Savants and naval officers weighed all the evidence, and were of the opinion that at least two of the survivors had been alive as late as 1824, or thirty-six years after the shipwreck, and that one of them was possibly La Pérouse. The theory was advanced that after his great adventure had been eclipsed by a misfortune so enormous, he might have been unwilling to return to France, fancying himself disgraced, and that he perhaps chose to maroon himself at Manicola when his comrades sailed away in their tiny schooner. Be that as it may, their fate was no less tragic, for the sea conquered them and left no sign or token. Long after Captain Dillon had made his famous voyage of discovery, the belief still persisted in France that La Pérouse and some of his officers and men were existing somewhere in the South Seas and awaiting the rescue that never came. Soon after Captain Dillon visited Manicola, a French ship arrived there on a similar mission. Having satisfied himself as to the location of the wreck of the flag-ship, _L’Astrolabe_, the captain sent his crew ashore to erect an enduring monument of stone, upon which was carved the words: “To the Memory of La Pérouse and his Companions.” CHAPTER IX WHEN H. M. S. _PHOENIX_ DROVE ASHORE Where Blake and mighty Nelson fell Your manly hearts shall glow, As ye sweep through the deep, While the stormy winds do blow! While the battle rages loud and long And the stormy winds do blow. It was a British admiral, Sir Lewis Bayly, who told the officers of the American destroyers operating out of Queenstown, “To work with you is a pleasure, to know you is to know the best traits of the Anglo-Saxon race.” In the same spirit it is generous to recall the enduring traditions of the English Navy, which were welded through many centuries of courageous conflict with the sea and the enemy. The wooden frigates and the towering ships of the line gave place to the steel-walled cruiser and the grim, squat dreadnought, but for the men behind the guns the salty lineage was unbroken. As Beatty and his squadrons kept watch and ward in the misty Orkneys, so had Nelson maintained his uneasy vigil off Toulon. Among the annals of the vanished days of the old navies, of the tarry, pigtailed seamen with hearts of oak, the story of a shipwreck has been preserved in a letter written to his mother by a lieutenant of the frigate _Phoenix_ in the year 1780. He tells her about the tragic episode as though he had actually enjoyed it, scribbling the details with a boyish gusto which conveys to us, in a manner exceedingly vivid, how ships and men lived and toiled in the age of boarding-pikes, hammock-nettings, and single topsails. Few young men write such long letters to their mothers nowadays, and even in that era of leisurely and literary correspondence a friend who was permitted to read the narrative was moved to comment: