Page:Twenty Thousand Verne Frith 1876.pdf/189

 Dumont d’Urville had made known, of which the following is a very succinct account.

La Perouse, and his mate, de Langle, were despatched by Louis XVI., in the year 1785, to circumnavigate the world. They embarked in the Boussole and Astrolabe, which never again returned.

In 1791, the French Government, naturally uneasy respecting the fate of these vessels, fitted out two large store-ships, the Recherche and Espérance, which left Brest on the 28th September, commanded by Bruni d’Entrecasteaux. Two months after it became known by the deposition of a certain Captain Bowen, of the Albemarle, that the remains of some wrecked vessels had been seen upon the coast of New Georgia. But Entrecasteaux, ignorant of this, and equally uncertain, moreover, sailed towards the Admiralty Isles, described in the report of a Captain Hunter, as being the scene of the shipwreck of La Perouse.

Entrecasteaux’s search was fruitless. The Espérance and the Recherche even passed Vanikoro without stopping, and the voyage altogether was most disastrous, as it cost the lives of Entrecasteaux, two of his lieutenants, and many of his crew.

An old hand, one Captain Dillon, was the first to discover some traces of the shipwrecks. On the 15th of May, 1824, his vessel, the Saint Patrick, passed close to the island of Tikopia, one of the New Hebrides. There a Lascar, who sold him the silver hilt of a sword, stated that six years previously, during his stay at Vanikoro, he had seen two Europeans who had belonged to the ships wrecked many years before upon the reefs of that island. Dillon suspected that the man was referring to