Few parallels to an extraordinary story

original complement of 219 were dead, and the Frenchmen had run up such large bills for food and medical treatment that the Dutch authorities confiscated their two ships as payment.

Several months later, the Dutch allowed the miserable survivors of the expedition to leave for France in a Dutch convoy.

But their misfortunes were by no means over.

A couple of ships in the convoy were wrecked in a storm soon after passing through the strait of Sunda and several of the Frenchmen on board were drowned. Others died of a sickness that broke out later.

Then the survivors found them selves up against further political trouble.

On reaching the Cape of Good Hope, they learned that England and Holland, which had previously been allies, were now at war, and that British naval ships were roam ing the seas not only in search of French vessels, but also of Dutch.

Rossel captured

One of the Dutch ships, carrying members of the expedition, was captured off St. Helena in mid-1795.

A second, with Lieutenant Rossel on board, was caught off the Shetland Islands as she tried to slip through the British net by sailing right round the British Isles.

Rossel, who had all the official charts and journals of the expedition, was taken as a prisoner to London.

But officialdom allowed him to work on his charts and on a narrative at the Hydrographic Department in Whitehall.

Anglo-French wars kept him a prisoner in England for the next 13 years, so that the 19th century was eight years old before he got home.

As the d’Entrecasteaux expedition had left France in 1791, it was thus a total of 17 years before the man who had the final command of it could say to himself that it was over.

But even then, his association with the expedition still had 12 more years to run, for it was not until 1820 that he saw the narrative of the expedition through the press.

There can be few cases in history to parallel Rossel’s extraordinarv story, which almost certainly would never have come about if Rossel’s countrymen, Captains Lepinay and Preaudet, had not misunderstood the meaning of the small word “habits”.

Footnote: Seven years after Rossel’s account of the d’Entrecasteaux ex pedition appeared, an Irish seaman.

Captain Peter Dillon, discovered that La Perouse’s two ships had been wrecked in a storm at Vanikoro in the Santa Cruz Islands. Vanikoro, it turned out, was the island which d’Entrecasteaux had called Recherche, but which he did not investigate. If he had, he might have been in time to rescue some survivors from La Perouse’s ships, as information gathered by Dillon and others in dicates that some of La Perouse’s men lived on Vanikoro for a number of months before they built another ship and sailed away in it, never to be heard of again.