The things we do!

In the long black body, moving between wind and water, did they not see
some formidable cetacean that they regarded with suspicion?
Just then Captain Nemo asked me what I knew about the wreck of La Perouse.
"Only what everyone knows, Captain," I replied.
"And could you tell me what everyone knows about it?"
he inquired, ironically.
"Easily."
I related to him all that the last works of Dumont d'Urville had made known--
works from which the following is a brief account.
La Perouse, and his second, Captain de Langle, were sent
by Louis XVI, in 1785, on a voyage of circumnavigation.
They embarked in the corvettes Boussole and the Astrolabe,
neither of which were again heard of. In 1791, the French
Government, justly uneasy as to the fate of these two sloops,
manned two large merchantmen, the Recherche and the Esperance,
which left Brest the 28th of September under the command
of Bruni d'Entrecasteaux.
Two months after, they learned from Bowen, commander of the Albemarle,
that the debris of shipwrecked vessels had been seen on the coasts
of New Georgia.


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