Terre Napoleón; a History of French Explorations and Projects in Australia

by Sir Ernest Scott

We will now turn to quite another aspect of the Terre Napoleon story, and one which to many readers will be more fruitful in interest. An investigation of the work of Baudin's expedition on the particular stretch of coast to which was applied the name of the most potent personage in modern history has necessarily demanded close application to geographical details, and a minute scrutiny of claims and occurrences. We enter into a wider historical realm when we begin to consider the motives which led Bonaparte to despatch the expedition of 1800 to 1804. Here we are no longer confined to shores which, at the time when we are concerned with them, were the abode of desolation and the nursery of a solitude uninterrupted for untallied ages, save by the screams of innumerable sea-birds, or, occasionally, here and there, by the corroboree cries of naked savages, whose kitchen-middens, feet thick with shells, still betray the places where they feasted.

We wish to know why Bonaparte, who had overturned the Directory by the audacity of Brumaire and hoisted himself into the dominating position of First Consul in the year before Le Geographe and Le Naturaliste were sent to the South Seas, authorised the undertaking of that enterprise. Was it what it purported to be, an expedition of exploration, or was it a move in a cunning game of state-craft by a player whose board, as some would have us believe, was the whole planet? Had Bonaparte, so soon after ascending to supremacy in the Government of France, already conceived the dazzling dream of a vast world-empire acknowledging his sway, and was this a step towards the achievement of it? If not that, was he desirous by this means of striking a blow at the prestige of Great Britain, whose hero Nelson had smashed his fleet at the Nile two years before? Or had he ideals in the direction of establishing French colonial dominions in southern latitudes, and did he desire to obtain accurate information as to where the tricolour might most advantageously be planted? It ought to be possible, out of the copious store of available material relative to Napoleon's era, to form a sound opinion on this fascinating subject. But we had better resolve to have the material before we do formulate a conclusion, and not jump to one regardless of evidence, or the lack of it.

In this inquiry very little assistance is given to the student by those classical historians of the period to whose voluminous writings reference might naturally be made. There is not, for example, the slightest allusion to Baudin's expedition or the Terre Napoleon incidents in Thiers' twenty-tomed Histoire du Consulat et de l'Empire; nor can the reader get much assistance from consulting many British works on the same epoch. An endeavour has, however, been made to set the facts in their right perspective, by a brilliant contemporary English historian, Dr. John Holland Rose, somewhat curtly in his Revolutionary and Napoleonic Era, but more fully in his Life of Napoleon.* (* Life of Napoleon 1 379 to 383. Still later, in his lecture on "England's Commercial Struggle with Napoleon," included in the Lectures on the Nineteenth Century, edited by F.A. Kirkpatrick (1908), Dr. Holland Rose pursues the same theme.) The present writer, after an independent study of the facts, is unable to share Dr. Holland Rose's view, as will presently appear, but the desire being less to urge an opinion than to present the case in its true relations, it will be convenient to state Dr. Rose's presentment of it before proceeding to look at it from other aspects.

"The unknown continent of Australia," says the historian, "appealed to Napoleon's imagination, which pictured its solitudes transformed by French energy into a second fatherland." Bonaparte had "early turned his eyes to that land." He took a copy of Cook's voyages with him to Egypt, and no sooner was he firmly installed as First Consul, than he "planned with the Institute of France a great French expedition to New Holland." It is represented that the Terre Napoleon maps show that "under the guise of being an emissary of civilisation, Commodore Baudin was prepared to claim half the continent for France."* (* Ibid page 381. The Terre Napoleon region is far from being half the continent of Australia, if that be what Dr. Holland Rose's words mean. One observes, by the way, a tendency on the part of English writers to use very small maps when speaking of the size of things in Australia.) Indeed, his inquiry "about the extent of British claims on the Pacific coast was so significant as to elicit from Governor King the reply that the whole of Van Diemen's Land and of the coast from Cape Howe on the south of the mainland to Cape York on the north, was British territory." The facts relative to the awakening of suspicion in Governor King's mind--to be discussed hereafter--are likewise stated; together with those affecting the settlements of Hobart and Port Phillip; and it is concluded that "the plans of Napoleon for the acquisition of Van Diemen's Land and the middle of Australia, had an effect like that which the ambition of Montcalm, Dupleix, Lally, and Péron has exerted on the ultimate destiny of many a vast and fertile territory."* (* Ibid page 382. One or two errors of fact may as well be indicated. Murray's discovery of Port Phillip was made in 1802, not in 1801, as stated on page 380 of the Life of Napoleon; the title of Flinders' book was not "A Voyage of Discovery to the Australian Isles" (page 381), but A Voyage to Terra Australis; Bass, the discoverer of the Strait bearing his name, was not a lieutenant (page 380), but a surgeon on H.M.S. Reliance. The Freycinet Peninsula, the French name of which is mentioned as being "still retained" (page 381), is not, it should be understood, on the Terre Napoleon coast at all, but in Eastern Tasmania. Dr. Rose's error as to the retention of other French names has been dealt with in Chapter 4.)

These passages submit with definiteness the view that Bonaparte, in 1800, despatched Baudin's ships from motives of political policy. He had "plans" for the requisition of territory in Australia; he wished to found a "second fatherland" for the French; Baudin was "prepared to claim half the continent for France." Now, the reader who turns to Dr. Holland Rose's book * (* He who turns to it without reading it through will miss an opulent source of profit and pleasure.) for references to proofs of these statements, will be disappointed. The learned author, who is usually liberal in his citation of authorities, here confines himself to the Voyage de Decouvertes of Péron and Freycinet, the Voyage of Flinders, and the collection of documents in the seven volumes of the Historical Records of New South Wales--all works of first-class importance, but none of them bearing out the broad general statements as to the First Consul's plans and intentions. Not a scrap of evidence is adduced from memoirs, letters, or state papers. To represent Napoleon as obsessed with magnificent ideas of universal dominion, scanning, like Milton's Satan from the mountain height, the immensity of many realms, and aspiring to rule them all--to do this is to present an enthralling picture, inflaming the imagination of the reader; and, perhaps, of the writer too. But we must beware of drawing an inference and painting it to look like a fact; we must regard historical data through the clear white glass of criticism, not through the coloured window of a gorgeous generalisation.

The remainder of our task, then, shall be devoted to examining the origins of Baudin's expedition. We will inquire into the instructions given to the commander; we will follow his vessels with a careful eye to any incidents that may point to ulterior political purposes; we will have regard to the suspicions engendered at the time, how far they were justifiable, and what consequences followed from them; we will search for motives; and we will look at what the expedition did, in case there should by any chance thereby be disclosed any hint of an aspiration towards territorial acquisition. We will try to regard the evidence as a whole, the object being--as the object of all honest historical inquiry must be--to ascertain the truth about it, freed from those jealousies and prejudices which, so freely deposited at the time, tend to consolidate and petrify until, as with the guano massed hard on islets in Australasian seas, it is difficult to get at the solid rock beneath for the accretions upon it, and sometimes not easy to discriminate rock from accretion.

CHAPTER 7. GENESIS OF BAUDIN'S EXPEDITION.

Baudin's one of a series of French expeditions.
The building up of the map of Australia.
Early map-makers.
Terra Australis.
Dutch navigators.
Emmerie Mollineux's map.
Tasman and Dampier.
The Petites Lettres of Maupertuis.
De Brosses and his Histoire des Navigations aux Terres Australes.
French voyages that originated from it.
Bougainville; Marion-Dufresne; La Perouse; Bruni Dentrecasteaux.
Voyages subsequent to Baudin's.
The object of the voyages scientific and exploratory.
The Institute of France and its proposition.
Received by Bonaparte with interest.
Bonaparte's interest in geography and travel.
His authorisation of the expedition.
The Committee of the Institute and their instructions.
Fitting out of the expedition.
Le Geographe and Le Naturaliste.
The staff.
Francois Péron.
Captain Nicolas Baudin.

French interest in southern exploration did not commence nor did it cease with the expedition of 1800 to 1804. We fall into a radical error if we regard that as an isolated endeavour. It was, in truth, a link in a chain: one of a series of efforts made by the French to solve what was, during the eighteenth century, a problem with which the scientific intellect of Europe was much concerned.

The tardy and piecemeal fashion in which definiteness was given to southern latitudes on the map of the world makes a curious chapter in the history of geographical research. After the ships of Magellan and Drake had circumnavigated the globe, and a very large part of America had been mapped, there still lay, south of the tracks of those adventurers who rounded the Horn and breasted the Pacific, a region that remained unknown--a Terra Australis, Great Southern Continent, or Terra Incognita as it was vaguely and variously termed. Map-makers, having no certain data concerning this vast uncharted area, commonly sprawled across the extremity of the southern hemisphere a purely fanciful outline of imaginary land. Terra Australis was the playground of the cartographers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. They seemed to abhor blank spaces. Some of the most beautiful of the old maps make the oceans busy with spouting whales, sportive dolphins, and galleons with bellying sails; but what to do with the great staring expanse of vacancy at the bottom their authors did not know. So they drew a crooked line across the map to represent land, and stuck upon it the label Terra Australis, or one of the other designations just mentioned. The configuration of the territory on different maps did not agree, and not one of them signified a coast with anything like the form of the real Great Southern Continent.