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Foul Histories and Forgotten Objects: French

Entanglement in the South Pacific
Kelly Presutti
Pages 39-64 | Published online: 07 Nov 2025

 Cite this article  https://doi.org/10.1080/00043079.2025.2537611

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ABSTRACT

This essay brings a blue humanities approach to the visual and material culture of an
eighteenth-century French shipwreck, positing that “agglomerations” recovered from the
wreck offer models for a way of doing history that is ongoing and accretive, a history
attuned to the particular conditions of shipwreck. Shipwrecks sit between singular event
and continual dispersal, imperial expansion and local environment. They confound their
telling, and thus benefit from and productively expand an art historical analysis.

Di l S
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Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

Essential research support for this project came from a Society for French Historical
Studies Research Travel Award and an Affinito-Stewart grant from the President’s
Council of Cornell Women. Portions of this essay were presented at “Resurfacing:
Shipwrecks in Art, History and Archaeology” conference at the Warburg Institute in 2022,
the CAA Annual Conference in 2023, and the “Imperial Failures” symposium in Singapore
in 2024; I am grateful for the generous feedback I received at each of these venues.
Particular thanks go to Christy Anderson and the anonymous reviewers for The Art
Bulletin, whose comments greatly strengthened this manuscript and clarified my
arguments; any remaining faults are my own.

Unless otherwise indicated, translations are mine.

Notes

1 Jacques Jasmin, “Lapèyrouso—à la Bilo d’Albi,” (1853), reproduced in “La Statue de

Lapérouse à Albi,” Bulletin de la Société de Géographie 7, no. 9 (1888): 224–226.

2 The wreck and the story of subsequent recovery efforts even made their way into Jules
Verne’s fantastical account of the underseas, Vingt mille lieues sous les mers (J. Hetzel et
Cie, 1871).

3 Association Salomon, Lapérouse à Vanikoro: Résultats des Dernières Recherches Franco-

Salomonaises aux ìles Santa Cruz (Association Salomon, 1999), 11.

4 The objects are inventoried on the association’s website, La Collection La Pérouse,

accessed May 2024, https://www.collection-laperouse.fr/en/inventaire-general.

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5 Also known as “concretions,” the objects are described in French as agglomérat

composite. The missions have also recovered more commonly celebrated objects,
including porcelain dinnerware, jewelry, glass bottles, bronze buttons, and a sextant.

6 The UNESCO Convention on the Protection of the Underwater Cultural Heritage (Paris,
2001), accessed March 2024, https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000126065.

7 This statement is so oft-quoted it has become something of an aphorism; it appears in

Paul Virilio, trans. Julie Rose, The Original Accident (Polity, 2007), 10.

8 Steve Mentz, Shipwreck Modernity (University of Minnesota Press, 2015), xxxvi. Hans
Blumenberg has also written on the relationship between shipwreck and modern
regimes of thought in Shipwreck with Spectator: Paradigm of a Metaphor for Existence,
trans. Steven Rendall (MIT Press, 1996 [1979]).

9 Kelly Presutti, “Smell of the Sea: A Review of the Musée National de la Marine,”
Journal18 (August 2024), https://www.journal18.org/7398.

10 See, for example, the Tang Shipwreck display at the Asian Civilizations Museum,
Singapore; the same wreck, also referred to as the Belitung wreck, featured in the British
Museum exhibition Silk Roads (2024). I am exploring what an art history modeled on
shipwreck might look like at greater length in my current book project, Agglomerations:
Accretive Histories of the French Marine, 1827–1914.

11 Josiah Blackmore, Manifest Perdition: Shipwreck Narrative and the Disruption of Empire
(University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 28. Other recent texts examining the affordances
of shipwreck for rewriting history include Natali Pearson, Belitung: The Afterlife of a
Shipwreck (University of Hawaii Press, 2022) and David Cressy, Shipwrecks and the Bounty
of the Sea (Oxford University Press, 2022).

12 Killian Quigley, Reading Underwater Wreckage: An Encrusting Ocean (Bloomsbury

Academic, 2022).

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13 Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Duke University Press, 2010).
There have been important critiques of “new” materialist thinking and object-oriented
ontologies that argue Indigenous communities have been thinking about material
agency for centuries; see Zoe Todd, “An Indigenous Feminist’s Take on the Ontological
Turn: ‘Ontology’ is Just Another Word for Colonialism,” Journal of Historical Sociology 29,
no. 1 (2016): 4–22. I thank Sara Rich for directing me to this and other related sources.

14 While shipwreck studies and archaeology have long been reckoning with oceanic
artifacts, a recent emphasis within art history on material agency has produced new
scholarship engaged with oceanic things, including Anna Grasskamp, Art and Ocean
Objects of Early Modern Eurasia: Shells, Bodies, and Materiality (Amsterdam University
Press, 2021); Marisa Anne Bass et al., Conchophilia: Shells, Art, and Curiosity in Early
Modern Europe (Princeton University Press, 2023); Mónica Domínguez Torres, Pearls for
the Crown: Art, Nature, and Race in the Age of Spanish Expansion (Penn State University
Press, 2024); Christy Anderson, “Ropewalks and the Linear City,” Studies in the History of
Gardens and Designed Landscapes 42, no. 4 (2022): 243–253.

15 Tim Ingold, “In the Gathering Shadows of Material Things,” in Exploring Materiality and
Connectivity in Anthropology and Beyond, eds. Philipp Schorch et al. (UCL Press, 2020), 17–
35.

16 Max Quanchi, “Acknowledging Local Heroes: The Lapérouse Museum in Albi, France,”
The Journal of Pacific History 51, no. 1 (2016): 48–51.

17 Not just in France; La Pérouse is, according to Saliha Belmessous, “One of the most
internationally commemorated of all French explorers.” Belmessous, “Commemorating
French Colonialism in Australia: The Lapérouse Monument in Sydney,” History Australia 3
(2020), 471. In a recent example illustrating the persistence of the expedition’s allure,
Bernard Jimenez retraced the captain’s journey by boat, publishing photographs of each
stop alongside historic documents. Bernard Jimenez, L’expédition Lapérouse Une aventure
humaine et scientifique autour du monde (Éditions Glénat, 2019).

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18 Steinberg and Peters introduced the concept of “wet ontology” with several essays in
2015: Philip Steinberg and Kimberley Peters, “Wet Ontologies, Fluid Spaces: Giving Depth
to Volume through Oceanic Thinking,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 33,
no. 2 (2015): 247–264; Kimberley Peters and Philip Steinberg, “A Wet World: Rethinking
Place, Territory, and Time,” Society and Space (April 27, 2015),
https://www.societyandspace.org/articles/a-wet-world-rethinking-place-territory-and-
time; Philip Steinberg and Kimberley Peters, “Volume and Vision: Toward a Wet
Ontology,” Harvard Design Magazine 39 (2014): 124–129. Steve Mentz gives a useful
overview of blue humanities thinking in An Introduction to the Blue Humanities (Routledge,
2024). For Mentz, the blue humanities emerged in anglophone literary contexts in the
first two decades of the twenty-first century. The field has since expanded and placed
particular emphasis on moving beyond the Atlantic, which had been the focus of much
early work. Scholars working in the blue humanities are concerned with critiquing the
terrestrial bias of knowledge, developing new methods of reading and analysis that
account for the fluidity of the oceanic realm, decentering the human in favor of
multispecies encounters, and breaking down what Mentz terms “traditional categories
such as nation, race, and language.” A major motivating factor in blue humanities is just
how little is known of the ocean, even as it is central to ongoing climate and migration
crises, as John R. Gillis outlines in “The Blue Humanities,” Humanities 34, no. 3 (May/June
2013), https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2013/mayjune/feature/the-blue-humanities.
Note that Peters and Steinberg have since expanded their theorization to describe a
“more than wet ontology” in Kimberley Peters and Philip Steinberg, “The Ocean in
Excess: Towards a More-than-wet Ontology,” Dialogues in Human Geography 9, no. 3
(2019): 293–307, though the “more-than-wet” formulation has less currency in the blue
humanities. Indigenous peoples have long been thinking fluidly with water in ways that
defy land/water binaries. For an overview, see Melanie K. Yazzie and Cutcha Risling
Baldy, “Introduction: Indigenous Peoples and the Politics of Water,” Decolonization:
Indigeneity, Education & Society 7, no. 1 (2018): 1–18.

19 Aaron M. Hyman and Dana Leibsohn, “Lost and Found at Sea, or a Shipwreck’s Art
History,” West 86th 28, no. 1 (Spring–Summer 2021).

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20 Sara Rich, Shipwreck Hauntography: Underwater Ruins and the Uncanny (Amsterdam
University Press, 2021), 13.

21 The instructions were included in Jean-François de Galaup, comte de La Pérouse,

Voyage de la Pérouse autour du monde (Paris: L’Imprimerie de la République, an V, 1797),
13–61. Bronwen Douglas, “Expeditions, Encounters, and the Praxis of Seaborne
Ethnography. The French Voyages of La Pérouse and Freycinet,” in Expedition into Empire
Exploratory Journeys and the Making of the Modern World, ed. Martin Thomas (Routledge,
2015), 108–126.

22 Jasmin, “Lapèyrouso—à la Bilo d’Albi,” (1853), 225.

23 The pithiest expression of this idea comes from Carl Schmitt, “The sea has no
character. . . . On the waves there is nothing but waves.” Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the
Earth (Telos, 2003 [1950]), 43. William Langewiesche details the limited regulation of
contemporary oceanic transit, whereby ships “are possibly the most independent
objects on earth,” in The Outlaw Sea: A World of Freedom, Chaos, and Crime (North Point
Press, 2004).

24 Different explanations have been posited for the wreck, and there is an ongoing hunt
for evidence of survivors who may have set up camp on Vanikoro. I am not interested in
solving that mystery here but instead dwelling on the proliferating associations
shipwrecks can generate. For an archaeological inquiry into the potential camp, see Jean-
Christophe Galipaud and Valérie Jauneau, Au-delà d’un naufrages: Les survivants de
l’expédition Lapérouse (Errance, 2012).

25 Catherine Gaziello, L’expédition de Lapérouse, 1785–1788: Réplique Française aux

Voyages de Cook (CTHS, 1984).

26 On hydrography, dead reckoning, and the guesswork involved in eighteenth- and

nineteenth-century French navigation of the Pacific, see John Gascoigne, “Navigating the
Pacific from Bougainville to Dumont d’Urville: French Approaches to Determining

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Longitude, 1766–1840,” in Navigation Enterprises in Europe and its Empires, eds. Rebekah
Higgitt et al. (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 180–199.

27 Ibid., 185.

28 Sara Caputo’s excellent account of the phenomenon of “ships tracks” shares and
expands on several of these observations. Caputo, Tracks on the Ocean (University of
Chicago Press, 2024).

29 Bruno Latour, “Visualization and Cognition: Thinking with Eyes and Hands,” Knowledge
and Society 6 (1986): 1–40.

30 Ibid., 6.

31 The constantly shifting boundaries between land and sea have been productively
theorized by Michele Currie Navakas, Liquid Landscape: Geography and Settlement at the
Edge of Early America (Penn State University Press, 2017) and Tiffany Lethabo King, The
Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies (Duke University Press,
2019).

32 Latour, “Visualization and Cognition,” 19.

33 La Pérouse, Voyage de la Pérouse.

34 Ibid., i.

35 As translated in “Private Instructions from the King to the Sieur de La Pérouse,

Captain in the Navy,” in A Voyage Round the World (London: Printed by A. Hamilton, for G.
G. and J. Robinson; J. Edwards; and T. Payne, 1799), 38.

36 Carol E. Harrison, “Projections of the Revolutionary Nation: French Expeditions in the

Pacific, 1791–1803,” Osiris 24, no. 1 (2009).

37 Bernard Smith, European Vision and the South Pacific (Harper and Row, 1984). Smith’s
pioneering work has inspired countless studies of travel imagery and objects collected

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by voyagers; see the essays collected in Felix Driver and Luciana Martins, eds., Tropical
Visions in an Age of Empire (University of Chicago Press, 2005) and Nicholas Thomas,
Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism in the Pacific (Harvard
University Press, 1991).

38 Duché de Vancy’s drawings from the expedition are held at the Service historique de
la Défense Centre historique des archives, “Recueil des dessins executes, durant
l’expédition du comte Jean-François Galaup de la Pérouse,” SH 352.

39 La Pérouse, Voyage de la Pérouse, pl. 25, “Naufrage des Deux Chaloupes, Au Port des
Français” and pl. 66, “Massacre de MM. de Langle, Mamanon, et de Dix Autres”. Charlotte
Guichard has remarked on the absence of references to violence in drawings from the
expedition despite textual references to violence in La Pérouse’s account; the published
“massacre” plate was based only on a map of the battle. Charlotte Guichard, “The Art of
Embarquement: Empire, Commerce and the Sea in Eighteenth-Century France,” lecture
October 21, 2022, New York University, YouTube, 1:22:02, accessed December 19, 2024,
https://youtu.be/qCZyUDl6Eug?si=qkxM8pO6ZktjjYVQ.

40 Vasilij Priklonski, “Funeral Customs of the Yakut,” Globus 59 (1891). I thank Raissa
Krivitsky for helping me navigate the Russian scholarship on Kamchatkan and Siberian
burial practices.

41 Journal des Etats Généraux 20, 22 Jan. 1791, cited by Harrison, “Projections of the
Revolutionary Nation,” 33.

42 Arnaud Orain et al., “Usages de l’absent: La figure de Lapérouse et la Révolution

française,” Annales HSS 76, no. 1 (2021): 47–82.

43 This model continues to characterize popular framing of shipwreck recovery, as in

headlines like Franz Lidz, “Ancient Shipwreck Preserves a Deep Bronze Age Time
Capsule,” New York Times (June 20, 2024),
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/20/science/shipwreck-bronze-age-israel.html?
smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare&sgrp=c-cb. Byron Hamann

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complicates the time capsule analogy by pointing out that wrecks were slowly unfolding
and constantly evolving sites in “Fieldnotes from Solaris: Ship’s Logs, Shipwrecks, and
Salt Water as Medium,” Grey Room 85 (December 2021): 100–45.

44 Hélène Richard, Le Voyage de d’Entrecasteaux à la recherche de Lapérouse (Éditions du

CTHS, 1986); Nicole Starbuck, “Entre Exploration, Observation, et Régénération: Regards
Croisés de Voyageurs sur les familles françaises et exotiques sous la revolution
française,” Annales historiques de la Révolution française 3 (2016): 175–198.

45 Dillon, meanwhile, collected as many artifacts as he could and displayed them on his
route back to Europe, earning himself a knighthood from the French government. He
published his account as Peter Dillon, Narrative and Successful Result of a Voyage in the
South Seas Performed by Order of the Government of British India, to Ascertain the Actual
Fate of La Pérouse’s Expedition Interspersed with Accounts of the Religion, Manners, Customs
and Cannibal Practices of the South Sea Islanders, (London: Hurst, Chance and Co, 1829).

46 Vilashini Cooppan, “Time-Maps: A Field Guide to the Decolonial Imaginary,” Critical

Times 2, no. 3 (2019): 396–415.

47 Jules Dumont d’Urville, L’Astrolabe: Voyage autour du monde (Nouvelle edition),

(Limoges: E. Ardant, 1881), 225.

48 Jules Dumont d’Urville, Voyage de la corvette l’Astrolabe execute par ordre du roi,
pendant les années 1826–1827–1828–1829 (Paris: J. Tatsu, 1830–33); Jules Dumont
d’Urville, Voyage pittoresque autour du monde (Paris: L. Tenré et Henri Dupuy, 1834); Jules
Dumont d’Urville, Voyage autour du monde (Paris: Furne, 1859). In addition to numerous
excepts in local newspapers, the account of the discovery of the wreck site appears in
compilations including M. Albert-Montémont, Voyages autour du monde et en Océanie
(Paris: Chez J. Bry Ainé, 1855).

49 D’Entrecasteaux did bring back some hydrographic data, especially around the
Loyalty Islands, but as he was unaware of the location of the wreck he was not charting
the area near the reefs of Vanikoro that Dumont d’Urville would have to approach.

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50 Geoffrey Clark, “Indigenous Transfer of La Pérouse Artefacts in the Southeast

Solomon Islands,” Australian Archaeology 57 (Dec. 2003): 103–111.

51 Adriana Craciun, “The Seeds of Disaster,” in The Material Cultures of Enlightenment, eds.
A. Craciun and S. Schaffer (Palgrave, 2016), 57.

52 Indigenous feminist scholars highlight the role of refusal as a strategy of resistance

against colonialism. See Cutcha Risling Baldy, We are Dancing for You: Native Feminisms
and the Revitalization of Women’s Coming-of-Age Ceremonies (University of Washington
Press, 2018).

53 Tamatam and Fanadik are part of the Micronesian atoll, while Vanikoro is in
Melanesia, resulting in a geographic elision on the page of the atlas. Adriana Craciun
points out that the map is awkwardly out of order in the publication in Craciun, “The
Seeds of Disaster,” 47–69.

54 Dumont d’Urville, L’Astrolabe, 223.

55 Dumont d’Urville, L’Astrolabe, 254.

56 Adriana Craciun compares the Franklin expedition to the wreck of La Pérouse’s ships
in “Seeds of Disaster.”

57 The monument has been destroyed and rebuilt several times, most recently in 2005
by the Association Salomon, the group responsible for organizing dives to the wreck site
and collecting the agglomerations. The structure has apparently collapsed again but the
Association Salomon reports that political disputes with the Salomon Islands have
prevented them from rebuilding. Raymond Proner, conversation with author, January 4,
2024.

58 Dumont d’Urville, L’Astrolabe, 126.

59 Ibid., 247.

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60 Andy Martin, “The Enlightenment in Paradise: Bougainville, Tahiti, and the Duty of
Desire,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 41, no. 2 (2008): 203–216.

61 A small selection of Sainson’s original drawings are collected in Louis Auguste de

Sainson, Dessins originaux de Louis Auguste de Sainson pour Voyage de découvertes autour
du monde et à la recherche de La Pérouse, par Dumont D’Urville sur la corvette l’Astrolabe
(1826 à 1829), Bibliothèque nationale de France (Richelieu), FOL-SG-4 (RES). While I have
not located the drawing of the inauguration of the monument, the drawings that do
exist are reproduced with reasonable enough fidelity to Dumont d’Urville’s published
account to suggest the lithograph generally adhered to Sainson’s original. Dumont
d’Urville himself remarked on the “truth” of Sainson’s images for the Voyage pittoresque
in Dumont d’Urville, Voyage pittoresque, 2, viii.

62 The lithograph is listed in Bibliographie de la France 18 (Paris: Pillet, 1829), 485.

63 Crépin seems to have found his modifications sufficiently adaptive to take credit for
both the drawing and an associated painting in the image’s caption, “Crépin pinx. et del.”
The painted version is held today in the National Library of Australia, Canberra: Louis
Phillipe Crépin, Inauguration du monument élevé par l’Astrolabe à La Pérouse à Vanikoro, 14
March, 1828, [1831?], T2709 NK11641. The artist had previously adapted views from the
La Pérouse expedition reproduced in La Pérouse, Voyage de La Pérouse into paintings,
including Naufrage des canaux de Lapeyrouse au Port-Français, sur les côtes de la Californie
(1806), Seattle Art Museum. Orain et al. briefly remark on Crépin’s idealization of the
scene in “Usages de l’absent,” 78.

64 Cooppan, “Time-Maps,” 396.

65 Bronwen Douglas, “Art as Ethno-historical Text: Science, Representation and

Indigenous Presence in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Oceanic Voyage Literature,”
in Double Vision: Art Histories and Colonial Histories in the Pacific, eds. Nicholas Thomas
and Diane Losche (Cambridge University Press, 1999), 65–99.

66 Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (Routledge, 1992).

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67 Grégoire Louis Domeny de Rienzi, Océanie ou Cinquième partie du monde (Paris: Firmin
Didot, 1836), 3, 407.

68 Douglas, “Art as Ethno-historical Text,” 70.

69 Elsje van Kessel observes the transformation of the value of gems at sea, finding
stone to become more liquid, in “Stone Liquidities: On Gems, Bodies, and Value in Early
Modern Shipwreck,” Viator 53, 2 (2022), 1–15.

70 Notable objects returned to France included one anchor of approximately 1,500 lb

(700 kg), one short canon labeled “12,” one sword hilt, and two smaller canons or
“pierriers.” Marie de Louvières, “Un marin Français,” La Sylphide (September 1, 1849),
151; several of the other anchors recorded in Sainson’s map were left at the debris field
to be recovered at a later date. Dumont d’Urville also contributed a number of
ethnographic objects collected over the course of his voyages, which greatly expanded
the range of displays featured in the museum, as Ralph Kingston discusses in “Armchair
Expeditionaries: Voyages into the French Musée de la Marine, 1828–78,” in Expedition
into Empire Exploratory Journeys and the Making of the Modern World, ed. Martin Thomas
(Routledge, 2015), 127–47.

71 Dillon arrived in France in 1827 and contributed two bells, one featuring a fleurs de
lys, several bronze canons, and items seemingly deemed not worthy of naming,
described as “etc., etc.” Ludovic Drapeyron, “Le centenaire de Lapérouse,” Revue de
géographie XXII (January 1, 1888), 375.

72 Géraldine Barron, “Revealing Maritimity in 19th-century France: Representations,

Heritage, and History,” Artefact 14 (2021): 269–91.

73 “Chronique Maritime,” Journal du Commerce (13 juillet 1833), n.p.

74 M. Fr. Thomas, “Affaire de l’Electeur du Tarn,” L’Union république du Tarn (September

7, 1850), 4.

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75 Todd Porterfield, “The Obelisk at the Place de la Concorde,” The Allure of Empire: Art in
the Service of French Imperialism, 1798–1836 (Princeton University Press, 1998), 13–41.

76 Thomas, “Affaire de l’Electeur du Tarn,” 4.

77 For the elaborate visual display of Louis XIV’s navy, and its concealment of the
violence of the practice of galley slavery on which it was founded, see Meredith Martin
and Gillian Weiss, The Sun King at Sea: Maritime Art and Galley Slavery in Louis XIV’s France
(Getty Research Institute, 2022).

78 Kelly Presutti, “Coasts,” in Land into Landscape: Art, Environment, and the Making of
Modern France (Yale University Press, 2024).

79 Lawrence Sondhaus, Navies in Modern World History (Reaktion Books, 2004), 49.

80 On threat diffusion as strategy, see Brian C. Chao, “A Brilliant Second: France as a

Great Naval Power,” in Navies in Multipolar Worlds, eds. Paul Kennedy and Evan Wilson
(Routledge, 2020), 23–46.

81 “Les Deux Marins de la Cour du Louvre,” Le Charivari (March 14, 1844).

82 Jasmin, “Lapèyrouso,” 225.

83 Ibid.

84 Claude Charles Marie du Campe de Rosamel to M. le Maréchal, Duc de Dalmatie,

Paris, 21 March 1838, Archives Départementales du Tarn.

85 “La Statue de Lapeyrouse, par M. Raggi,” La Gazette de France (August 27, 1843), n.p.

86 Le Ministre Secrétaire d’état de la marine et des colonies to the Mayor of Albi

February 22, 1830, Archives Départementales du Tarn.

87 By “ascendant” I am thinking not only of the statue’s towering height but also the
tremendous popularity of a print showing Captain Cook being carried up to the heavens:
John Thane (publisher) after Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg and John Webber, The

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Apotheosis of Captain Cook, 1794, engraving, 12 1/4 in × 5/8 in. (31 × 22 cm), British
Museum, London, museum no.1867,1214.28, as well as Gananath Obeyesekere’s
critique of the trope in The Apotheosis of Captain Cook: European Mythmaking in the Pacific
(Princeton University Press, 1997).

88 “Compte-rendu de l’arrivée à Nouméa des épaves apportées par le Bruat et

provenant de l’expédition de La Pérouse,” Moniteur de la Nouvelle-Calédonie 1247 (August
17, 1883), 252.

89 Ibid., 253.

90 Ibid.

91 “Nouvelles,” L’Entracte (November 13, 1883), n.p.

92 “Chronique Locale,” L’Union république du Tarn (January 26, 1884), n.p.

93 Much later, in 1988, human remains recovered by the Association Salomon were also
interred at the site of the monument. Yann Roques, “Albi: Le Mystère des marins
emmurés de la statue Lapérouse,” La Dépêche (July 18, 2021),
https://www.ladepeche.fr/2021/07/18/le-mystere-des-marins-emmures-de-la-statue-
laperouse-9678581.php.

94 Rich, Shipwreck Hauntography, 18. Underwater archeologists are increasingly

grappling with the question of whether to excavate shipwrecks at all. See George Bass,
“The Ethics of Shipwreck Archaeology,” in Ethical Issues in Archaeology, eds. Larry
Zimmerman et al. (Altamira Press and Society for American Archaeology, 2003), 65–66.

95 Martine Lecaudey, “Inconnu de Vanikoro: le mystère est relance,” La Dépêche

(November 17, 2007), https://www.ladepeche.fr/article/2007/11/17/293723-inconnu-de-
vanikoro-le-mystere-est-relance.html. A French doctoral thesis also attempted to discern
the sailor’s identity on the basis of dental records: Coranie Lutton, “Sur les traces de La
Pérouse au large de Vanikoro: apport de l’odontologie légale aux fouilles
archéologiques,” PhD diss., Université de Nantes, 2007.

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96 Other exhibits address the shipment of a disassembled lighthouse to New Caledonia

from metropolitan France; the remnants of US military infrastructure in the South
Pacific; and the establishment of a ferry system to navigate the archipelago in the
twentieth century.

97 Association Salomon, Inventory, (2016), FAI08170, “Lot d’empreintes et de blocs de

corail amalgamés. Gardés pour scéno.” https://www.collection-
laperouse.fr/en/inventaire-general.

98 Raymond Proner, conversation with author, January 4, 2024.

99 Killian Quigley addresses the salvage paradigm, which can both remove artifacts from
their context and provide a form of affective closure for those who may have material
relationships to the sunken ships, in “Concretion: Submarine Growths and Imperial
Wrecks,” Critical Times 6, no. 3 (December 2023): 517–39.

100 Neil A. North, “Formation of Coral Concretions on Marine Iron,” The International
Journal of Nautical Archaeology and Underwater Exploration 5, no. 3 (1976): 253–258.

101 Jennifer Nelson, “Here, too,” broadside, Ugly Duckling Press (February 2016),
https://uglyducklingpresse.org/publications/here-too/

102 Jennifer Nelson, “What is a Classic? On the role of Endurance in Art History,” Selva: A
Journal of the History of Art 3 [Fall 2021): 1–6.

103 Saltwater corrosion impacts metals even while the ship is still sailing; ship owners
continue to struggle with “iron sickness” today.

104 Pierre-Yves Le Meur, “Conflict and Agreement: The Politics of Nickel in Thio, New
Caledonia,” in Large-scale Mines and Local-level Politics: Between New Caledonia and Papua
New Guinea (ANU Press, 2017), 157–82.

105 The industry has, however, suffered decline in recent years, further suggesting the
potential dissolution or always present fragility of these forms. At the time of writing,

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May 2024, New Caledonia is in the midst of significant upheavals as France enacted
voting reforms that would continue to secure the French hold on the island despite
Indigenous Kanak calls for independence.

106 Briag Merlet, “La Boussole, La Pérouse’s sailing ship, soon anchored at the foot of
the Musée de la Marine in Paris?,” Boatnews.com, February 8, 2022,
https://www.boatnews.com/story/39269/la-boussole-la-perouses-sailing-ship-soon-
anchored-at-the-foot-of-the-musee-de-la-marine-in-paris. Boussole is also the name of
the app helping museum goers navigate the museum.

107 Helen Goiran, “The Role of the French Military on Key Issues for Oceania,” East-West
Center Asia Pacific Bulletin 416 (March 26, 2018): 1–2.

Additional information
Notes on contributors

Kelly Presutti

Kelly Presutti is assistant professor of history of art and visual studies at

Cornell University. Her current book project looks at the art and object
collections of the French navy, bringing an oceanic perspective to the study
of empire [Department of the History of Art and Visual Studies, Cornell
University, Ithaca, NY 14853, [email protected]].

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