of them
brought to me a quart bottle which he had found, fastened with some wire
to a projecting rock on the north side of the harbour. This bottle
contained a piece of parchment, on which was written the following
inscription:

_Ludovico XV. Galliarum
rege, et d.[109] de Boynes
regi a Secretis ad res
maritimas annis 1772 et
1773.

[Footnote 109: The (d.), no doubt, is a contraction of the word
_Domino_. The French secretary of the marine was then Monsieur de
Boynes.--D.]

From this inscription, it is clear, that we were not the first Europeans
who had been in this harbour. I supposed it to be left by Monsieur de
Boisguehenneu, who went on shore in a boat on the 13th of February,
1772, the same day that Monsieur de Kerguelen discovered this land, as
appears by a note in the French chart of the southern hemisphere,
published the following year.[110]

[Footnote 110: On perusing this paragraph of the journal, it will be
natural to ask, How could Monsieur de Boisguehenneu, in the beginning of
1772, leave an inscription, which, upon the very face of it,
commemorates a transaction of the following year? Captain Cook's manner
of expressing himself here, strongly marks, that he made this
supposition, only for want of information to enable him to make any
other. He had no idea that the French had visited this land a second
time; and, reduced to the necessity of trying to accommodate what he saw
himself, to what little he had heard of their proceedings, he confounds
a transaction which we, who have been better instructed, know, for a
certainty, belongs to the second voyage, with a similar one, which his
chart of the southern hemisphere has recorded, and which happened in a
different year, and at a different place.

The bay, indeed, in which Monsieur de Boisguehenneu landed, is upon the
west side of this land, considerably to the south of Cape Louis, and not
far from another more southerly promontory, called Cape Bourbon; a part
of the coast which our ships were not upon. Its situation is marked upon
the chart constructed for this voyage; and a particular view of the bay
du Lion Marin, (for so Boisguehenneu called it,) with the soundings, is
preserved by Kerguelen.

But if the bottle and inscription found by Captain Cook's people were
not left here by Boisguehenneu, by whom and when were they left? This we
learn most satisfactorily, from the accounts of Kerguelen's second
voyage, as published by himself