As he prepared to climb the scaffold to be publicly guillotined on January 21, 1793, Louis XVI is said to have asked: “Is there any news from Monsieur de la Pérouse?”
He was referring to Jean-François de Galaup, Count of Perugia, a naval officer and navigator whom the French king had sent in 1785 on a scientific mission around the world to rival the discoveries of the English explorer Captain James Cook.
The two ships commanded by La Pérouse, La Boussole and L’Astrolabe, disappeared three years later after leaving Botany Bay in Australia. The wrecks were only formally identified in 2005 and what happened to them remains a mystery to this day.
Today, rare letters written by an illustrious scientist who died in 1788 have resurfaced, giving a new and personal account of the journey. They are described as veiled love letters addressed to the married daughter of an aristocratic family and were discovered hidden in a book of engravings being examined for an auction.
Ludovic Miran, an expert on books and manuscripts for the auctioneers who will sell the letters next month, called the discovery a “miracle.”
“We have a number of documents from the expedition but they are almost all scientific, so these personal letters are extremely rare,” Miran told the Guardian. “They shed a whole new light on what constitutes an extraordinary scientific and historical event in France.”
The La Pérouse expedition was launched at a time when Britain and France were in a period of intense rivalry over colonial expansion. La Pérouse was a great admirer of Cook, his maritime cartography and his scientific discoveries, but Louis XVI had more political and commercial ambitions. The French wanted to create trade routes and find out if the secret information they had that Britain was planning to establish a permanent base at Botany Bay, giving it access to unexplored areas of the Pacific region, was accurate.
La Pérouse’s ships, carrying 225 crew members, officers and scientists, left Brest on the French Atlantic coast on August 1, 1785 and for nearly three years sent reports during port calls including from Alaska, California, Asia, Russia and Samoa, where the captain of the Astrolabe and 11 men were killed.
At the time of Louis XVI’s execution, the frigates had not been heard from since their departure from Botany Bay in March 1788. Much to La Pérouse’s dismay, Captain Arthur Phillip and the British First Fleet had beaten him to the Australian coast – inhabited by an indigenous population for tens of thousands of years – by just six days.
La Boussole and L’Astrolabe are said to have sunk on the coral reefs of Vanikoro, east of the Solomon Islands, during a tornado a few months later. The wreck was discovered in 1826 and 1964 but was not formally identified until 2005.
The letters were written by Jean-André Mongez, brilliant scientist, director of an illustrious scientific journal and church canon who accompanied the expedition, to Louise Victoire Le Cloustier, daughter of a small noble family from Rouen, in Normandy.
Miran said Mongez used the letters to express his dissatisfaction with his marriage and appeared to repent of his previous bad behavior. “He writes several times: ‘I will come back, I will be another man, a better man,'” Miran said. “It feels like he didn’t behave well towards her and she put him in his place.”
This could, he added, be behind Mongez’s decision to undertake such a long and perilous journey. “The references are often veiled, but they appear to have had a very close relationship but it seems to have caused some offense at one point. These are intimate letters, very personal,” he said.
“He told her that he was leaving ‘a little for love of fame and a desire to acquire new knowledge’, but he already had scientific fame and a successful career and they would all have read the works of James Cook before leaving so they knew the dangers.
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“We will never know why he decided to join this perilous journey, but it is clear that he was leaving in part because of this emotional connection.”
Miran added: “The correspondence also provides answers about how these young men endured three years of sailing around the world, a completely new and unimaginable experience. We learn how they withstood the shock of such a crazy journey and horrible conditions.
“He tells how his friend and others were massacred in one stop. In his last letter he tells her that the expedition has taken a sad turn and that he now only wants to return home because this misfortune is not compensated for by the meager scientific results they have.
“Maybe it’s a journey of redemption.”
Le Cloustier died in 1821, unaware like the rest of the world of the fate of Mongez or the expedition. “But she kept the letters and we can say they were read and reread. I imagine she must have hidden them from her husband,” Miran said.
Auctioneer Benoît Derouineau said he discovered the letters in a book of “ordinary” 19th-century engravings being prepared for the sale.
“At first I didn’t realize what they were. They had clearly been carefully preserved and hidden. Perhaps because they were some kind of love letter and the recipient didn’t want them to be seen. But she hadn’t thrown them away or burned them,” he said.
“The fact that Louis XVI asked questions about La Pérouse shows how much was invested in this expedition. It was a very important event in France.”
The letters, valued at between €30,000 and €50,000, were sold in a single lot by Daguerre at the Hôtel Drouot, Paris, on November 17.
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