The Astrolabe was a horse barge converted to an exploration ship of the French Navy and was originally named Coquille. She is famous for her travels with Jules Dumont d'Urville. The name derives from an early navigational instrument, the astrolabe, a precursor to the sextant.
Voyage under the command of Louis Isidore Duperrey
Louis Isidore Duperrey commanded Coquille on its circumnavigation of the earth (1822–1825) with Jules Dumont d'Urville as second. René-Primevère Lesson also travelled on Coquille as a naval doctor and naturalist. On the return to France in March 1825, Lesson and Dumont brought back to France an imposing collection of animals and plants collected on the Falkland Islands, on the coasts of Chile and Peru, in the archipelagos of the Pacific and New Zealand, New Guinea and Australia.
During the voyage the ship spent two weeks in the Bay of Islands in the north of New Zealand in 1824. On the return voyage to France the ship sailed through the Ellice Islands (now known as Tuvalu).
Seven ships of the French Navy have borne the name Astrolabe, after the instrument astrolabe
Ships
See also
Notes and References
Notes
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The Astrolabe was a converted flûte of the French Navy, famous for her travels with Jean-François de Galaup, comte de Lapérouse.
She was built in 1781 at Le Havre as the flûte Autruche for the French Navy. In May 1785 she and her sistership Boussole (previously the Portefaix) were renamed and rerated as frigates, and fitted for round-the-world scientific exploration. The two ships departed from Brest on 1 August 1785, the Boussole commanded by Lapérouse and the Astrolabe under Paul Antoine Fleuriot de Langle.
Disappearance
The expedition vanished mysteriously in 1788 after leaving Botany Bay on 10 March 1788. The fate of the expedition was eventually solved by Captain Peter Dillon in 1827 when he found remnants of the ships the Astrolable and the Boussole at Vanikoro Island in the Solomon Islands. The ships had been wrecked in a storm.
Survivors from one ship had been massacred while survivors from the other ship had constructed their own small boat and sailed off the island, never to be heard from again.