pérouse wrote, “If the French government had any plans for a trading post in this part of the American coast, no nation could claim any right to oppose it.”14
Legend suggests that the Tlingit who cautiously paddled out to the island thought that La Pérouse was Yeahlth, their birdlike creator. Yeahlth, so the story went, was returning to Earth to reward those who had followed his teachings and to turn to stone those who had disobeyed him. This seems unlikely. European vessels along the coast were still rare, but even if the Tlingit in this area had not seen earlier ships—those of Bering, Chirikov, and Cook come to mind—they had probably heard tales of similar visitors from other Tlingit to the south. In any event, these Tlingit offered the island to La Pérouse, and he purchased it with some red cloth and iron tools.
La Pérouse recounts that hundreds of Tlingit visited Lituya Bay during the course of the French stay there. They came in large canoes and camped along the shores, drying salmon and halibut. As some groups left, others came to take their place. Prophetically, La Pérouse wrote that the Tlingit seemed to have considerable dread of the passage into the bay, and that they never ventured through it except during the slack water between flood and ebb tides. Through his spyglass, La Pérouse could watch as canoes approached the passage. The Tlingit leader in the canoe would stand and stretch out his arms to the sun, perhaps both in prayer and as a signal to the others to paddle with all of their strength. When asked about this custom, the Tlingit told the French that seven large canoes had recently been lost negotiating the entrance and that an eighth had barely escaped.15
Then the expedition, which to this point had been free of death or major illness, was struck a bitter blow. On July 13, Charles-Gabriel d’Escures, second officer of the Boussole, was dispatched with a party of boats to take soundings of the bay so that the chart could be completed. With the Tlingit experience etched indelibly on his brain, La Pérouse specifically warned d’Escures not to venture too closely to the dangerous entrance. Perhaps d’Escures ignored the warning or thought Frenchmen the equal of Tlingit paddlers. More likely, the fury of the seaward-rushing ebb tide surprised him. First his boat was caught up in the maelstrom, then the Astrolabe’s pinnace, coming to his rescue, was also ensnared. A third boat barely escaped. Within ten minutes, six officers and fifteen seamen were drowned and washed out to sea and two boats capsized.
La Pérouse was devastated. He erected a small cairn on the southeast corner of the island as a memorial and named the island “Isle de Caenotaphe,” or Cenotaph Island, a cenotaph being a monument erected in memory of those whose bodies lie elsewhere. A bottle was placed in the cairn with the names of the dead and an account of the tragedy, captioned with the ominous lines: “At the entrance to this port twenty-one brave sailors perished. Whoever you are, mix your tears with ours.”16
The tragedy delayed the expedition in Lituya Bay another two weeks, in part because it dictated some necessary reassignments among the crews. Finally on July 30, the two somber ships clawed their way out into the open sea and once again turned south. La Pérouse named Mount Crillon for General Louis des Balbes de Berton, the duke of Crillon, who distinguished himself in the naval battle of Lepanto off Greece in 1571. Later, William Dall would name a major peak south of Mount Crillon after La Pérouse.
Confronted by the jagged array of bays north of Cross Sound, La Pérouse soon realized the gargantuan task of mapping all of the many inlets and islands of the Alexander Archipelago. All of the time that he once thought he would have was beginning to run out. Concentrating on those areas not well mapped by Cook or the Spanish before him, he sailed past Cross Sound, Baranof Island, and Christian Sound, before admitting that the Spanish chart of Bucareli Bay on Prince of Wales Island was of little help. Along the way, he named the southern tip of Baranof Island, now called Cape Ommaney, for Aleksei Chirikov, and Necker Bay and Islands on Baranof’s western coast for the French minister of finance, one of the few La Pérouse names to survive.
On August 9, the two ships crossed Dixon Strait and became enshrouded in another fog off the Queen Charlotte Islands. Fog also hid Nootka Sound and the Strait of Juan de Fuca as the winds of autumn chased the expedition south. Finally, the Boussole and the Astrolabe dropped anchor in Monterey Bay on September 15, 1786, La Pérouse’s northern detour having been accomplished. But the voyage was far from over. Pausing at Monterey only ten days, the two ships soon hurried westward across the Pacific. Some of the uncharted lands La Pérouse sought almost wrecked his vessels when what he named French Frigate Shoals suddenly appeared west of Hawaii. Reaching Macao, the ships doubled back to Cavite in the Philippines for repairs and then struck north, mapping Sakhalin Island, the La Pérouse Strait between Sakhalin Island and Hokkaido, and the Kuriles before calling at Petropavlovsk almost fifty years after Bering’s first huts were built there.
La Pérouse was indeed well on his way to becoming the French Captain Cook. But the end was to be as tragic as the episode in Lituya Bay. At Petropavlovsk, the captain received dispatches from Paris that directed him to Australia to investigate rumors that the British were establishing a colony of convict labor at Botany Bay. Sailing from Avacha Bay on September 30, 1787, the French ships arrived in Botany Bay four months later, scarcely a week after the British themselves had dropped anchor there. That was one rumor that could be confirmed.
Wary pleasantries were exchanged, and then on March 10, 1788, the Boussole and the Astrolabe weighed anchor and departed Botany Bay, never to be seen again. For forty years their fates and that of their crews were one of the great mysteries of the seas. In 1827, an Irishman named Peter Dillon finally found relics from the two ships on the tiny island of Vanikoro between the Solomon and New Hebrides Islands. In a cyclone, they had been dashed to bits on deadly reefs. As it turned out, like his hero Captain Cook, Jean-François de Galaup de la Pérouse would remain forever in the Pacific he explored.