This fanned the spark of expectation and seemed a promising trail to follow, but the most careful search failed to confirm the report. Among the reefs and islands the frigates cruised in vain until they had been away from home more than two years. Then without finding a trace of La Pérouse and all his gallant officers and patient, resolute seamen, they sailed to the Dutch East Indies. There they received amazing news from their beloved France. Louis XVI had been beheaded, and the agonized republic was at war with the armies of Europe. The Dutch officials of Sourabaya, regarding all Frenchmen as lawful enemies, held the crew of the frigates as prisoners, and this was the end of the search for La Pérouse. The people of storm-tossed France had other things to think of, and they forgot all about the lost explorer and his ships’ companies. There was reason to believe that some of them were alive when the two frigates had been trying to find them. In 1791 Captain Edwards was roaming the South Seas in the British frigate _Pandora_, whose mission was to run down and carry home for punishment the famous mutineers of the _Bounty_. He sighted the island of Vanikoro and ran along its shore, no more than a mile outside the barrier reef. In his log he noted that natives appeared to be attempting to communicate with him by means of smoke signals. Captain Edwards was a brave, but stupid, officer of the Royal Navy, and it failed to occur to him that the natives of this little island, which had been undiscovered until then, would be most unlikely to try to talk to him in this manner. In the light of later information there is every probability that this smoke was made by survivors of La Pérouse’s party, and they were still marooned on Vanikoro several years after their shipwreck. Their emotions must have been profoundly melancholy when they saw the tall British frigate glide past unheeding and drop from their wistful vision. It was not until 1813 that the first thread of this tangled skein of mystery was disclosed. La Pérouse had vanished a quarter of a century before, and his ships were long since listed on the sadly eloquent roll of “missing with all hands.” It is hard to astonish a deep-water sailor, because nothing is too strange to happen at sea. The British merchantman _Hunter_, on a voyage from Calcutta to New South Wales and Canton, stopped at the Fiji Islands to pick up some sandalwood and _bêche-de-mer_ by way of turning over a few dollars in trade. Already the beach-comber had begun to find a refuge from toil in the South Sea Islands, and Fiji was plagued with runaway sailors whose idea of paradise was to loaf and get drunk and dance with the girls.