L'Étoile (ship)

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Ship data
Surname: L'Étoile (French) the star
Built: Nantes, France
Crew: 8 officers, 108 sailors
Armament:
Technical specifications
Type: Fleute , used as a tender
Displacement: 480 t
Length: 33.8 m
Width: 9.1 m
Drive: sail

The L'Étoile (dt. The Star ) was a French flute that took part in the circumnavigation of the world between 1766 and 1769 together with the La Boudeuse under the command of Louis Antoine de Bougainville .

It was the first French expedition of its kind. The L'Étoile was led by the captain Francois Chenard de la Giraudais (1727–1775) and served as the expedition's supply ship. On board were the botanist and doctor Philibert Commerçon with his assistant Jeanne Baret , disguised as a man , and the astronomer Pierre-Antoine Véron (1736-1770).

The purpose of the expedition was:

  • to look for new territories suitable for colonization
  • to find a new route to China so that the French East India Company could establish new trading posts there
  • To find aromatic plants suitable for cultivation in France.

The two ships headed for the Falkland Islands first to supply the small colony that Bougainville had settled there a few years earlier. When the L'Étoile was fetching wood in Patagonia , she sighted two British ships. It was the Dolphin and the Swallow that were on their way to the South Seas under the command of Samuel Wallis . The encounter was full of suspicion - the ships did not reveal themselves. (A second meeting was to take place on the way back on February 25, 1769 north of Ascension with the Swallow of Captain Philipp Carteret .)

On April 2, 1768, the ships saw Tahiti in front of them, where Wallis had landed on June 18, 1767. After a three-week stay, the ships sailed further west to Samoa , to the New Hebrides , to the Great Barrier Reef , then north to the Solomon Islands , New Britain and the Moluccas . In Batavia they took a break to service the ships and give the crew a break. On March 16, 1769, the ships were back in Saint-Malo . The trip had taken two years and four months.

literature

  • Louis Antoine de Bougainville: Voyage autour du monde par la frégate du roi la Boudeuse et la flûte l'Étoile , en 1766, 1767, 1768 et 1769 (Paris, 1771).