L'Astrolabe

(formerly Coquille) Corvette (3m). Tons: 380. Hull: wood. Comp.: 70-79. Built: France; 1811.

Shortly after returning to France from a three-year circumnavigation as lieutenant in Louis de Freycinet's L'Uranie, Louis I. Duperrey and his colleague Jules S. Dumont d'Urville made a proposal for a new circumnavigation to the Minister of Marine, the Marquis de Clermont Tonnerre. The twin aims were scientific—including studies of terrestrial magnetism and meteorology—and geographic, with a view especially to confirming or correcting the position of islands and other landmarks essential to safe navigation. Departing Toulon on August 11, 1822, Coquille ("Shell") sailed via Ascension Island, St. Catherine Island (arriving the week that Brazil declared its independence from Portugal), and the Falklands—where the shipwrecked Uranie still lay—before rounding Cape Horn. Once in the Pacific, Coquille sailed along the coast of South America as far as Paita, Peru, and then headed west through the Tuamotus to Tahiti, arriving on May 3. The expedition continued westward through the Society, Friendly (Tonga), and Fiji Islands. Though bound for Australia, horrendous weather forced them to steer northwest, and they passed the Santa Cruz and Solomon Islands before landing at Louis de Bougainville's Port Praslin, New Britain. From there Coquille continued across the top of New Guinea to the Dutch entrepôt at Amboina where the French spent most of October.

Coquille sailed to Port Jackson via the west and south coasts of Australia, and after a two-month layover continued to New Zealand in April 1824. After two weeks visiting with the English missionaries, who had been established there for nine years, the French sailed north through the Ellice and Gilbert Islands and west through the Carolines to New Guinea, where they arrived at the end of July. After a stop at the Dutch settlement of Surabaya, Coquille turned for France via the British island of Mauritius—formerly the French Ile de France—and St. Helena, where the British had imprisoned French emperor Napoleon Bonaparte from 1815 to his death in 1821. The ship arrived at Marseilles on March 24, 1825.

Upon returning to France, Coquille was renamed L'Astrolabe, in honor of one of La Pérouse's ships which had disappeared in 1788. Under Dumont d'Urville, whose interests were more geographic and ethnographic than Duperrey's, Astrolabe would undertake two further voyages of discovery. The first, from 1826 to 1829, was concentrated in Australian and western Pacific waters, with a view especially to locating any trace of the La Pérouse expedition. After a survey of Australia's south coast, Astrolabe sailed to New Zealand, where her crew made extensive ethnographic and zoological studies. The French continued to Tonga and Fiji Islands, where they charted 120 islands—many of them previously unknown—before heading west to the waters around New Guinea. After repairs to the ship at Amboina, Dumont d'Urville sailed east through the Torres Strait and south to Tasmania, where Dumont d'Urville learned that the English captain Peter Dillon had found relics of La Pérouse's expedition on Vanikoro. Sailing to the New Hebrides, the French confirmed these findings and gathered artifacts with which they returned to Marseilles on February 24, 1829, after further stops at Guam, in the East Indies, and at Ile de France. (Dillon had returned earlier and Charles X appointed him to the Legion of Honor.)

Although English and American whalers and sealers had been hunting in the Southern Ocean for the half century since Cook's 1774 voyage into the ice in Endeavour, and Bellingshausen had sailed near Antarctica in 1820/21 in Vostok and Mirny, the French had played no active role in the exploration of the South Seas. In 1836, France's Emperor Louis-Philippe decided to mount an expedition to locate the south magnetic pole, with Dumont d'Urville as its leader in Astrolabe. Unlike the ship's previous two expeditions, she would be accompanied by La Zélée, under Charles Hector Jacquinot, a veteran of the previous expedition; between them, the ships embarked seven scientists and naturalists. Departing Toulon on September 7, 1837, the two ships sailed via Tenerife and Rio de Janeiro for the Strait of Magellan where they remained from December through January 1838, taking aboard a Swiss and an Englishman who had been living among the Patagonians. On January 22, the ships were confronted with an impenetrable mass of ice that Dumont d'Urville described as

a marvelous spectacle. More severe and grandiose than can be expressed, even as it lifted the imagination it filled the heart with a feeling of involuntary terror; nowhere else is one so sharply convinced of one's impotence. The image of a new world unfolds before us, but it is an inert, lugubrious, and silent world in which everything threatens the destruction of one's faculties.

The ships were unable to make much progress southward, although they sighted the previously named Palmer Peninsula, and sailed for Chile in April 1838, where two men died of scurvy and twenty-two others either deserted or were too ill to continue. From South America the expedition sailed through the many of the larger Pacific Island groups—the Marquesas, Tahiti, Samoas, Tongas, Fiji, then northwest through the Santa Cruz Islands, Solomons, and Carolines before coming to the Spanish island of Guam. Astrolabe and Zélée continued to the Philippines, the Dutch East Indies, and then westabout to Tasmania where they arrived in November 1839. On the first of the new year, the two ships sailed south and on January 19 they saw the part of Antarctica they called Terra Adélie (for d'Urville's wife), though they were unable to land. They also crossed the path of USS Porpoise, one of the ships in the expedition led by Captain Charles Wilkes in USS Vincennes.

After determining approximately the position of the south magnetic pole, the ships returned to Tasmania where they reembarked some of their sick crew before sailing for New Zealand. The French were also chagrined to find that the English had made significant advances in settling the land they had once considered for a French colony. From there the ships made their way back to France, arriving at Toulon on November 7, 1840. Although twenty-two crew had died, and another twenty-seven had left the expedition because of illness or desertion, the ships had brought back the largest quantity of natural history specimens ever garnered in a single expedition. Although Dumont d'Urville died before its publication, his account of Astrolabe's third voyage ran to twenty-three volumes, with five atlases. The ship's previous two voyages resulted in seven volumes and four atlases by Duperrey and fourteen volumes and five atlases by Dumont d'Urville.

Brosse, Great Voyages of Discovery. Dumont d'Urville, Two Voyages to the South Seas by Captain Jules S-C Dumont d'Urville. Dunmore, French Explorers in the Pacific.