Note 68-1 — CAPTAIN EDWARDS' REPORTS.
Reading edition
This was Vanikoro in the Santa Cruz Group. It was probably seen by Mendaña in 1595, and again by Carteret in 1767, but the interest attached to it by Europeans, and particularly to Edwards' visit, lies in the undoubted fact that at that very time there were survivors of La Pérouse's ill-fated expedition upon it. If his search for the mutineers had been as keen at this part of his voyage as it was in the earlier portion, he would have been the means of rescuing them. The smoke he saw may well have been signal fires lighted by the castaways to attract his attention.
La Pérouse's ships were cast away in 1788, just three years before, shortly after the Commander had delivered his journals to Governor Phillip in Botany Bay for transmission to Europe. Their fate was unknown until Peter Dillon chanced upon a French swordhilt in Tucopia thirty-eight years later in 1826. Satisfying himself that they had been brought from Vanikoro, he persuaded the East India Company to place him in command of a search expedition. In 1827 he made a thorough examination of the island, and found the remains of the Boussole; the Astrolabe, according to the native account, having foundered in deep water. He found the clearing where the survivors had felled timber to build themselves a brig in which they sailed to meet a second shipwreck elsewhere, perhaps on the Great Barrier reef of Queensland. But two had been left, and of these one had died shortly before his visit, and the other had gone with the natives to another island leaving no trace behind him.
D'Entrecasteaux, when in search of La Pérouse in 1793, also passed within sight of the castaways.
D'Urville made a thorough examination of the island both in 1828 and 1838. The relics brought home by Dillon may be seen in the Gallerie de la Marine in the Louvre.