6 The Survival of La Perouse's Men. 



tliose shores. The Admiralty chart of 1 853 and that furnished for the 

 volume of De Haven's Expedition, still had upon them the so-called 

 "Strait" as reported by Frobisher, which was supposed to be a passage 

 westward to the further part of Hudson's Bay; but navigators have 

 always chosen Hudson's Straits in passing to and from that bay. Had 

 any one attempted the passage through what was laid down on their 

 charts as Frobisher's Strait, they might have anticipated Hall's dis- 

 covery, coiTCCting Frobisher and proving this to be a Bay. But the 

 language of nearly all of the geographical writers on Frobisher's voy- 

 ages was obscure, and the charts of the first half of the century, inaccu- 

 rate. Hall had reason for desiring to prove the genuineness of his dis- 

 coveries, and he expressed a wish to place his proofs before a committee 

 that might be appointed in London to examine his notes, his relics, and 

 himself. 



Sir Martin's name was that of one of the first of Englishmen 



•luarters, anchored in Botany Bay January 26, 1788. Here La Perouse met with the Britisli 

 squadron under Governor Phillijjs, and committed to him what proved to be his last dispatches 

 for France. At the close of February the French set sail for further discovery, but nothing more 

 was heard of La Perouse for thirty-eight years, when Captain Dillon, commanding a vessel sent in 

 search of the remains of the lost expeditiou, ascertained the fate of the long lost navigator. Ou 

 the island of Tucopia (Barnwell Island), lat. 12^^ 15' S., long. 169° W., Dillon, in 1826-'-27, obtained 

 information that, many years before, two vessels had been wrecked near the island of Manicolo, 

 within less tb«n one day's sail of Tucopia. Through Martin Burhart, a Prussian who had resided 

 there fourteen years, Captain Dillon learned that many from the shipwrecked crews had escaped 

 to the islands. He hastened to Manicolo and Ihere procured many relics from the natives; and, 

 from the depths of the seas in which the vessel had been wrecked, incontrovertible proofs of their 

 destruction forty years before; and at length he learned tliat many of the white men were saved, 

 but that the last remnant of them had died only three years before, after surviving thirty-seren years 

 from the time of the wreck. Ou the island of Manicolo had lived some of these survivors of the 

 ill-fated expedition long after the world had given them up as dead. The expedition sent out by 

 France, under Admiral Entrecasteau, in 17'Jl, had visited La Croix, a few leagues only from Mani- 

 colo, where survivors of the lost ex]>edition were then living, and the inhabitants of both islands 

 liad kept n\t constant intercourse with each other. Yet this expedition, which was out six years, 

 gained no intelligence whatever of La Perouse, while by that fearful scourge scurvy, it lost ono 

 hundred and twenty officers and men, though its voyage was mostly in the warm zone. 



"Dillon's men nund)ered 87 souls, and, at one time, nearly every one was prostrated by the 

 discascfi of the tropical region. Still, in that clime— more inhospitable than that, surely, of King 

 n'illiam'M Ixiud — ilid some nf La Perouse's companions survive for nearly forty years." 



