In October 1825 the following brief note appeared on p. 436 of Volume XX of the Asiatic Journal.
LA PEYROUSE.
Admiral MANBY, of the English royal navy, has recently arrived at Paris with the news, which is strongly supported by presumptive evidence, that the place where the intrepid Peyrouse, with his brave crew, perished, forty years back, is now known.
An English whale ship has discovered a long and low island, surrounded by innumerable rocks between New Caledonia and New Guinea, at nearly an equal distance from those two islands. When the inhabitants came on board, they perceived that one of the chiefs had, as an ornament, a cross of Saint-Louis hanging from his ear. Other natives had swords upon which was marked the word Paris, and some medals of Louis XVI were seen in their hands. When they were asked how they became possessed of those articles, one of the chiefs, of about fifty years of age, answered, that when he was a boy, a large vessel was wrecked, in a violent tempest upon a coral reef, and that all the men that were in her perished. The sea cast upon the shore of their island several chests, in which was found the cross of St. Louis, along with many other things.
During his voyage round the world Admiral Manby saw several medals of the same sort which M. de la Peyrouse had distributed among the natives of California, and as, after he had quitted Botany Bay, M. de la Peyrouse announced his intention of sailing to the western coast of New Holland to explore the Archipelago in that direction, there is, therefore, too much reason to fear that the above-mentioned rocks have caused the destruction of this great mariner and his brave crew. The cross of St. Louis is at present on the way to Europe and will be placed in the hands of Admiral Manby.
The amount of hard information in this note is frustratingly meagre, but that is not the fault of the editors of the journal, because their hands were tied. All they had to go on was a note in the August 1825 issue of the Bulletin de la Société de géographie, of which this is a very close translation. It seems that, despite the fact that both Manby and the whaling ship to which he referred were English, the report was first circulated in Paris. It may have attracted scant attention outside France, and little more was ever published in English. Are there even any clues to the source of the information in the contemporary literature?
The first question to be asked is whether the island that the whaler visited was Vanikoro, where the LaPérouse expedition came to grief, or Tikopia, where Peter Dillon would find artefacts from the wrecks being traded among the islanders, or some other island, perhaps one where the survivors ended their days when, we have to assume, their makeshift escape vessel was wrecked.
The third possibility seems unlikely, since no such relics have since been discovered. Now that the whole area where those survivors might have perished is much better known, surely something would have been found since that time, if there had been anything there for a random whaler to come upon by accident in the 1820s.
As far as Vanikoro is concerned, neither Dillon nor Dumont d’Urville, the two captains who, after Manby’s announcement, competed to discover relics of the lost expedition, heard anything when they were on that island that would suggest that any Europeans had visited it prior to their arrival except for those on the ships of LaPérouse. That is understandable; the reefs that surround it would not have encouraged a whaling ship, or any other vessel, to approach it too closely.
Which leaves Tikopia as the by no means certain but certainly most likely place, especially as the Prussian Bushart, who was left on the island with his Fijian wife at his own request in 1813 and was visited by Dillon again in May 1826, specifically mentioned visits by two whaling ships, one about twenty months earlier and the other about ten months earlier (Dillon, v.1, p. 32-3). Bushart had himself spent days and possibly weeks on the first of these vessels, which remained in the vicinity for about a month, but only about twenty minutes on the second. The first is thus the more likely candidate for Manby’s whaler. Are there any clues as to her name and history?
Figure 1.Thomas Manby, While still a serving officer, he was involved in a scandal involving a rumoured, but never proven, affair with Caroline, then Princess of Wales and later Queen to George IV. Early 19th century etchingby an unknown artist, National Portrait Gallery collection NPG D38176.
The records of the Southern Whale fisheries show that although whalers did visit the area, it was not amongst the most popular of destinations, and only a small number are recorded as having been there during the period in question. Amongst them, one name stands out. The Harriet, an American built sometime East Indiaman, made four whaling voyages in all, and on the first three she was reported to have been at least to New Zealand, where the Bay of Islands had become a common reprovisioning port for such vessels. On the third of these voyage she certainly went to Tikopia, because when she sailed away she left behind three of her crew, deserters according to d’Urville but accidentally according to the fisheries records.Two of the men were later taken off by the Astrolabe, but the third decided to remain on Tikopia.
This third voyage was too late to have been the one mentioned by Bushart, but the second is very possible, even though it is not certain that the Harriet went to Tikopia on that occasion. The voyage was a complicated one, involving two separate visits to the whaling grounds, and if one of these was the visit mentioned by Bushart, then his estimate of the time that had elapsed since then was either too high or too low. Either error would be understandable in a casual remark made on an island where the seasons pass almost unnoticed. On the first sortie, the Harriet left Sydney in May 1823 and returned on 29 April 1824 loaded with 125 tons of sperm oil. This is presumed to have been disposed of in Sydney, because when she sailed again for the Bay of Islands, on 17 May, the Harriet was in ballast. This time she was away for more than a year, sailing from Sydney for England on 7 August 1825 and arriving on 27 December laden with 319 casks of oil. The voyage home had thus taken her a little over 140 days, rather longer than usual, but whalers were not the swiftest of sailing ships.
If Manby’s information did indeed come from the Harriet, how, when and where did he receive it? Not from the vessel itself after her return to London, which was far too late for it to be announced in Paris in August 1825. If, however, the discovery was reported in Sydney during her inter-sortie stay, and Bushart’s ‘twenty months’ was an underestimate, then there was just time for the news to reach Manby by fast mail packet, and for him to take it to Paris and publish it there. But why him, of all the sailing fraternity in England and, apparently, no-one else?
There is one possible answer. Despite having effectively retired from the navy in 1810 on medical grounds, Manby was promoted to rear-Admiral on 27 May 1925, and shortly thereafter sold a considerable amount of property. In August left for Paris, where, it is said, his knowledge of the Pacific Islands was soon used to help ascertain the fate of the great French explorer, the Comte de La Pérouse. In other sources it is noted that during his retirement, he worked on a chart of the South Pacific which he hoped would prove that the peoples of the region had a common origin. If this was the case, he is unlikely to have relied entirely on his memories of his 1790-95 voyage with George Vancouver as master’s mate on the Discovery, and he may have been an avid collector of information from ships arriving from the Pacific at the Port of London.
Manby was a Francophile, and visited Paris frequently. At the beginning of 1827 his sixteen-year-old daughter Mary was married at the British ambassador’s chapel in Paris, the ceremony being followed by a grand dinner and a ball at the Palais Bourbon. The husband, James Dawes, was English but became a baron of France the following year. He died in Calais in 1831, aged just twenty-nine, but Manby’s younger daughter also married in Paris, but to a Frenchman, Théodore-Adolphe Barrot, and this produced another, rather tenuousbut nonetheless interesting, link between Manby and the discoveries on Vanikoro. Barrot was for a time the French government’s chief representative in the Philippines, and during that time France also maintained a consulate in Cavite.The honorary consul responsible for it was the perpetually unlucky Eugène Chaigneau, who had accompanied Peter Dillon to Vanikoro as an observer on the Research in 1827.