In the age of Pacific exploration, two men spearheaded expeditions to parts of globe previously uncharted by Europeans – Jean François de La Pérouse and James Cook. Although La Pérouse and Cook would never meet, both men would converge on Cape Breton Island in the year 1758, near the beginning of their careers. This episode takes us from the port of Rochefort, France to the idyllic settlement known today as Englishtown, and then on to the shores of Gabarus Bay.

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

1. “Where Fate Beckons: The Life of Jean-François de La Pérouse”, John Dunmore
2. Johnstone, J. Johnstone., Winchester, C. (187071). Memoirs of the Chevalier de Johnstone vol. II p. 199, Aberdeen: D. Wyllie & son
3. Colonial Society of Massachusetts, Volume III, The Journals of Ashley Bowen
4. “Captain Cook’s War and Peace: The Royal Navy Years,” John Robson 
5. “The Capture of Louisbourg, 1758,” Hugh Boscawen
6. Acadian Settlement on Ile-Royale,1713-1734 by Bernard Pothier, B.A, of College Sainte-Anne
7. “Plan du Fort Dauphin en Isle Royale, 1757” – Antoine-François Sorrel – Bibliotheque nationale de France Gallica
8. “History of Victoria County, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia,” Patterson, George Geddie
9. T. A. Crowley and Bernard Pothier, “DU PONT DUCHAMBON, LOUIS,” in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 4, University of Toronto/Université Laval, 2003–, accessed January 15, 2022, http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/du_pont_duchambon_louis_4E.html.
10. F. J. Thorpe, “HOLLAND, SAMUEL JOHANNES,” in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 5, University of Toronto/Université Laval, 2003–, accessed January 16, 2022, http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/holland_samuel_johannes_5E.html.

TRANSCRIPT

This is The Lost World of Cape Breton Island. Through personal journals, memoirs and correspondence from the 18th century, we will reconstruct the lives of people long gone, walk the roads that no longer exist, and retell events from a reality so very different from the one that the people of Cape Breton Island now know. This episode picks up where our last installment ended, with a young Jean-Francois de La Perouse returning to France from his first significant time at sea, or as French naval officers would say at that time, coming back from “their campaign”. Jean-François de La Pérouse would go on to become one of the most renowned mariners and explorers of the 18th century, but in 1788 he and his expedition disappeared in the Pacific Ocean without a trace, leaving behind a mystery that would take decades to unravel.

In the year 1757 aboard the ship Le Celebre, La Perouse had sailed to the port of Louisbourg, the capital of the French colony of Île Royale, known today as Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia. The ship he was serving on was part of a large fleet that had been ordered by the French government to reinforce the port of Louisbourg against the threat of a British attack that in the end didn’t materialize. Though only a few months long, this voyage to Cape Breton Island served as his introduction to the sea. Now back in France, with winter setting in and the campaign months winding down for the year, La Perouse found himself aboard ship in the port of Brest with very little to do. In the end it was for the best, because when the fleet that had spent the summer in Louisbourg returned to Brest, they brought with them a typhus epidemic that subsequently ravaged that seaport town. It wasn’t long, however, before La Perouse received a transfer and found himself assigned to a frigate under the command of Charles de Ternay, a figure that would influence La Perouse’s life for decades to come. 

Historian John Dunmore says the following about Charles de Ternay: “{He}, like La Perouse, had entered the (Navy) at the age of fifteen, and then saw service in the Mediterranean, Canada, Louisiana and the West Indies. An earnest, serious man, aged only thirty-five, he took at once to the young man from Albi and guided him in his career for a number of years.” Ternay would bring La Perouse to the Indian Ocean when he was made Governor of Mauritius, and when Ternay was given command of the fleet that brought French troops to America in 1780, La Perouse followed him there too. But first, La Perouse would follow Ternay back to Cape Breton. 

The following spring, the spring of 1758, Ternay, his ship, and by extension La Perouse, were assigned to the small squadron commanded by Du Chaffault de Besné that was preparing to cross the Atlantic, bound for Louisbourg. It would be transporting troops to reinforce the garrison, which, like the year before, was facing the threat of a British attack. So one year after La Perouse’s first time to sea, he would once again be crossing the Atlantic for the port of Louisbourg, but this time in much altered surroundings. Now that he was aboard a much smaller ship instead of a bulky battleship, he would no longer be lost in a crowd of other young men, and he would benefit from the oversight of his “friend and protector”, Ternay. Also, La Perouse would spend the rest of his time afloat in these kinds of fast, agile ships renowned for their sharp sailing qualities.  As he would soon discover, he was surrounded by examples of quality mariners. 

The squadron would only sail from Rochefort on the 2nd of May. Young La Perouse must’ve sensed the anxiety among the sailors of the squadron, knowing that they’d likely be arriving at Louisbourg at the exact same time as the British fleet from Halifax. When they did finally leave France, they succeeded in making landfall in Cape Breton by the end of the month – a fast crossing –  but their plans of slipping into Louisbourg were disrupted by the presence of British ships in the Gulf of Saint-Lawrence, and so Du Chaffault put into the first port they came to and dropped anchor – Port Dauphin, today known as Englishtown.

Port Dauphin was one of the larger communities on Cape Breton Island during the 18th century. Originally called Ste Ann’s by the French, It was used as a fishing port during the 16th century but it wasn’t until 1629 that it was permanently settled and a fort was constructed. In the early 1700s, when France was debating which harbour in Cape Breton to invest in, Port Dauphin became the capital of the colony for a short time until fishermen complained of its distance from the fishing grounds and the capital was switched to Louisbourg. For the next 40 or so years, Port Dauphin continued to serve as a busy hub of activity. Aside from private properties, 18th century maps of the area include the location of limekilns, quarries, a forge, and shipbuilding sites such as “The King’s Shipyard”. The French called the mountains on the north side of the harbour “Les Quatre fils Aymond”, or the four sons of Aymond, after the medieval folk tale of the same name. Some of the better known families in the colony at that time had strong ties to Port Dauphin, such as the Du Ponts, d’Angeac, and Courtiau families. In the early 1750s, a road connected the port with the Bras d’Or Lakes, coming out somewhere in the vicinity of present-day Baddeck Bay. The idea was that this road would allow quick communication between Port Dauphin and Louisbourg, and so hypothetically if you found someone to bring you by boat across the Bras d’Or Lakes to the vicinity of Big Pond or Ben Eoin, you could then hop on  Raymond’s Road which would have brought you to the Mira River and then take the Great Mira Road back to Louisbourg. This however, likely never happened, since the inhabitants of Île Royale preferred getting around by boat more than on foot.  After the Highland Clearances of the first half of the 19th century, Port Dauphin or Englishtown as it came to be known received an influx of Gaelic-speaking families, and the descendants of many of those families still inhabit the area down to this day. Nowadays, the area is known for being the home of Giant McAskill and The Gaelic College.

  Du Chaffault decided to send two officers from the squadron on foot to Louisbourg, to inform the Governor of their arrival. Somehow, they managed to arrive in Louisbourg only a few days later. Speaking about the situation at hand, historian John Dunmore continues: “They could no longer land at Louisbourg: the  French ports were now completely blockaded by the British. …Totally besieged by sea and land, it fell a few weeks later.” Having arrived too late, on the 5th of June, the squadron weighed anchor for France, and La Perouse was spared the experience of living through the disastrous second and final siege of Louisbourg.

 At the very same moment La Perouse was leaving Rochefort with squadron, James Cook, the future trailblazer of Pacific exploration, was preparing to sail with the British fleet then anchored in Halifax harbour. James Cook was at that time sailing master aboard HMS Pembroke, and as such he was responsible for the overall sailing and navigation of the ship. Cook and HMS Pembroke arrived in Cape Breton on June 9, only 4 days after Ternay and La Perouse had set sail back to France. Likely it was the closest the two would ever come to actually meeting.

It was on the rough and jagged shores of Gabarus Bay that James Cook met the man that would set him on his path towards world explorer – Samuel Johannes Holland. Holland was an engineer, and would go on to become surveyor general of Quebec and the Northern District of North America. In a letter to a friend written in 1792, Samuel Holland detailed his chance encounter with the young James Cook:

Holland: “The day after the surrender of Louisbourg [in 1758], being at Kennington Cove surveying and making a plan of the place, with its attack and encampments, I observed Capt. Cook (then master of … the Pembroke man of war) particularly attentive to my operations; and as he expressed an ardent desire to be instructed in the use of the Plane Table (the instrument I was then using) I appointed the next day in order to make him acquainted with the whole process.”

A Plane Table was a tool with a flat square surface used for surveying and map making, allowing the user to inscribe measurements of distance and topography directly onto a sheet of paper. In the book Captain “Cook’s War & Peace”, author John Robson says: “For Cook, this was a momentous meeting as it changed his life, marking the beginning of his career as a surveyor and instilling in him the desire to draw charts.” Next, Cook would chart the Saint Lawrence River along with Holland for the British fleet under Charles Saunders. Then in the 1760’s, Cook would spend some five years charting the coast of Newfoundland. The charts he created were so accurate that they were still in use up until the 20th century, 200 years after their creation. The skills he acquired throughout his time in Newfoundland, often in the face of adverse conditions…, would serve as the framework which would power his future voyages of exploration to the Pacific ocean. Beginning in 1769, Cook would conduct three voyages to the Pacific – including two circumnavigations of the globe –  through huge swaths of previously uncharted territory – before being killed in modern-day Hawaii on the 14 of February, 1779.

Throughout the years that James Cook was away on the far side of the world, La Perouse was busy honing his own skills in navigation, mathematics, and charting under the watchful eye of Ternay while stationed in Mauritius. The stories of exploration would trickle in with the shipping – the stories of Cook, Bougainville, Wallis but also the absurd stories like that of Kerguelen continued to feed his ever growing fascination with those uncharted corners of the earth.

 La Perouse eventually left Mauritius to return to France. Interestingly, In 1781, we find La Pérouse once again cruising off the shores of Cape Breton, but this time  in circumstances much altered by the ebb and flow of power and politics. La Perouse is now the captain of his own ship, Cape Breton Island is no longer a French colony but a British holding, and France is allied with the Americans in their fight for independence. One can’t help but wonder if he didn’t bring his ship in towards Louisbourg Harbour to take a look at what was left of the old fortress after it had been dismantled by the British twenty years earlier.

1 August 1785, La Perouse and his Pacific expedition left France under the orders of Louis XVI. For two and a half years, the La Perouse expedition criss-crossed the Pacific – from Chile to California, then crossing over to modern-day Russia from the shores of Alaska, then onward to Samoa, where without warning they were attacked on the shores of the island of Tutuila, leaving 12 members of the expedition dead. Seeking shelter, On January 24, 1788, La Pérouse and the rest of the expedition arrived off the coast of Australia. After limping into Botany Bay, they set up a small camp to regroup and rest from the devastating events of the previous month. Six weeks later, La Pérouse gave the order to weigh anchor and set sail for the islands of New Caledonia. They were never heard from again.

Today, the legacy of explorers like La Pérouse, James Cook and their expeditions continue to be evaluated. Both men had tremendous impact not only on the societies they came from, but also on the societies they met as they attempted to chart what was left of the unknown world. Both men had much in common – obsessed with exploration of the Pacific, expert mariners, meticulous navigators. Both men also got practical training for their vocations in Cape Breton, fueling their future ambitions. They would also both lose their lives in the Pacific, the place that both men had become so obsessed with throughout their careers. Although the final fate of Cook was never a mystery, the fate of La Pérouse is still an open case – likely La Pérouse died when his expedition encountered a hurricane and ran aground on the island of Vanikoro. It’s said on the morning of his execution that Louis XVI asked – “Any news of La Pérouse?” Even today, there is still no answer.  [END]