The second half of the eighteenth century is the most significant in the history of British and French exploration and colonization in the Pacific. An abundance of travel literature, about real and imaginary voyages, formed a creative palette for synthesizing information from more than a century of European discovery in the antipodes. Imaginary voyages continued to draw upon well-known antipodean imagery and to offer utopian critiques of European society, and they weaved in the increasing material evidence of new geographies and new cultures. More imaginary voyages were published in this period than at any other time. Many examples engage with or comment directly upon the political and philosophical issues raised by the growing European presence and cross-cultural encounters taking place in the antipodes. Out of this environment emerged the two anonymously published texts, Fragmens du dernier voyage de La Pérouse [Fragments from the Last Voyage of La Pérouse] (1797) and The Life of La Perouse, the Celebrated and Unfortunate French Navigator (1801). They offer a fascinating glimpse of how writers of fiction were able to capture and exploit the appeal of contemporary exploratory voyages. In these marvellously realistic stories, distinctions between fact and fantasy are carefully masked. Both examples are framed around the mystifying disappearance of the famous French navigator, Jean-François de Galaup de La Pérouse, a tragedy that was a magnet for public speculation.

References to the ‘great south land’ and ‘South Seas’, respectively alluding to an immense area of land and of ocean, emphasized a broad-brush perspective and drew attention to the extent of uncharted spaces, awaiting discovery, that kept driving exploration.