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

by Sir Ernest Scott

The effect of the President's work was almost immediate. De Brosses published it in 1756; and in 1766 Louis de Bougainville sailed from France in command of La Boudeuse and L'Etoile on a voyage around the world.* (* See the Voyage du Monde par la frigate du Roi La Boudeuse et la flute L'Etoile en 1766, 1767, 1768, 1769, by Louis de Bougainville, Paris, 1771.) A eulogy pronounced on De Brosses before the Academy of Inscriptions by Dupuy* (* Memoirs of the Academy of Inscriptions 42 177.) hardly put the case too strongly when it was said that before he died he had the satisfaction to see in Europe men animated by his spirit, who had gone forth, braving the risks of a long voyage, to make discoveries; though the prophecy that centuries to come would doubtless count to his glory the achievements of navigators has not been verified. The world is perhaps too little inclined to accord to him who promulgates an idea the praise readily bestowed upon those who realise it.

Bougainville discovered the Navigator Islands, re-discovered the Solomon group, and was only just forestalled by the Englishman, Wallis, in the discovery of Tahiti. He produced a book of travel which may be read with scarcely less interest than the wonderful work of his contemporary, Cook.

The voyage of Nicholas Marion-Dufresne (1771) differed from the other French expeditions of the series in that one of the ships belonged to the commander, and part of the cost was sustained by him. He was fired by a passion for exploration, which led him to propose that he should take out his vessel, Le Mascurin, in company with a ship of the navy, and that a grant should be made to him from the public funds. The French Government acquiesced, and gave him Le Marquis de Castries. He did some exploring in southern Tasmania, but his career was cut short in New Zealand, where, in the Bay of Islands, he was killed and eaten by Maories in 1772.* (* Rochon, Nouveau Voyage a la Mar du Sud, Paris 1783.) One of the objects of the voyage was to take back to Tahiti a native woman, Aontouron, who had been brought to Paris by Bougainville to be shown at the court of Louis XV; but she died of smallpox en route.

Again, in 1785, the expedition commanded by the ill-fated La Perouse sailed from France on a discovery voyage.* (* See the Voyage de la Perouse, redige par M. L.A. Milet-Mureau, volume 1 Paris 1797.) The appearance of his two ships, La Boussole and l'Astrolabe, in Port Jackson only a fortnight after Governor Phillip had landed in Botany Bay to establish the first British settlement in Australia, was an event not less surprising to the governor than to La Perouse, who had left France before colonisation was intended by the English Government, though he heard of it in the course of the voyage. The French navigator remained in the harbour from February 23 to March 10 (1788), on excellent terms with Phillip; and then, sailing away to pursue his discoveries, "vanished trackless into blue immensity, and only some mournful mysterious shadow of him hovered long in all heads and hearts." His remark to Captain King, "Mr. Cook has done so much that he has left me nothing to do but admire his work," indicated the generous candour of his disposition. His fate after he sailed from Sydney remained a mystery for forty years, Flinders, on his voyage inside the Barrier Reef in 1802, kept a lookout for wreckage that might afford a key to the problem. He wrote: "The French navigator La Perouse, whose unfortunate situation, if in existence, was always present to my mind, had been wrecked, as it was thought, somewhere in the neighbourhood of New Caledonia; and if so the remnants of his ships were likely to be brought upon this coast by the trade winds, and might indicate the situation of the reef or island which had proved so fatal to him. With such an indication, I was led to believe in the possibility of finding the place; and though the hope of restoring La Perouse or any of his companions to their country and friends could not, after so many years, be rationally entertained, yet to gain some knowledge of their fate would do away with the pain of suspense, and it might not be too late to retrieve some documents of their discoveries.* (* Flinders, Voyage 2 48.) The vigilance of Flinders to this end indicates the fascination which the mysterious fate of the French mariner had for seamen, until doubts were finally set at rest in 1827, when one of the East India Company's ships, under Captain Dillon, found at Manicolo, in the New Hebrides, traces of the wreckage of the vessels of La Perouse. Native tradition enabled the history of the end of the expedition to be ascertained. The French ships, on a dark and stormy night, were both driven on the reef, and soon pounded to match-wood. A few of the sailors got ashore, but most were drowned; and the bulk of the remainder were lost in an unsuccessful attempt to make for civilised regions from the coral isolation of Manicolo. A monument to the memory of the gallant La Perouse, on the coast a few miles from Sydney, now fronts the Pacific whose winds wafted him to his doom, and beneath whose waters he found his grave.

The next link in the chain was furnished by the expedition commanded by Bruni Dentrecasteaux, who, while the hurricane of the Revolution was raging, was despatched (1791) to search for La Perouse. He made important discoveries on his own account,* (* Voyage de Dentrecasteaux, redige par M. de Rossel, Paris 1808; Labillardiere, Relation du Voyage a la Recherche de la Perouse, Paris 1800.) both on the mainland of Australia and in Tasmania; and though he found no trace of his predecessor, his own name is honourably remembered among the eminent navigators who did original work in Australasia. It was Dentrecasteaux's hydrographer, Beautemps Beaupre, whose charting of part of the southern coast of Australia was so highly praised by Flinders.

The expeditions thus enumerated were all despatched before the era of Napoleon, and appreciation of their objects cannot therefore be complicated by doubts as to his Machiavellian designs. Bougainville's voyage, and that of Marion-Dufresne, were promoted under Louis XV, that of La Perouse under Louis XVI, and Dentrecasteaux's under the Revolutionary Assembly. Each was an expedition of discovery.

Next came the expedition commanded by Nicolas Baudin, with which we are mainly concerned, and which was despatched under the Consulate. It will presently be demonstrated that it did not differ in purpose from its predecessors, and that there is nothing to show that in authorising it Bonaparte had any other object than that professed. But before pursuing that subject, let it be made clear that French exploring expeditions to the South Seas were continued after the final overthrow of the Empire.

In 1817, while Napoleon was mewed up in St. Helena, and a Bourbon once more occupied the throne of France as Louis XVIII, the ships Uranie and Physicienne were sent out under the command of Captain Louis de Freycinet, the cartographer of Baudin's expedition.* (* Voyage autour du Monde, entrepris par ordre du Roi, par Louis de Freycinet, Paris 1827.) They visited some of the scenes of former French exploits, and Freycinet took advantage of his position on the west coast to pull down and appropriate for the French Academy of Inscriptions the oldest memorial of European presence in Australia. That is to say, he took the plate put up by the Dutchman Vlaming in 1697, in place of that erected in 1616 by Dirk Haticks on the island bearing the name of "Dirk Hartog," to commemorate his visit in the ship Eendraght of Amsterdam.* (* Ibid 1 449.) Freycinet had desired to take the plate when he was an officer on Le Naturaliste in July 1801, but Captain Hamelin, the commander, would not permit it to be disturbed. On the contrary, he set up a new post with the plate affixed to it, and expressed the opinion that to remove an interesting memorial that for over a century had been spared by nature and by man, would be to commit a kind of sacrilege.* (* "Il eut pense commettre un sacrilege en gardant a son bord cette plaque respectee pendant pres de deux siecles par la nature et par les hommes qui pouvoient avant nous l'avoir observee." Péron, Voyage de Decouvertes 1 195.) Freycinet was not so scrupulous.

Again, in 1824, the Baron de Bougainville, a son of the older navigator, and who as a junior officer had sailed with Baudin, took out the ships Thetis and Esperance on a voyage to the South Seas, for purely geographical purposes;* (* Journal de la Navigation autour du monde de la fregate La Thetis et de la corvette L'Esperance, pendant les annees 1824-1826; publie par ordre du Roi. Par M. le Baron de Bougainville.) and still later, in 1826 to 1828, during the reign of Charles X, Dumont d'Urville, in the Astrolabe, did valuable exploratory work, especially in the Western Pacific.* (* Voyage de la corvette L'Astrolabe, execute par ordre du Roi, pendant les annees 1826-1829, sous le commandement de M. J. Dumont D'Urville, Paris 1830.)

The whole of these expeditions, with the partial exception of that of Marion-Dufresne, were conducted in ships of the French navy, commanded by French officers, supported by French funds, and their official records were published at the expense of the French Government. A certain unity of purpose characterised them; and that purpose was as purely and truly directed to extend man's knowledge of the habitable earth as was that of any expedition that ever sailed under any flag.