A Brief History of Circumnavigators

by Derek Wilson

  Bougainville and his contemporaries, therefore, had to rely on the other method for calculating longitude. It was more complicated. It required careful handling of instruments and several mathematical calculations. It was also less accurate. But those experts who preferred this method (and the superiority of calculations based on chronometers was by no means proved in the 1760s) believed that it could be perfected and simplified. The astronomical calculation of longitude aimed at measuring the difference in time between different points on the earth’s surface by comparing the occurrence of constant astronomical phenomena such as the angular distance between the moon and various other heavenly bodies. The marine navigator – given a clear sky and a deck that was not pitching too violently – had to take regular readings with instruments of varying sophistication. Then he had to consult his almanac, which gave him corresponding measurements in London or Paris or some other European fixed point for every day of the year. The arithmetic necessary to convert all these data into a single, accurate measurement of the angle of longitude was not simple and was certainly beyond many mariners. However, the astronomical method, like the mechanical method, was being improved. In 1766 the British Astronomer Royal, Nevil Maskelyne, published the Nautical Almanac which provided a new set of lunar tables and instructions for their use. Equipped with these, an accurate set of readings and more than a smattering of mathematics a naval officer could calculate longitude in about a quarter of an hour. But there were still many points in the process at which human error could insinuate itself. What was needed, in Bougainville’s opinion, was to take an expert to sea and entrust all measurements and calculations to him.

  Thus it was that Pierre Antoine Véron, a young astronomer, boarded the expedition’s flagship, Boudeuse, equipped with all the latest instruments. During the voyage he took thousands of readings with quadrant, octant and megameter – devices of varying sophistication for measuring the angular distance between various heavenly bodies. Sometimes Bougainville took his own readings for the sake of comparison and noted the results in his journal. Whenever possible Véron went ashore to make his sightings under more stable conditions and twice he observed eclipses. All his calculations were checked against the ship’s charts and Bougainville’s readings. Always there were discrepancies and the discrepancies were not even constant. They might be several degrees or only a few minutes in disagreement. Sometimes they erred to the east, sometimes to the west. Islands shown on Bougainville’s Pacific charts were, in reality, nowhere to be seen. Similarly unexpected chunks of land showed up in what should have been empty ocean. Even familiar landmarks appeared in the ‘wrong’ place. For example, the position of the Azores as calculated by M. Véron’s methods differed by 200 nautical miles from that shown on the chart. Bougainville’s scientific approach to the problems of longitude measurement was a long overdue initiative. He and Véron established for the first time the actual width of the Pacific Ocean. But overall it must be said that their work clearly illuminated the extent of the problem rather than provided a lasting solution. However, the French might with some justification claim that their first circumnavigation, unlike contemporary British ventures, was planned in a spirit of scientific enquiry

  It is a measure of the importance the government placed upon it that Bougainville was equipped with a newly-built frigate, the Boudeuse. However, from the start, the commander was worried about his vessel. The Boudeuse was designed as a sleek, fast-moving warship. She was armed with twelve-pounders and carried a great deal of sail. She was a greyhound of the sea. But Bougainville needed a cart-horse, a stalwart ship that he could cram with supplies and which would stand up to the buffetings of the ocean. His worst fears were realised when the first Atlantic storm carried away the Boudeuse’s foretop and maintop and the overloaded vessel took in too much water. Immediately he returned to Nantes, where he had the masts shortened, exchanged his twelve-pounders for smaller cannon and carried out other modifications. Still he was unhappy. He was convinced that his ship would not survive the legendary horrors of Cape Horn and, therefore, he planned to take the slower route through the Straits of Magellan.

  Bougainville was an immensely cautious man – no great fault in a circumnavigator. He was determined to leave nothing to chance. Having completed his Falklands mission and returned to Rio de Janeiro to rendezvous with his storeship, the Étoile, he devoted another five months to recaulking and refitting his ships and cramming aboard all the victuals they could hold. He divided his crews into three groups and rotated them so that one contingent was always resting ashore. By mid-November 1767, ships and men were in as good shape as they would ever be and Bougainville had provisions for ten months’ sailing. Yet, as he ruefully reported, some of his followers were not prepared to face the rigours ahead. He shared with Byron the aggravation of having some of his crew enticed away by the Portuguese: ‘Notwithstanding all our care, twelve men, soldiers and sailors, deserted from the two ships’.1 It was Bougainville’s boast that, unlike the British, he had no need to offer his men financial inducements, and he later reported:

  It has not been necessary to animate them by any extraordinary incitement, such as the English thought it necessary to grant to the crew of commodore Byron. Their constancy has stood the test of the most critical situations, and their good will has not one moment abated. But the French nation is capable of conquering the greatest difficulties, and nothing is impossible to their efforts, as often as she will think herself equal at least to any nation in the world.2

  But it would seem that at least a dozen members of his expedition did not share their leader’s ardent national pride.

  Bougainville claimed that his decision to proceed via the Straits was taken on purely professional grounds. Not only did he consider his ships to be unequal to rounding the Horn; he actually professed to believe that it was safer to take the open sea route during the southern winter when there is less than eight hours of daylight. Since he was obliged to travel in summer, he insisted that the proper course was by way of Magellan’s Straits. Byron concurred with this judgement up to a point. He thought December and January the best months for passing through the Straits but he believed this course always better than the alternative. ‘I would prefer it twenty times over to the going round Cape Horn,’ he honestly stated.3 There seems little doubt that Bougainville felt the same basic fear of the ‘wild Horn’s hate’. His strange opinion runs so completely counter to the experience of earlier expeditions that it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Bougainville was seeking to excuse rather than explain his actions. For example, Anson’s difficulties in this region had arisen largely because he had delayed his assault on the waters of the Horn to March and April when the winter storms were at their worst. Bougainville, fully familiar with such awful precedents, simply took the safest course – and would probably have done so whatever time of year he reached Cape Virgins. No modern sailor would criticise him for such a decision but there were, at that time, many men in England and not a few in France, who questioned his bravery and insisted that the first French circumnavigation was not to be compared with the courageous exploits of Anson, Schouten and other great mariners. Bougainville was familiar with the eastern end of the Straits: he had made previous voyages there collecting timber for his Falklands colony. The devil he partially knew must have seemed infinitely preferable to the notorious devil he did not.

  But the demon of the Straits played him false with a vengeance. Bougainville took fifty-two days to reach the Pacific. Although dwarfed by Carteret’s mammoth 119 days his passage from ocean to ocean is still one of the longest on record. Even Magellan’s tiny ships took two weeks less for the journey than the Boudeuse and the Étoile. But it was not only the strong currents and unpredictable winds which delayed the Frenchmen. Bougainville was a captain who took no chances. He preferred to keep within sight of land, even though this meant taking constant soundings and reducing sail every time the wind veered to an unfavourable quarter. He anchored frequently and so
ught out suitable havens in which to rest his ships and men. He took every opportunity to go ashore for fresh food and water.

  It was, in fact, his desire to ensure the health of his crew which was Bougainville’s chief and most convincing justification for his slow passage through the Straits. The fear of scurvy was very real and the captain wanted his men to be as fit as possible before the long Pacific crossing ahead. In this respect his caution paid dividends:

  ... there will be some obstacles in passing the straits, but this retardment is not entirely time lost. There is water, wood and shells [i.e. shellfish] in abundance. Sometimes there are likewise very good fish; and I make no doubt but the scurvy would make more havoc among a crew who should come into the South Seas by way of Cape Horn, than among those who should enter the same seas through the Straits of Magellan. When we left it we had no sick person on board.4

  Once in the Pacific, Bougainville’s most pressing concern was maintaining the health of his crew. He intended to ‘island hop’, making landfalls as often as possible. Ironically, it was good fortune which prevented him making his first projected stop at Juan Fernandez. It being midsummer, the south-east trades were at their southernmost point and Bougainville had to take advantage of them. From late January to the beginning of April his ships scudded north-westwards across the ocean, while he scoured the horizon for a landfall. The Étoile and the Boudeuse sailed a parallel course keeping just in sight of each other so as to observe as wide a swathe of ocean as possible.

  Within six weeks scurvy had begun to appear, despite all Bougainville’s precautions: ‘Each sailor got daily a pint of lemonade, prepared with a kind of powder, called powder of faciot’.5 This powder was mixed with fresh water obtained either from rain or from distilling sea water in an apparatus designed by a Monsieur Poissonier. Every night the still was set in operation and it produced one barrel by morning. Although Bougainville set much store by these measures it is unlikely that they did anything to stave off scurvy. Powdered lemonade cannot have provided the vitamin C so abundant in fresh fruit and vegetables. Fortunately, the French expedition reached land before the disease became rampant.

  After passing the outer islands of the Tuamotu archipelago, the voyagers came on 6 April to Tahiti which Wallis had discovered the previous year. The islanders must have thought that their British friends had returned for they rushed out by canoe in their hundreds to greet them, bearing gifts of fowls, fruit, meat and coconuts. Nor was that all.

  The periaguas [canoes] were full of females, who, for agreeable features, are not inferior to most European women, and who, in point of beauty of the body might, with much reason, vie with them all. Most of these fair females were naked, for the men and the old women that accompanied them, had stripped them of the garments which they generally dress themselves in ... The men ... soon explained their meaning very clearly. They pressed us to choose a woman and to come on shore with her; and their gestures, which were nothing less than equivocal, denoted in what manner we should form an acquaintance with her.6

  Small wonder that the Frenchmen enjoyed their two-week stay among the exceedingly friendly Tahitians. The Polynesians’ tolerance and desire to please seemingly knew no bounds. Even when some of their men were murdered by the sailors, they did not turn against their visitors. Yet, those visitors unwittingly ill repaid their hosts. For shortly afterwards venereal disease, previously unknown, spread among the islanders and they attributed its appearance to the men of the Boudeuse and the Étoile. And when the ships, at last, prepared to sail away, one of the young men begged to accompany his new friends back to Europe.*

  Bougainville sailed due westwards on about the 15°S parallel of latitude, stalked always by the spectre of scurvy. There was now no lack of land; the voyagers were in the maze of the isles and atolls that make up southern Polynesia. The French expedition, by crossing the Pacific farther to the south than its predecessors, was able to add several new discoveries to the charts. But the cautious captain rarely allowed his mariners to stop. The sight of natives brandishing spears, or breakers smashing onto jagged reefs was sufficient for him to order his helmsman to steer away into deeper water. Just what was Bougainville up to? If we were to judge his actions purely on the basis of his own written account we would have difficulty in making much sense of them. He emerges from his journal as a strange mixture of contradictory aspirations and anxieties. His perseverance in journeying due west was, he claimed, to discover the east coast of New Holland (Australia).

  Yet as soon as he encountered what he believed to be floating vegetation – he made the assumption that it was a barren shore and concluded, ‘It would have been rashness to risk running in with a coast from whence no advantage could be expected, and which one could not get clear of, but by beating against the reigning winds.’7 Accordingly, he altered course to the north-east (a fortunate decision, for had he continued to westward he would eventually have encountered the Great Barrier Reef).

  By now (7 June 1768) hunger was adding to the miseries of his crew. Bread and pulses were strictly rationed and the salt meat was so foul that his men preferred to eat rats when they could catch them. Yet when, after three days’ sailing, they reached, and named, the Louisiade Archipelago which seemed able to furnish all their needs, Bougainville declined to stop.

  Long before the break of day, a delicious smell announced us the vicinity of this land, which forms a great gulf open to the S.E. I have seen but few lands, which bore a finer aspect than this; a low ground, divided into plains and groves, lay along the sea-shore, and from thence it rose like an amphitheatre up to the mountains, whose summits were lost in the clouds. There were three ranges of mountains; and the highest chain was above twenty-five leagues in the interior parts of the country. The wretched condition to which we were reduced, did not allow us, either to spend some time in visiting this beautiful country, that by all appearances, was fertile and rich; nor to stand to westward in search of a passage on the south side of New Guinea, which might open a new and short navigation to the Moluccas, by the gulf of Carpentaria. Nothing, indeed, was more probable, than the existence of such a passage; it was even believed, that the land had been seen as far as W by S. We were now obliged to endeavour to get out of this gulf as soon as possible . . .8

  Bougainville was clearly not a coward, so how do we explain his timorousness in the face of poorly-armed ‘savages’? He was concerned for the welfare of his crew, so why did he shun potentially beneficial landfalls? He was a dedicated explorer, so what reason did he have for deliberately declining to seek the coast of Terra Australis and refusing to sail through the Torres Strait, separating Australia from New Guinea? The answer lies in his secret instructions. His immediate objective was the Moluccas. He had to be sure of reaching the Spice Islands in order to reconnoitre the possibilities for French trade and to collect his sample plants. His cargo and his news were urgently required at Île de France, so he could not afford to take up more time in speculative forays around the coasts of the southern continent. But he had another problem: if he did not make haste to reach the Indies he would miss the monsoons which were to carry him across the Indian Ocean and this would delay by several months his arrival at Île de France. Bougainville’s options had thus been reduced to one: he had to make for the Moluccas by the only known route. This meant turning eastwards in order to circle the Louisiades. This proved much more difficult than he had hoped. Day after day the lookouts scanned the reefs and islands on their port beam for some break that would enable the ships to get back on course. But, as Bougainville and his men travelled farther and farther away from their objective, there seemed no end to the shoals and the breakers. It was as though they had become embayed in a vast gulf from which there was no escape.

  For over two weeks they sailed steadily eastwards, the fear of wandering among these hostile coral outcrops until hunger and disease picked them off, one by one, growing stronger by the hour. So it is easy enough to imagine the crews’ relief when, on 25 June, they sig
hted the easternmost point of the chain and thankfully named it ‘Cape Deliverance’.

  A northerly course brought the Frenchmen to New Ireland where they at last found a safe anchorage. By a strange chance it was precisely the same bay, English Cove, in which Carteret and his men had sheltered. A reconnaissance party discovered nails, pieces of tent ropes and the metal plate which Carteret had fixed to a tree. This had, however, been torn down and broken by some Polynesian visitors. The haven offered fresh water and timber but little in the way of food. Thus, when the Frenchmen continued on their way after a stay of eight days their general condition was but little improved. However, English Cove was the location of an important scientific experiment. While here Véron observed a solar eclipse and from it he calculated his position accurately. Having done that he was able to do what no mariner had ever done before, make a correct assessment of his longitude and thus of the width of the Pacific.

  On 24 August the master of the Boudeuse died of scurvy. Almost all the men and officers were now afflicted with the disease and half of them were too ill to work. But deliverance was near. The ships were cruising along the northern coast of New Guinea and on 1 September they reached the eastern edge of the Moluccas. Aided at last by accurate charts, Bougainville made for the Dutch factory of Kajeli on the island Buru:

  The aspect of a pretty, large town, situated in the bottom of the gulf; of ships at anchor there, and of cattle rambling through the meadows, caused transports which I have doubtless felt, but which I cannot here describe.9

  Bougainville hoisted a Dutch flag and fired a gun in salute as he entered the harbour but the local ruler, who came aboard the frigate, was cautious. He had strict instructions from the Dutch governor to give no succour to foreign ships. However, when all had been explained, the Frenchman received a warm welcome. He and his officers supped that evening in the chief’s house: