Barthélemy de Lesseps

There he met with Paul Antoine Fleuriot de Langle, second in command of the La Pérouse expedition, who had the respect of Louis XVI.

The journey took the ships south across the Atlantic Ocean, around Cape Horn to the Pacific, stopping at Easter Island, Hawaii, modern-day Alaska, Macao, Manila, the Sea of Japan, the Sea of Okhotsk and then to the port of Saints Peter and Saint Paul, now Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky on the eastern side of the Kamchatka Peninsula.

[6] While in port, La Pérouse received orders to proceed as quickly as possible to Australia to investigate a rumored British settlement at Botany Bay.

Since ice would soon close the port for months, the only option that would keep the material under French control was to send it overland with de Lesseps.

The party stayed in Bolsheretsk until the end of January while a convoy of 35 sleighs was assembled, but both the weather and Kassloff's official duties slowed progress.

De Lesseps set off promptly for Yakutsk, 1200 km inland, but as the weather warmed and the tracks through the snow turned to mud, the sleighs were bogged down, so he dragged them back to Okhotsk.

The boats broke up on the rapids, but de Lesseps was able to continue on horseback to Irkutsk, near the south-western end of Lake Baikal.

De Lesseps then used a carriage to travel through Krasnoyarsk, Achinsk, Tomsk, Tobolsk, Tyumen, Yekaterinburg, and Kungur in the Ural Mountains to Kazan, where he was injured in an accident.

[7] Given the subsequent loss of both ships, by leaving at Petropavlovsk, de Lesseps became one of three members of the original cast to survive the La Pérouse expedition, along with mathematician Louis Monge and naturalist Jean-Nicolas Dufresne.