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Updated: May 2, 2025
Except a few cocoa-nuts, they brought us no kind of provisions, but by pantomimic gestures invited us to land; endeavouring to signify that we should be richly provided on shore with every thing we wanted. The savages had probably destined for us the fate of De Langle and his companions; they appeared unarmed, but had artfully concealed clubs and short lances in their canoes.
He then placed his armies in the field in the relation in which he deemed they would be most effective: the First army, under General Dubail, was in the Vosges, and the Second army, under General Castelnau, was round about Nancy; the Third army, under General Sarrail, east and south of the Argonne in a kind of "elbow," joining the Fourth army, under General de Langle de Cary; then the Ninth army, under General Foch; then the Fifth army, under General Franchet d'Espérey; then the little British army of three corps, under General Sir John French; and then the new Sixth army, under General Manoury.
"In fifteen minutes," writes an officer of the Staff of General Langle de Gary, "the Hôtel was empty."
Did you ever dream of such a curiosity?" and, after listening a while, he added, "I say, Langlé, I must possess that instrument. Go and ask the old blind man what he will sell it for." Langlé approached and asked the question, but the old man was disinclined to part with it.
It was they who murdered Captain de Langle, the commander of the second ship under La Pérouse, the naturalist Laman, and fourteen persons from the crews of both ships, on their venturing ashore; although they had loaded the natives with presents.
One of our gunboats had come in from a river-station with only four healthy men out of seventy-five. Typhus fever was decimating the crew. I had to present the Cross of the Legion of Honour to the lieutenant in command, M. de Langle, who had behaved like a hero. I went alongside his ship to see him in the lonely creek to which the infected vessel had been relegated.
"They preferred a few beads which could be of no utility, to anything we could offer them in iron or cloth." Two days later a tragedy occurred at this island, when Captain de Langle, the commander of the ASTROLABE, and eleven of the crew were murdered. He made an excursion inland to look for fresh water, and found a clear, cool spring in the vicinity of a village.
These fogs are such that it has taken one hundred and fifty days to explore a part of the coast which Captain King, in the third volume of Cook's last voyage, supposes might be examined in the course of two months. During this period I rested only ten days, three in the Bay of Ternai, two in the Bay de Langle, and five in the Bay de Castries.
Laperouse was drowned; de Langle was murdered; Dentrecasteaux died miserably at sea; Kermadec, the fourth, had expired shortly before; and Baudin, the fifth, died at Port Louis on the homeward voyage. Nor is even that the last touch of melancholy to the tale of tragedy. There was a young poet who was touched by the fate of Laperouse.
The ships were not urgently in need of water, but de Langle "had embraced the system of Cook, and thought fresh water a hundred times preferable to what had been some time in the hold. As some of his crew had slight symptoms of scurvy, he thought, with justice, that we owed them every means of alleviation in our power. Besides, no island could be compared with this for abundance of provisions.
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