Yet La Pérouse was ready to go on with his quest, nor was there any sign of mutiny among his men. Most of them were hard and brown and healthy, and ready to follow him to other ends of the earth. It was his purpose to depart from Botany Bay and explore the Australian coast and the Friendly Islands, and finally to lay his course to reach Mauritius, in the Indian Ocean, at the end of the year of 1788. This was the last word that came from him to France. Two more years passed, and not a ship had sighted the roving frigates, nor had they been seen in any port. The people of France were proud of La Pérouse and his romantic achievements, and although the unhappy nation was in the throes of revolution, the National Assembly passed a decree which read in part:
That the King be entreated to give orders to all ambassadors, residents, consuls, and national agents at the courts of foreign powers that they may engage those different sovereigns, in the name of humanity and of the arts and sciences, to charge all navigators and agents whatsoever, their subjects, in whatever place they may be, but especially in the southerly part of the South Sea, to make inquiry after the two French frigates, La Boussole and L’Astrolabe, commanded by M. de la Pérouse as well as after their crews, and to obtain every information which may ascertain their existence or their shipwreck; so that in case M. de la Pérouse, and his companions should be found, no matter in what place, there shall be given to them every assistance, and all means procured for them, that they may be enabled to return to their country with whatever may belong to them.
It is further decreed that the King be entreated to direct that one or more vessels be equipped and several learned and experienced persons embarked therein, to the commanders of which may be given in charge the double mission, to search after M. de la Pérouse and also at the same time to render this expedition useful and advantageous to navigation, to geography, and to the arts and sciences.
This hope of rescue appealed to the quick imagination of France. La Pérouse was a national hero. It was argued, with good reason, that he might be waiting on some solitary island of those empty seas where topsails had never yet lifted above the blue horizon. Again two frigates were elaborately fitted out at Brest, and rechristened, with a pretty touch of sentiment, la Recherche (The Research) and L’Esperance (The Hope). They sailed early in 1791, touching at the Cape of Good Hope, where the vice-admiral in command got wind of a curious rumor that “near the Admiralty Islands in the Pacific Ocean the captain of a British sloop-of-war had seen men dressed in the European style and in what he took to be French uniforms.”
This fanned the spark of expectation and seemed a promising trail to follow, but the most careful search failed to confirm the report. Among the reefs and islands the frigates cruised in vain until they had been away from home more than two years. Then without finding a trace of La Pérouse and all his gallant officers and patient, resolute seamen, they sailed to the Dutch East Indies. There they received amazing news from their beloved France. Louis XVI had been beheaded, and the agonized republic was at war with the armies of Europe. The Dutch officials of Sourabaya, regarding all Frenchmen as lawful enemies, held the crew of the frigates as prisoners, and this was the end of the search for La Pérouse.
The people of storm-tossed France had other things to think of, and they forgot all about the lost explorer and his ships’ companies. There was reason to believe that some of them were alive when the two frigates had been trying to find them. In 1791 Captain Edwards was roaming the South Seas in the British frigate Pandora, whose mission was to run down and carry home for punishment the famous mutineers of the Bounty. He sighted the island of Vanikoro and ran along its shore, no more than a mile outside the barrier reef. In his log he noted that natives appeared to be attempting to communicate with him by means of smoke signals. Captain Edwards was a brave, but stupid, officer of the Royal Navy, and it failed to occur to him that the natives of this little island, which had been undiscovered until then, would be most unlikely to try to talk to him in this manner. In the light of later information there is every probability that this smoke was made by survivors of La Pérouse’s party, and they were still marooned on Vanikoro several years after their shipwreck. Their emotions must have been profoundly melancholy when they saw the tall British frigate glide past unheeding and drop from their wistful vision.
It was not until 1813 that the first thread of this tangled skein of mystery was disclosed. La Pérouse had vanished a quarter of a century before, and his ships were long since listed on the sadly eloquent roll of “missing with all hands.” It is hard to astonish a deep-water sailor, because nothing is too strange to happen at sea. The British merchantman Hunter, on a voyage from Calcutta to New South Wales and Canton, stopped at the Fiji Islands to pick up some sandalwood and bêche-de-mer by way of turning over a few dollars in trade. Already the beach-comber had begun to find a refuge from toil in the South Sea Islands, and Fiji was plagued with runaway sailors whose idea of paradise was to loaf and get drunk and dance with the girls.
While the Hunter was taking on her cargo, a party of these salt-water vagabonds engaged in a murderous row with the natives, who decided to be rid of them. The earnest intention of the embattled Fijian warriors was to exterminate their European guests. The chief mate of the Hunter, Mr. Dillon, happened to be ashore with a boat’s crew, and he was a lusty man in a shindy, as his name might indicate. Out of the mêlée he succeeded in hauling a German beach-comber, Martin Bushart, who seems to have been a sober, decent fellow, and a Lascar sailor. They were taken off to the ship and allowed to remain there.
When the Hunter sailed for China, this derelict of a Martin Bushart made the singular request of Chief Officer Dillon that he be landed on the first island that happened to be convenient to the vessel’s course. Dillon’s story fails to explain why this simple-minded “Prussian,” as he called him, should have desired to run the risk of being killed and perhaps eaten after he had escaped by the narrowest margin. However, the captain and the mate of the Hunter were obliging mariners who sensibly concluded that it was a man’s own business if he yearned to hop from the frying-pan into the fire, and so they let the ship go toward the first land sighted after leaving Fiji.
This happened to be the island of Tucopia, and if you care to prick it off on the chart, Chief Officer Dillon gives the position as latitude 12° 15´ S. and longitude 169° E. The Lascar sailor who also had been saved from the irate Fijians and their uplift movement elected to seek this new place of exile along with Martin Bushart as a sort of Man Friday to a Prussian Robinson Crusoe, and so the singular pair were left on the beach of Tucopia, where they waved an unperturbed farewell, while the Hunter hoisted colors and fired a gun to express her regards and best wishes. What kind of welcome the natives extended them is left to conjecture.