A new French voyage of exploration came down to the Pacific in 1817, under the command of Louis de Freycinet, who had been a lieutenant in Baudin’s expedition in 1800-4.  The purpose was not chiefly to look for evidence concerning Laperouse, though naturally a keen scrutiny was maintained with this object in view.

An extremely queer fact may be mentioned in connection with this voyage.  The URANIE carried a woman among the crew, the only one of her sex amidst one hundred men.  Madame de Freycinet, the wife of the commandant, joined at Toulon, dressed as a ship’s boy, and it was given out in the newspapers that her husband was very much surprised when he found that his wife had managed to get aboard in disguise.  But Arago, one of the scientific staff, tells us in his Memoirs, published in 1837, that—­as we can well believe—­Freycinet knew perfectly who the “young and pretty” boy was, and had connived at her joining the ship as a lad, because she wanted to accompany her husband, and the authorities would have prevented her had they known.  She continued to wear her boy’s dress until after the ships visited Gibraltar, for Arago informs us that the solemn British Lieutenant-Governor there, when he saw her, broke into a smile, “the first perhaps that his features had worn for ten years.”  If that be true, the little lady surely did a little good by her saucy escapade.  But official society regarded the lady in trousers with a frigid stare, so that henceforth she deemed it discreet to resume feminine garments.  It does not appear that she passed for a boy when the expedition visited Sydney, and of course no hint of Madame’s presence is given in the official history of the voyage.

We now reach the stage when the veil was lifted and the mystery explained.  In 1813 the East India Company’s ship Hunter, voyaging from Calcutta to Sydney, called at the Fiji Islands.  They discovered that several Europeans were living on one of the group.  Some had been shipwrecked; some had deserted from vessels; but they had become accustomed to the life and preferred it.  The Hunter employed a party of them to collect sandal wood and beche-de-mer, one of her junior officers, Peter Dillon, being in charge.  A quarrel with natives occurred, and all the Europeans were murdered, except Dillon, a Prussian named Martin Bushart, and a seaman, William Wilson.  After the affray Bushart would certainly have been slain had he remained, so he induced the captain of the Hunter to give him a passage to the first land reached.  Accordingly Bushart, a Fiji woman who was his wife, and a Lascar companion, were landed on Barwell Island, or Tucopia.

Thirteen years later Peter Dillon was sailing in command of his own ship, the st. Patrick, from Valparaiso to Pondicherry, when he sighted Tucopia.  Curiosity prompted him to stop to enquire whether his old friend Martin Bushart was still alive.  He hove to, and shortly after two canoes put off from the land, bringing Bushart and the Lascar, both in excellent health.