IN SEARCH OF LAPeROUSE. 



521 



trace of him at any subsequent point of his intended track. No 

 floating remnants of wood or iron work were anywhere dis- 

 covered ; and the public mind gradually settled into the convic- 

 tion that the two unfortunate vessels were lost upon their 

 passage from Botany Bay to the Friendly Islands. The cause 

 was supposed to be neither fire, nor leakage, nor the effects of a 

 stress of weather, — causes which could hardly be fatal at the 

 same moment to two vessels. It was generally believed that, 

 as the Boussole and Astrolabe were accustomed to keep as near 

 each other as possible during the night, they both simultaneously 

 dashed upon a hidden quicksand. In this manner, one vessel 

 would not have been able to take warning in time by the dis- 

 aster of the other. 



In the year 1813, one Captain Dillon, in the service of the 

 British East India Company, putting in at one of the Feejee 

 Islands, found there two foreign sailors, one of whom was a 

 Prussian, the other a Lascar. At their request he transported 

 them to the neighboring island of Tucopia, where he left them, 

 the natives expressing no hostility toward them nor objections 

 to their stay. In 1826, — thirteen years afterward, — Captain 

 Dillon again touched at Tucopia, where he found them comfort- 

 able and contented. The Lascar sold the armorer a silver 

 sword-hilt of French manufacture and bearing a cipher en- 

 graved upon it. It resulted from Dillon's inquiries that the 

 natives had obtained many articles of iron and other metals 

 from a distant island named Manicolo, where, as they said, two 

 European ships had been wrecked forty years before. It imme- 

 diately occurred to Dillon that this circumstance was connected 

 with the loss of the vessel of Laperouse, whose fate still remained 

 involved in uncertainty. Aware of the interest felt in Europe 

 in the fate of the unfortunate navigator, he sailed with the 

 Prussian to Manicolo, but, being prevented from landing by the 

 surf and the coral reef, bore away to New Zealand and pro- 

 ceeded on his voyage. 



