Ship (3m).
Tons:
650 bm. Hull:
wood. Comp.:
172. Arm.:
26 × 12pdr, 10 × 6pdr. Built:
Nantes, France; 1767.
St. Jean-Baptiste was a merchant ship built for trade between France and India following the collapse of the French East India Company. Jean-François-Marie de Surville was captain and part owner. On June 3, 1767, she sailed for the Ganges River on the Bay of Bengal and arrived in November 1768. The next spring, she traded between French-Indian ports at Madras, Chandernagore, and Binganapali before Surville began to ready her for a voyage east. Surville and his partners hoped to find a land rumored to have been discovered by the English—during Captain Samuel Wallis's cruise in
HMS Dolphin—reports of which had been conflated with the century-old rumor of Davis Land, off the coast of Chile. Surville was also to "open trade with the Dutch and share it with the Dutch." If these plans failed, the enterprise might at least break even by selling off trade goods at Manila.
St. Jean-Baptiste sailed from the Hooghly River on March 3, 1769. After calling at Pondicherry, she crossed to Malacca and Trengganu, and then north to the Philippines and the Bashi Islands between Luzon and Formosa (Taiwan). From here she entered the Pacific and sailed southwest until, on October 8, she came to Choiseul Island, easternmost of the Solomon Islands (first identified by Alvaro Mendaña in 1568, though the French did not recognize them as such). Surville and his crew anchored at de Surville Island, east of Santa Isabel. On October 22, they sailed south through the Coral Sea and into the Tasman Sea in search of new lands. They narrowly missed New Caledonia, and after two months, during which scurvy ravaged the crew, they turned hopefully east to seek shelter on New Zealand, then known only from Tasman's 1642 voyage in
Heemskerck.
On December 12, they fell in with the land off Hokianga Harbor, about 100 miles below Cape Maria Van Diemen. Doubling the Cape, they came to anchor in what Captain James Cook had six days before named Doubtless Bay. One estimate suggests that St. Jean-Baptiste and Cook's
Endeavour missed one another by as little as thirty miles, and certainly not more than a few days at Doubtless Bay. The Maoris proved helpful and the surviving crew soon regained their strength. After discussing the available options, Surville decided it was safer to run down the 5,000 miles to Chile before the prevailing westerlies than to risk the fickle winds and island-studded waters back to the Indies. Having kidnapped a Maori named Ranginui to retaliate for a stolen yawl boat, the French sailed on New Year's Eve 1769.
St. Jean-Baptiste crossed the Pacific in about 35°S, a higher southern latitude than any ship to that time, and thereby removed any lingering doubts about the existence of a Davis Land or Terra Australis in the central South Pacific. Nonetheless the journey took its toll, and many of the crew died, including Ranginui. The men were so enfeebled that Surville could not put ashore at Más Afuera, on March 24, 1770. Continuing to the Peruvian coast, on April 7 they made a landfall at Chilca, where Surville drowned in the surf when his boat capsized as he went ashore. First Officer Guillaume Labé took the ship to Callao, where the French were arrested and held for three years. With a crew that included 63 Spaniards recruited to make up for the 79 deaths and 23 desertions of the original crew, St. Jean-Baptiste sailed on April 7, 1773, and arrived back at Port-Louis, Brittany, on August 20. The voyage was a commercial disaster, and the ship and what cargo remained were auctioned.
Dunmore, Expedition of the "St. Jean-Baptiste.".
