Adynata N° 231 - august 2026

What if La Perouse did find what he was looking for ? by Alfred Batayon

« I have looked in vain through all my notes and every printed journey ; I did not find the story nor the tale of this island, and I think the only reason the geographers kept on placing it on the great ocean is because of the map admiral Anson took on the Manilla galleon. » (JF de La Perouse)

The area searched by the Pandora- Veidt-Batayon expedition from may 2022 to march 2025, as it is shown on official maps.

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[A word from the editor : In order to celebrate the 500th anniversary of Juan Sebastian del Cano's (the first European navigator around the world) disappearing in the middle of the Pacific ocean, we present you here with a translation of his travelog, as it was retrieved last June by members of the Pandora- Veidt-Batayon expedition, in an undersea grotto of the Clipperton Island. Prominent Professor Batayon, eventually back after a 3-year research stint, will present afterwards some strange conclusions on his fantastic journey.]

14 August 1526 A.D. There ! I'm dead. Meaning I'm free at last. Free to organise at will the journey that will allow me to go back... there. With a little help of some determined friends, I've made arrangements to officially decease thanks to scurvy. Captain Garcia de Loaysia being buried at sea himself since a few days, no one will ever have any doubts about the Santa Ana's survivors word - provided she makes it back to Sevilla. Indeed I've chosen the plainest way of dying for a sailor in order to avoid undue heroism, which would draw too much attention on me, which I don't need by any means. As it had been settled, my other fellow companions - a few survivors of the Retondo , two out of the three Indians1 who had come along with us to Spain, as well as some reliable people from Biscay - and I have been left near Concepcion Bay where the Habanera was awaiting us. This modest caravel is supposedly vanished since eleven years she has been discreetly « recovered » by Calixto Metun, my blood brother. Stocks were ready ; we set sail at once towards the center of the Pacific sea, for I want to be the first to reach the middle continent, this « Mediapacífico » we've heard so much about six years ago before Magellan died. Today I reckon that if he was killed, the reason was that he spoke out too loud his intention to go there, in the teeth of the Indians who had yet categorically forbidden us to do. That is the reason why I haven't told anyone about this, apart from a few cousins, nieces and nephews, and country fellows. In order to mislead and discourage possible travelers, I had prompted Pigafetta to scatter his narrative with a few fantasies Marco Polo wouldn't have 1 Read : Indonesians.

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disowned. This dumbling Pigafetta being totally devoid of imagination except when he's drunk, but then he cannot hold a quill - I've written said excerpts myself. I even resorted to this old chestnut Amazons story, the truth being that, the biggest the lie, the easiest it is believed. « For twenty days and three months we went into a gulf where we sailed a good four thousand leagues on the Pacific sea. Its name suits her well, for all the while we had no strike of luck and saw no land but two small deserted islands where were only birds and trees and we called them the Misfortunate Islands. The distance that separates them is of two hundred leagues and there is no place where the water is deep enough to cast an anchor. (...) Had Our Lord and His Mother not helped us in providing a fair weather and provisions and other things, we'd have starved to death upon this too large a sea. Methinks no man will undertake such a journey ever. » - « Our eldest pilot told us how, on an island called Ocoloro, under Java the Great, are only women to be met, who get pregnant by the wind. And whenever they give birth, if the child is a boy they kill him, and if the child is a girl they feed her. And if men come into their island they kill them whenever they can. »2

I wish such chimeras will scare the best hardened of spirits. My people deserve to recover their native land and stay there alone. For this is what I'm seeking : we, second-to-none Basques, must have come from somewhere. Now that Christian realms are tormenting us and smothering us with their sick and wizened faith, it is about time we find an asylum on this world, where no one will ever dare looking for us : and we shall call it New-Biscay. [a word by M. Batayon : There follows a heart- breaking relation where del Cano and his crew sail the Pacific ocean in every conceivable direction without ever reaching the least islet. Eventually, after four years of a tooth and nail navigation, the Habanera reduced to a mere carcass going under, her crew attritioned to seven people by many adventures, scurvy, slaughters and hunger, del Cano quits keeping his log for want of ink and paper. A last and ominous paragraph, scribbled in charcoal on the forelast coverpage of the book, sounds like an epitaph :] Where is it ? Is it possible that we found it and yet not realised ? That we went all around it unceasingly for a whole four years-time ? And yet there has been 2 These two extracts feature in Pigafetta's « Relation of Magellan's voyage around the world », with but a few slight modifications.

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sure enough signs. I know it's here. We have seen its coastline, its mounds, its clouds ; its winds carried us away from it. Its fish, its birds have fed us. Who prevented us from reaching its shores ? Is it but the land of dreams ? It is here, I swear, where the hand can reach it, where the heart can reach it, not quite in the middle of the ocean, as the heart is not quite in the middle of the chest : the Nomediapacifico3. *

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« We are closing in to the very moment when all the peoples will know the extent of the seas surrounding them and of the lands they dwell in. » (Journal of La Pérouse) The purpose of this article is not to solve the « riddle of La Perouse » (which has been completely cleared up by various expeditions led by the Salomon Association) but to ask a question that seems to have never been broached by literature. Some might consider such question sheer speculation, though they have not been granted with a wide knowledge of the world's history of great discoveries. Others, less numerous and all the more enlightened, will certainly grasp the meaning of this mystery I am intent to here unveil. As we know, La Perouse's expedition was commissioned by Louis XVI himself, to counterbalance Louis XV with Bougainville ; its stakes are emphasized by the king's famous words on the scaffold : « Have we heard of M. de la Pérouse ? » Having left the shores of France seven years ago, the navigator's ships were at the time wrecked on Vanikoro island in the Salomon archipelago. Yet a makeshift European encampment has been found on its shore4, proving the survival of a group of men at least. The not finding of a travelog on the premises does not prove anything, even though some might argue that a surviving officer would never have failed to keep some record. As it was, the inhabitants' habit of stealing astronomers' copybooks rather speaks in favour of a non fortuitous disappearance. « M. Verron had made a lot [of observations] on land during four days and four nights in order to determine this very same 3 This fundamental discovery reveals at last the origin of the name given to the Misplaced Continent by the happy few who seek it : Nomedia and its inhabitants, the Nomedians. 4 By Peter Dillon, an Irish sailor, in 1826 first, then in 1828 by Dumont d'Urville.

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Adynata N° 231 - august 2026 longitude ; but the copybook where he kept record having been taken from him, he only kept observations made on the eve of our departure. » (Journal of La Perouse) Here is our

first clue that some unsettling scheme is afoot in these waters : why did the natives - who wrote not - take hold of Europeans' writings ? And no insignificant ones, to say the least, for they contained the means to trace back the routes leading to their land ? It strikes me as an evidence that the Indians (as they called the Polynesians) were far less dunces than we're invited to believe, and that they did have a purpose of their own. More items of some significance add up to that. First of all, there are numerous incidents on board the Boudeuse and the Etoile - Bougainville's ships. While La Perouse's Astrolabe and Boussole sustain less damage and snubs, it may well be thanks to their admiral's optimism that prevented him to record everything blow-by-blow, so as not to bore his readers. « Besides, Baragan presented no resources of any sorts, but rather much sundry hardships as well as any thing that will compell one to operate slowly. » - « We saw then that some seams of the ships were utterly devoid of oakum. We also found out two auger holes which dowels had simply not been set. » - « M. de la Giraudais told me that not only his topsail yard had been torn but also four of the shroud chains ; he also said that, but for two oxen, he'd lost all the cattle boarded in Montevideo ; our sharing of this last misfortune was no solace. » - « Our foresail having been torn away... » - « On the 11th, at 2 o'clock in the morning (...) the cable between the bitt and the hawsehole broke and as a consequence we lost our anchor. » - « This is how a nine-days mooring cost us six anchors. » (Journal of Bougainville) « We henceforth had too many occasions to hear from the British settlement whose deserters caused us a lot of trouble and annoyance. » (Journal of La Perouse)

Espionage is at no loss and one feels legitimate to wonder about the motives of some characters involved in these adventures. « During a south-western storm, the San Fernando who moored close to the Etoile dragged her anchors, nightly rammed into the flute and at first shock, broke her bowsprit level with the partner. Her headsails were then carried away. » - « On 7 September, no pilot being available, I embarked on the Etoile (..) intending to set sail the next day and supervise a course supposed to be of a great difficulty. The San Fernando and the Carmen got under way to La Encenada from Montevideo on the same day and I had expected to follow them ; Nomedia 0 { 5 }

Adynata N° 231 - august 2026 however the San Fernando - on board was this pilot by the name of Philippe - got under way in the middle of the night, only so as to conceal her course from us, leaving her fellowship in the same trouble they wanted to put us into. » - « On the 9, (...) I bypassed [the Spanish ships] and navigated by soundings, my own ships in front, and in our wake was this Philippe, as mean a pilot as he is a man. (...) The Spanish followed our lights and moored behind us at a distance of a league and a half. » (Journal of Bougainville) « This man, whose name is Aoturu, wished to come along with us. (...) However, in spite of his mispronouncing but a few words of our language, he used to go out on his own every single day, roamed about the city [Paris] and never got stray. (...) As I was not changing the ship's course, Aoturu said several times that we should find there coconuts, bananas, hens, hogs, and above all women whom he depicted to us, with much expressive gestures, as very obliging ones. Outraged to see that such reasons were not influencing me, he ran and seized the rudder's wheel, having perfectly understood its purpose, and in the teeth of the helmsman, tried to change our course and have us navigate towards a star he was pointing to. We hardly could abate him and such rebuke caused him a lot of grief. » (Journal of Bougainville) « Rumour had it on both ships that M. de Commerson's servant, Baré, was in fact a woman. (...) An episode on Tahiti turned suspicion into certainty. M. de Commerson went to land to botanize. From the very moment Baré - who was following, with his books - set foot on the shore, Tahitians gathered around her, crying she was a woman, wishing to show her around the island. (...) When I was aboard, an all-weeping Baré confessed to me that she was a girl : she told me that in Rochefort she had deceived her master by introducing herself in a man's disguise when embarking ; that she had already waited a Genevese man in Paris as a footman ; that, being born in Burgundy and an orphan, a trial she'd lost had caused her destitution and determined her to conceal her sex ; besides, she knew as she embarked that the whole purpose was to go around the world and such a journey aroused her curiosity. » (Journal of Bougainville)

We must emphasize here on the fact that M. de Commerson disembarked on the Isle of France [now Maurice] on the way back to Europe, as well as 23 other sailors. Bougainville does not mention it, but Jeanne Baré was among them ; now, her master being dead a month later, what have she made of her new freedom ? Is it vain to imagine that she has fallen in with one of the sailors and organised a secret expedition towards Tahiti, or even further ? Indeed there is no evidence, but then there are none to prove the opposite. Considering the 21-year old Prince of Nassau-Siegen who was allowed to take Nomedia 0 { 6 }

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part in the campaign by the king of France himself, what was he really doing on board ? His official post was to assist M. de Commerson, though Baré was enough for the job. Rumour had it that he joined the expedition on the spur of the moment to avoid creditors, but then again such a public figure must have had powerful backers ? When one considers the life he had afterwards, one must conclude that the Prince did present the perfect background for a Grand Siecle « diplomat » - that is, an international spy. Finally, isn't it strange that, after an involved stopover on the Falklands to retrocess these islands to Spain, the French ships did stop in Montevideo at the very moment when powers-that-be were arresting Jesuit priests who had come, at last, under the pale ? When one considers the enormity of time and means devoted to such expeditions, one must conclude that such coincidences seem all the more unlikely. From our bird's view thanks to a comprehensive knowledge of the Earth and to progress of the Enlightenment, it is now hard to take in the genuine war of secrecy that sea-powers of the time were waging against each other - a war quite similar to the modern era struggles waged by big industrial corporations. « Since I left Europe, all my thoughts were focused on ancient navigators' routes : their journals are so ill-conceived that one has to wild-guess their meaning ; and geographers, who are no sailors, are usually so ignorant of hydrographia that they were not able to bring a sound criticism upon these desperately flawed journals ; they have therefore drawn islands that do not exist, like ghosts that vanish in front of new navigators. » - « I've come to these conclusions on location and must confess that the discovery of islands is due to nothing but random, and that, as often as not, seemingly wise schemes have kept navigators at bay. » « I feel it my duty to deliver here my opinion on Admiral de Fuentes' alleged canal of SaintLazarus. I am convinced that this admiral never existed and that navigating inside America through lakes and rivers and in such a short time, is (...) absurd. » - « Then, the Russians were denying the very existence of these two islands, yet more extended than the British Islands. » (Journal of La Perouse) « Let me come back on my tracks to present you with a modest view of this ideal republic. (...) Its position in longitude and latitude is a secret belonging to the government and I impose silence upon myself regarding it, though I can tell you that it is the only place on earth where inhabitants are men without any vice, prejudice, want or disagreement. » (Journal of Commerson) Nomedia 0 { 7 }

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« Since Cythera [Tahiti], we have found various lands looking fine thanks to their size, location, height and the peoples who live on them. However, hurried by want of food, we couldn't visit any of them. What might we say about Cythera ? Have we only seen its hinterland ? Is M. de Commerson conveying the key to its treasures (...) ? Did we only sound its shores ? Do we know of a single good place to moor ? What does the purpose of this journey boil down to, regarding the nation ? How strong shouldn't we have endeavoured to keep on going westward ? We might thus have blazed a new trail, useful to the nation, if anything some glorious finding ? To this day, the only truth I see in this adventure is but the spending of two costly commissionings. » (Starot de Saint-Germain 5, writer on board La Boudeuse ) « Besides, how often have we not longed for Narborough's and Beauchesne's travelogs as they had left their very own hands, and felt sorry to be only able to read these defaced extracts : worse than their author's affectation on deleting whatever is useful to navigation, whenever some related detail escapes them, their ignorance of state-of-the-art terms a sailor must use, induces them to consider as tricky those necessary and sanctioned terms that they soon replace with sheer nonsense. All their purpose is but to produce a work convenient to sissies of both sexes and their work only achieves to arrange a book that bores everyone and serves no one. » - « We had solid grounds to believe that the southern land of Saint-Spirit was in fact the Great Cyclades archipelago, and that Quiros had mistook them for a continent and described them from a romantic point of view. » - « The Dutch are extremely cautious about keeping secret every single map they use for navigation in these waters. They are likely to worsen the jeopardy. » - « I will present you now with a few details regarding this part of the world, as it is concealed from other nations' knowledge both by distance and the silence of the Dutch. (...) It is rather peculiar that the Portuguese kept a factory on Timor, and more peculiar yet that they do not take a great benefit from it. (...) Every engineer and sailor hired in this area are compelled, as they leave their position, to give up their maps and plans, and to swear they're not keeping any with them. Not long ago, a denizen of Batavia was whipped, branded and relegated on an almost deserted island, for he had shown a map of the Moluccas to an English man. » (Journal of Bougainville)

More than this, one will keep in mind that the great James Cook himself, after his second journey, considered the Antarctic continent as a pipedream, although everyone else took its existence for ascertained. No doubt will I be objected that nowhere lies an explicit mention of a sought continent. But then if Louis XVI was looking for a consistent land to claim and occupy, such a deed would have had to be kept in secrecy, therefore it is 5 Saint-Germain was also debarked on the Isle of France, and no one knows what has happened to him.

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obvious that reports sent by La Perouse could not mention it, as they were given to foreigners and thus ran many chances to get exposed6. The object of La Perouse's quest had to remain hidden, even from his own crew. For only a happy ending to this adventure would have led to the publication of its purpose. Now here is another question I am thinking of : was La Perouse the only one to twine secrecy around the ultimate continent, the famous Nomedia that del Cano had mentioned under his last breath ? How else could one explain some of the Natives' attitudes, if not to prevent access to a land that stood for us as a particular world ? Their origins, perhaps ? « The old man was our host's father. (...) This venerable man seem to hardly register our arrival ; unresponding to our gestures, he went out and shew no more fear than surprise, nor even a mild curiosity : far from partaking in the ecstasy provoked on this people by the sight of us, his dreamy and concerned air seemed to vouch for his fearing that his happy days, spent in peace's bosom, be troubled by the arrival of a new race. » (Journal of Bougainville)

The old man refusing to take part in the extravagant demonstrations of the Tahitian people, is he not a guardian, a priest of sorts looking at all cost for a way to keep the invaders at bay ? It is indeed very clever to throw their women and daughters at the sailors' head, frustrated as they were after months of navigation. « I am asking it : how is it possible to hold back to work, amidst such a display, four hundred young French sailors, who have not seen a single woman in six months ? In the teeth of all our cautions, a young girl went aboard and placed herself on the poop, in front of a hatchway above the capstan ; this hatch was open to give air to the men at the heave. This young girl flippantly got rid of her loincloth and exposed herself, as Venus appeared to the Phrygian shepherd : she had the same celestial shapes. Sailors and soldiers hurried to reach the hatch and no capstan has ever been heaved with such a haste. Our cautions however succeeded in holding back these beguiled men ; the easiest part of the task was not to control oneself. » (Journal of Bougainville) 6 Apart from the reports brought to Europe by Barthelemy de Lesseps, who were debarked in Kamtchatka and crossed Russia alone - and the one brought back by Dufresne the naturalist from Macao. Incidentally, they were the only survivors of the expedition.

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It is as clever, if not more dangerous, to fake any interest in the « rassades », those preposterous glass trinkets Europeans brought there by the ton, usually to the cost of food and staples. One is bound to wonder how Europeans could be dumb enough to think the Natives were granting any worth to trinkets, where everything leads to conclude that they only used them as stakes in a competitive game of sorts, a childish game indeed, though perfectly suited to waste the navigators' time while they were so close to their goal. Let's keep in mind that the term « taboo » was born in these very waters : the island of Tabuaeran lies there alone, at mid-distance between Tahiti and Hawaii. Who then says that La Perouse did vanish, that he's lost at sea, or that he perished at the hands of Vanikoro's denizens ? Who says then that he has not acknowledged the course to that continent he was seeking, and that he did not go there to spend happy days, far from that Europe where, had he come back, he might have ended up shot or guillotined ? Or, ironically, exiled ? Nothing tells us so, actually. One clue even leads me to think that he did find, although in his travelog, he intended to deceive his readers. « Nothing came up to interrupt the monotony of our enduring crossing ; we followed a route quite parallel to the one we had past year, when we linked Easter island to the Sandwich islands ; all along the latter, we'd been incessantly surrounded by birds and bonitos who provided us with a healthy and abundant food. Conversely, on the former, a deep solitude was prevailing around us ; the air and the waters of this part of the world were devoid of inhabitants. » (Journal of La Perouse)

For how can it be explained that a land who was there on the way, has vanished when going back ? Unless we, emulating the ancient Greeks, must imagine some stratagem worthy of Atlantis ? A mechanical island set on springs and conceived by some Polynesian counterpart of Master RobertHoudin ? A land perched on a cloud and blown away by a simple gust of wind, as Mr Swift has reported ? Come on, reason loathes such arguments and evidence is here plain for all to see : there lies a huge land in the midst of the Pacific ocean, and those who reached it are doing their best to throw a mystifying veil around this Eden Nomedia 0 { 10 }

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they do not wish to see corrupted. From 1945 to 1962, the United-States of America pretended to run hundreds of nuclear tests in this area, deterring whoever tried to get too close. Today, the powers-that-be7 pretend that this same area is a wide seabed research zone to prevent reconnaissance by foreign interests. Will I be accused of exaggeration, of making things up ? In his journal, Bougainville himself tries to confuse the issue : « How could I dare hoping that my chimera, as likely as I could make it look, may ever flourish ? I am a traveler and a sailor, i. e. a liar and a fool to this class of idle and superb writers who, in the darkness of their studies, endlessly philosophizing about the world and its inhabitants, peremptorily submit Nature to their fantasies. A rather singular process, unimaginable by people who, having observed nothing with their own eyes, only write and dogmatise out of observations borrowed to the very same navigators to whom they deny the ability to think and observe. »

Saying so, he indeed turns against him those system-mongers who hold salons in Paris, deciding on what must be. Yet reality alone owns a right to deceive navigators : « Today will outstand in our log thanks to the most complete delusion I have ever witnessed in my life as a navigator. At 4 o'clock in the evening, a most exquisite sky was followed by the thicker of mists ; we saw the continent lying from west to south-west (...), and then, to the south, a large land. (...) We could discern mounds, gullies, the ground in every detail ; and we could not figure out how we had came through that strait. (...) Given the situation, I thought better to hug the wind and sail to south-south-west ; but soon the mounds and gullies vanished. The most extraordinary fog bank I had ever seen had caused our mistake : we saw it dispel ; its shapes and hues rose, then were lost into the clouds, and we had enough daylight to be ascertained that such a fantastic land could not exist at all. I set sail all over the night towards the area it had seemingly occupied, and in the morning, there was nothing to be seen. » (La Perouse) Only navigators, in turn, have the right to put reality back where it belongs : « It took us less than 48 hours to do this reconnaissance and 15 days at most to clear up a geographic detail that I thought important, since it takes off five or six islands that do not exist. (...) I thought it better to clean them off the surface of the sea. » (La Perouse)

Given all these striking items, I do declare that some tremendous land, a continent perhaps half the size of Australia, existed there until 1775 ; that all navigators since Magellan were aware of its existence and have tried to reach 7 The International Seabed Authority is ruled by China, South Corea, Japan, France and Russia.

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it ; that many travelers, from Mindana 8 to La Perouse, have touched its shores and found enough reasons to never come back to their mother countries ; that its inhabitants, facing the hostility of greedy Europeans, chose to vanish and secure themselves thanks to some process beyond our understanding, if not our rationality. Who were the Nomedians ? Did they look so alien to the navigators who met them ? Or were they so humane that none was able to leave them ? Closer to us, in 1891, what was Gauguin seeking on this other side of the world ? « It was Europe - Europe of which I thought I'd liberated - in the worsening form of colonial snobbishness, of a childish initiative, grotesque to the point of caricature. It was not what I've come so far to find. (...) A deep sadness took hold of me. Such a long way I've traveled to find only what I had fled ! The dream that led me to Tahiti was crually denied by present time : I loved the Tahiti of yonder. But I could not resign myself to believe that it was utterly annihilated, that such a beautiful race had not saved, nowhere, any of its ancient splendor. » (Paul Gauguin)

Then again, at the dawn of XXth century, the mists surrounding Nomedia were still lingering, and Gauguin, though one of the greatest visionaries of his time, could not perceive the Misplaced Continent, however it lied only a few fathoms from him. He died in 1903 on one of the Marquesas, in front of an ocean he considered empty, of this ocean that a tremendous secret forbade him to explore.

8 After his discovering of the Marquesas islands in 1595, Alvarez de Mindana was supposed to reach the Philippines, but his ship never turned up. His second officer, Quiros, became later one of the most indefatigable navigators in the Pacific ocean.

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