WE climb to the top of the La Perouse headland and look across to Bare Island. There's quite a lot
of interesting history associated with this location.

La Perouse was named after the French navigator Jean-François de Galaup, comte de La Pérouse. La
Pérouse’s two ships sailed to New South Wales after some of his men had been attacked and killed in
the Navigator Islands (Samoa). On 26 January 1788, as Arthur Phillip was moving the First Fleet
around to Port Jackson, La Pérouse sailed into Botany Bay, anchoring near Bare Island, just eight
days after the British had.

After building a longboat (to replace one lost in the attack in the Navigator Islands) and
obtaining wood and water, the French departed for New Caledonia, Santa Cruz, the Solomons, and the
Louisiades. He wrote in his journals that he expected to be back in France by December 1788, but
the two ships vanished. Some of the mystery was solved in 1826 when items associated with the
French ships were found on an island in the Santa Cruz group, with wreckage of the ships themselves
discovered in 1964.