Heading westward, he crossed the Atlantic, rounded Cape Horn, followed the Chilean coast, hopped across the Pacific to Easter Island and the Sandwich Islands, and by June, 1786, had reached Alaska. There he headed south to Macao and Manila, before doubling back north to explore Korea and Japan, where he passed between Sakhalin and Hokkaido and named the Straits of La Pérouse. In September 1787, he landed on the Kamchatka peninsula at Petropavlovsk, where he received letters from Paris ordering him to check out the new British settlements in Van Diemen's Land (Tasmania). Arriving in January, 1788, he dropped off letters to be taken home to France and set sail for the Polynesian islands. He was never to be seen again.
Wreckage recovered in 1826 proved La Pérouse had been shipwrecked, but where and how were not definitively established until 1964. La Pérouse's two ships had run aground on the coral reefs of Vanikoro, where natives massacred most of his crew. From the wreckage the survivors had built a small boat but this too was lost at sea.
La Pérouse had no children, so Napoleon granted his sister's children the right to carry the name. All their money was confiscated by the Revolution and Napoleon did not restore that.