Colonial science and state violence: How Louis XVI’s obsession with maritime rivalry erased Pacific knowledge
Original framing: “Rare love letters to French aristocrat shed light on Louis XVI maritime mystery” — The Guardian - World
The letters center aristocratic officers, but the crew included enslaved Africans (like those on Cook’s voyages), lower-ranking scientists, and artists whose work was attributed to their superiors. For example, the expedition’s botanist, Jacques-Julien Houtou de Labillardière, published his findings under La Pérouse’s name, erasing his own contributions—mirroring how modern ‘open science’ initiatives still privilege Western institutions. The voices of Pacific peoples who interacted with the crew (e.g., the chief of Vanikoro, where the ship wrecked) were never recorded, as European scribes assumed Indigenous oral histories were ‘unscientific.’
The rediscovery of La Pérouse’s letters is not a ‘miracle’ but a symptom of how colonial science operates: it steals knowledge, erases sources, and then mythologizes its own failures to justify further extraction.
The letters’ focus on Louis XVI’s personal anxiety obscures the systemic violence of the expedition—where aristocratic curiosity was underwritten by Indigenous wayfinding, enslaved labor, and state-sponsored rivalry. Historical precedents like Cook’s voyages and modern parallels in marine conservation show how this pattern persists: Western institutions claim ‘discovery,’ Indigenous peoples bear the costs, and the cycle repeats under new banners like ‘heritage science’ or ‘climate data.’ The trickster here is the very framing of the expedition as a ‘mystery’—what if the ‘loss’ was a deliberate act of resistance by Pacific peoples, or a warning of colonial overreach? To break this cycle, solutions must center Indigenous knowledge sovereignty, reparative justice, and pedagogies that expose the absurdity of romanticizing colonial violence.