CHAPTER 19
Vanikoro
THIS DREADFUL SIGHT was the first of a whole series of maritime
catastrophes that the Nautilus would encounter on its run. When it
plied more heavily traveled seas, we often saw wrecked hulls rotting
in midwater, and farther down, cannons, shells, anchors, chains, and a
thousand other iron objects rusting away.
Meanwhile, continuously swept along by the Nautilus, where we lived in
near isolation, we raised the Tuamotu Islands on December 11, that old
“dangerous group” associated with the French global navigator
Commander Bougainville; it stretches from Ducie Island to Lazareff
Island over an area of 500 leagues from the east-southeast to the
west-northwest, between latitude 13 degrees 30′ and 23 degrees 50′
south, and between longitude 125 degrees 30′ and 151 degrees 30′
west. This island group covers a surface area of 370 square leagues,
and it’s made up of some sixty subgroups, among which we noted the
Gambier group, which is a French protectorate. These islands are coral
formations. Thanks to the work of polyps, a slow but steady upheaval
will someday connect these islands to each other. Later on, this new
island will be fused to its neighboring island groups, and a fifth
continent will stretch from New Zealand and New Caledonia as far as
the Marquesas Islands.
The day I expounded this theory to Captain Nemo, he answered me
coldly:
“The earth doesn’t need new continents, but new men!”
Sailors’ luck led the Nautilus straight to Reao Island, one of the
most unusual in this group, which was discovered in 1822 by Captain
Bell aboard the Minerva. So I was able to study the madreporic process
that has created the islands in this ocean.
Madrepores, which one must guard against confusing with precious
coral, clothe their tissue in a limestone crust, and their variations
in structure have led my famous mentor Professor Milne-Edwards to
classify them into five divisions. The tiny microscopic animals that
secrete this polypary live by the billions in the depths of their
cells. Their limestone deposits build up into rocks, reefs, islets,
islands. In some places, they form atolls, a circular ring surrounding
a lagoon or small inner lake that gaps place in contact with the
sea. Elsewhere, they take the shape of barrier reefs, such as those
that exist along the coasts of New Caledonia and several of the
Tuamotu Islands. In still other localities, such as Réunion Island and
the island of Mauritius, they build fringing reefs, high, straight
walls next to which the ocean’s depth is considerable.
While cruising along only a few cable lengths from the underpinning of
Reao Island, I marveled at the gigantic piece of work accomplished by
these microscopic laborers. These walls were the express achievements
of madrepores known by the names fire coral, finger coral, star coral,
and stony coral. These polyps grow exclusively in the agitated strata
at the surface of the sea, and so it’s in the upper reaches that they
begin these substructures, which sink little by little together with
the secreted rubble binding them. This, at least, is the theory of
Mr. Charles Darwin, who thus explains the formation of atolls—a theory
superior, in my view, to the one that says these madreporic edifices
sit on the summits of mountains or volcanoes submerged a few feet
below sea level.
I could observe these strange walls quite closely: our sounding lines
indicated that they dropped perpendicularly for more than 300 meters,
and our electric beams made the bright limestone positively sparkle.
In reply to a question Conseil asked me about the growth rate of these
colossal barriers, I thoroughly amazed him by saying that scientists
put it at an eighth of an inch per biennium.
“Therefore,” he said to me, “to build these walls, it took . . . ?”
“192,000 years, my gallant Conseil, which significantly extends the
biblical Days of Creation. What’s more, the formation of coal—in other
words, the petrification of forests swallowed by floods—and the
cooling of basaltic rocks likewise call for a much longer period of
time. I might add that those ‘days’ in the Bible must represent whole
epochs and not literally the lapse of time between two sunrises,
because according to the Bible itself, the sun doesn’t date from the
first day of Creation.”
When the Nautilus returned to the surface of the ocean, I could take
in Reao Island over its whole flat, wooded expanse. Obviously its
madreporic rocks had been made fertile by tornadoes and
thunderstorms. One day, carried off by a hurricane from neighboring
shores, some seed fell onto these limestone beds, mixing with
decomposed particles of fish and marine plants to form vegetable
humus. Propelled by the waves, a coconut arrived on this new
coast. Its germ took root. Its tree grew tall, catching steam off the
water. A brook was born. Little by little, vegetation spread. Tiny
animals—worms, insects—rode ashore on tree trunks snatched from
islands to windward. Turtles came to lay their eggs. Birds nested in
the young trees. In this way animal life developed, and drawn by the
greenery and fertile soil, man appeared. And that’s how these islands
were formed, the immense achievement of microscopic animals.
Near evening Reao Island melted into the distance, and the Nautilus
noticeably changed course. After touching the Tropic of Capricorn at
longitude 135 degrees, it headed west-northwest, going back up the
whole intertropical zone. Although the summer sun lavished its rays on
us, we never suffered from the heat, because thirty or forty meters
underwater, the temperature didn’t go over 10 degrees to 12 degrees
centigrade.
By December 15 we had left the alluring Society Islands in the west,
likewise elegant Tahiti, queen of the Pacific. In the morning I
spotted this island’s lofty summits a few miles to leeward. Its waters
supplied excellent fish for the tables on board: mackerel, bonito,
albacore, and a few varieties of that sea serpent named the moray eel.
The Nautilus had cleared 8,100 miles. We logged 9,720 miles when we
passed between the Tonga Islands, where crews from the Argo,
Port-au-Prince, and Duke of Portland had perished, and the island
group of Samoa, scene of the slaying of Captain de Langle, friend of
that long-lost navigator, the Count de La Pérouse. Then we raised the
Fiji Islands, where savages slaughtered sailors from the Union, as
well as Captain Bureau, commander of the Darling Josephine out of
Nantes, France.
Extending over an expanse of 100 leagues north to south, and over 90
leagues east to west, this island group lies between latitude 2
degrees and 6 degrees south, and between longitude 174 degrees and 179
degrees west. It consists of a number of islands, islets, and reefs,
among which we noted the islands of Viti Levu, Vanua Levu, and Kadavu.
It was the Dutch navigator Tasman who discovered this group in 1643,
the same year the Italian physicist Torricelli invented the barometer
and King Louis XIV ascended the French throne. I’ll let the reader
decide which of these deeds was more beneficial to humanity. Coming
later, Captain Cook in 1774, Rear Admiral d’Entrecasteaux in 1793, and
finally Captain Dumont d’Urville in 1827, untangled the whole chaotic
geography of this island group. The Nautilus drew near Wailea Bay, an
unlucky place for England’s Captain Dillon, who was the first to shed
light on the longstanding mystery surrounding the disappearance of
ships under the Count de La Pérouse.
This bay, repeatedly dredged, furnished a huge supply of excellent
oysters. As the Roman playwright Seneca recommended, we opened them
right at our table, then stuffed ourselves. These mollusks belonged to
the species known by name as Ostrea lamellosa, whose members are quite
common off Corsica. This Wailea oysterbank must have been extensive,
and for certain, if they hadn’t been controlled by numerous natural
checks, these clusters of shellfish would have ended up jam-packing
the bay, since as many as 2,000,000 eggs have been counted in a single
individual.
And if Mr. Ned Land did not repent of his gluttony at our oyster fest,
it’s because oysters are the only dish that never causes
indigestion. In fact, it takes no less than sixteen dozen of these
headless mollusks to supply the 315 grams that satisfy one man’s
minimum daily requirement for nitrogen.
On December 25 the Nautilus navigated amid the island group of the New
Hebrides, which the Portuguese seafarer Queirós discovered in 1606,
which Commander Bougainville explored in 1768, and to which Captain
Cook gave its current name in 1773. This group is chiefly made up of
nine large islands and forms a 120-league strip from the
north-northwest to the south-southeast, lying between latitude 2
degrees and 15 degrees south, and between longitude 164 degrees and
168 degrees. At the moment of our noon sights, we passed fairly close
to the island of Aurou, which looked to me like a mass of green woods
crowned by a peak of great height.
That day it was yuletide, and it struck me that Ned Land badly missed
celebrating “Christmas,” that genuine family holiday where Protestants
are such zealots.
I hadn’t seen Captain Nemo for over a week, when, on the morning of
the 27th, he entered the main lounge, as usual acting as if he’d been
gone for just five minutes. I was busy tracing the Nautilus’s course
on the world map. The captain approached, placed a finger over a
position on the chart, and pronounced just one word:
“Vanikoro.”
This name was magic! It was the name of those islets where vessels
under the Count de La Pérouse had miscarried. I straightened suddenly.
“The Nautilus is bringing us to Vanikoro?” I asked.
“Yes, professor,” the captain replied.
“And I’ll be able to visit those famous islands where the Compass and
the Astrolabe came to grief?”
“If you like, professor.”
“When will we reach Vanikoro?”
“We already have, professor.”
Followed by Captain Nemo, I climbed onto the platform, and from there
my eyes eagerly scanned the horizon.
In the northeast there emerged two volcanic islands of unequal size,
surrounded by a coral reef whose circuit measured forty miles. We were
facing the island of Vanikoro proper, to which Captain Dumont
d’Urville had given the name “Island of the Search”; we lay right in
front of the little harbor of Vana, located in latitude 16 degrees 4′
south and longitude 164 degrees 32′ east. Its shores seemed covered
with greenery from its beaches to its summits inland, crowned by
Mt. Kapogo, which is 476 fathoms high.
After clearing the outer belt of rocks via a narrow passageway, the
Nautilus lay inside the breakers where the sea had a depth of thirty
to forty fathoms. Under the green shade of some tropical evergreens, I
spotted a few savages who looked extremely startled at our
approach. In this long, blackish object advancing flush with the
water, didn’t they see some fearsome cetacean that they were obliged
to view with distrust?
Just then Captain Nemo asked me what I knew about the shipwreck of the
Count de La Pérouse.
“What everybody knows, captain,” I answered him.
“And could you kindly tell me what everybody knows?” he asked me in a
gently ironic tone.
“Very easily.”
I related to him what the final deeds of Captain Dumont d’Urville had
brought to light, deeds described here in this heavily condensed
summary of the whole matter.
In 1785 the Count de La Pérouse and his subordinate, Captain de
Langle, were sent by King Louis XVI of France on a voyage to
circumnavigate the globe. They boarded two sloops of war, the Compass
and the Astrolabe, which were never seen again.
In 1791, justly concerned about the fate of these two sloops of war,
the French government fitted out two large cargo boats, the Search and
the Hope, which left Brest on September 28 under orders from Rear
Admiral Bruni d’Entrecasteaux. Two months later, testimony from a
certain Commander Bowen, aboard the Albemarle, alleged that rubble
from shipwrecked vessels had been seen on the coast of New
Georgia. But d’Entrecasteaux was unaware of this news—which seemed a
bit dubious anyhow—and headed toward the Admiralty Islands, which had
been named in a report by one Captain Hunter as the site of the Count
de La Pérouse’s shipwreck.
They looked in vain. The Hope and the Search passed right by Vanikoro
without stopping there; and overall, this voyage was plagued by
misfortune, ultimately costing the lives of Rear Admiral
d’Entrecasteaux, two of his subordinate officers, and several seamen
from his crew.
It was an old hand at the Pacific, the English adventurer Captain
Peter Dillon, who was the first to pick up the trail left by castaways
from the wrecked vessels. On May 15, 1824, his ship, the St. Patrick,
passed by Tikopia Island, one of the New Hebrides. There a native
boatman pulled alongside in a dugout canoe and sold Dillon a silver
sword hilt bearing the imprint of characters engraved with a cutting
tool known as a burin. Furthermore, this native boatman claimed that
during a stay in Vanikoro six years earlier, he had seen two Europeans
belonging to ships that had run aground on the island’s reefs many
years before.
Dillon guessed that the ships at issue were those under the Count de
La Pérouse, ships whose disappearance had shaken the entire world. He
tried to reach Vanikoro, where, according to the native boatman, a
good deal of rubble from the shipwreck could still be found, but winds
and currents prevented his doing so.
Dillon returned to Calcutta. There he was able to interest the Asiatic
Society and the East India Company in his discovery. A ship named
after the Search was placed at his disposal, and he departed on
January 23, 1827, accompanied by a French deputy.
This new Search, after putting in at several stops over the Pacific,
dropped anchor before Vanikoro on July 7, 1827, in the same harbor of
Vana where the Nautilus was currently floating.
There Dillon collected many relics of the shipwreck: iron utensils,
anchors, eyelets from pulleys, swivel guns, an eighteen-pound shell,
the remains of some astronomical instruments, a piece of sternrail,
and a bronze bell bearing the inscription “Made by Bazin,” the foundry
mark at Brest Arsenal around 1785. There could no longer be any doubt.
Finishing his investigations, Dillon stayed at the site of the
casualty until the month of October. Then he left Vanikoro, headed
toward New Zealand, dropped anchor at Calcutta on April 7, 1828, and
returned to France, where he received a very cordial welcome from King
Charles X.
But just then the renowned French explorer Captain Dumont d’Urville,
unaware of Dillon’s activities, had already set sail to search
elsewhere for the site of the shipwreck. In essence, a whaling vessel
had reported that some medals and a Cross of St. Louis had been found
in the hands of savages in the Louisiade Islands and New Caledonia.
So Captain Dumont d’Urville had put to sea in command of a vessel
named after the Astrolabe, and just two months after Dillon had left
Vanikoro, Dumont d’Urville dropped anchor before Hobart. There he
heard about Dillon’s findings, and he further learned that a certain
James Hobbs, chief officer on the Union out of Calcutta, had put to
shore on an island located in latitude 8 degrees 18′ south and
longitude 156 degrees 30′ east, and had noted the natives of those
waterways making use of iron bars and red fabrics.
Pretty perplexed, Dumont d’Urville didn’t know if he should give
credence to these reports, which had been carried in some of the less
reliable newspapers; nevertheless, he decided to start on Dillon’s
trail.
On February 10, 1828, the new Astrolabe hove before Tikopia Island,
took on a guide and interpreter in the person of a deserter who had
settled there, plied a course toward Vanikoro, raised it on February
12, sailed along its reefs until the 14th, and only on the 20th
dropped anchor inside its barrier in the harbor of Vana.
On the 23rd, several officers circled the island and brought back some
rubble of little importance. The natives, adopting a system of denial
and evasion, refused to guide them to the site of the casualty. This
rather shady conduct aroused the suspicion that the natives had
mistreated the castaways; and in truth, the natives seemed afraid that
Dumont d’Urville had come to avenge the Count de La Pérouse and his
unfortunate companions.
But on the 26th, appeased with gifts and seeing that they didn’t need
to fear any reprisals, the natives led the chief officer,
Mr. Jacquinot, to the site of the shipwreck.
At this location, in three or four fathoms of water between the Paeu
and Vana reefs, there lay some anchors, cannons, and ingots of iron
and lead, all caked with limestone concretions. A launch and whaleboat
from the new Astrolabe were steered to this locality, and after going
to exhausting lengths, their crews managed to dredge up an anchor
weighing 1,800 pounds, a cast-iron eight-pounder cannon, a lead ingot,
and two copper swivel guns.
Questioning the natives, Captain Dumont d’Urville also learned that
after La Pérouse’s two ships had miscarried on the island’s reefs, the
count had built a smaller craft, only to go off and miscarry a second
time. Where? Nobody knew.
The commander of the new Astrolabe then had a monument erected under a
tuft of mangrove, in memory of the famous navigator and his
companions. It was a simple quadrangular pyramid, set on a coral base,
with no ironwork to tempt the natives’ avarice.
Then Dumont d’Urville tried to depart; but his crews were run down
from the fevers raging on these unsanitary shores, and quite ill
himself, he was unable to weigh anchor until March 17.
Meanwhile, fearing that Dumont d’Urville wasn’t abreast of Dillon’s
activities, the French government sent a sloop of war to Vanikoro, the
Bayonnaise under Commander Legoarant de Tromelin, who had been
stationed on the American west coast. Dropping anchor before Vanikoro
a few months after the new Astrolabe’s departure, the Bayonnaise
didn’t find any additional evidence but verified that the savages
hadn’t disturbed the memorial honoring the Count de La Pérouse.
This is the substance of the account I gave Captain Nemo.
“So,” he said to me, “the castaways built a third ship on Vanikoro
Island, and to this day, nobody knows where it went and perished?”
“Nobody knows.”
Captain Nemo didn’t reply but signaled me to follow him to the main
lounge. The Nautilus sank a few meters beneath the waves, and the
panels opened.
I rushed to the window and saw crusts of coral: fungus coral,
siphonula coral, alcyon coral, sea anemone from the genus Caryophylia,
plus myriads of charming fish including greenfish, damselfish,
sweepers, snappers, and squirrelfish; underneath this coral covering I
detected some rubble the old dredges hadn’t been able to tear
free—iron stirrups, anchors, cannons, shells, tackle from a capstan, a
stempost, all objects hailing from the wrecked ships and now carpeted
in moving flowers.
And as I stared at this desolate wreckage, Captain Nemo told me in a
solemn voice:
“Commander La Pérouse set out on December 7, 1785, with his ships, the
Compass and the Astrolabe. He dropped anchor first at Botany Bay,
visited the Tonga Islands and New Caledonia, headed toward the Santa
Cruz Islands, and put in at Nomuka, one of the islands in the Ha’apai
group. Then his ships arrived at the unknown reefs of
Vanikoro. Traveling in the lead, the Compass ran afoul of breakers on
the southerly coast. The Astrolabe went to its rescue and also ran
aground. The first ship was destroyed almost immediately. The second,
stranded to leeward, held up for some days. The natives gave the
castaways a fair enough welcome. The latter took up residence on the
island and built a smaller craft with rubble from the two large
ones. A few seamen stayed voluntarily in Vanikoro. The others, weak
and ailing, set sail with the Count de La Pérouse. They headed to the
Solomon Islands, and they perished with all hands on the westerly
coast of the chief island in that group, between Cape Deception and
Cape Satisfaction!”
“And how do you know all this?” I exclaimed.
“Here’s what I found at the very site of that final shipwreck!”
Captain Nemo showed me a tin box, stamped with the coat of arms of
France and all corroded by salt water. He opened it and I saw a bundle
of papers, yellowed but still legible.
They were the actual military orders given by France’s Minister of the
Navy to Commander La Pérouse, with notes along the margin in the
handwriting of King Louis XVI!
“Ah, what a splendid death for a seaman!” Captain Nemo then said. “A
coral grave is a tranquil grave, and may Heaven grant that my
companions and I rest in no other!”