Baudin wrote two letters in reply, one officially, and the second, by far the more interesting document, a personal and friendly epistle. In the official answer he said: "The story you have heard, of which I suspect Mr. Kemp, captain in the New South Wales corps, to be the author, is without foundation, nor do I believe that the officers and naturalists who are on board can have given cause for it by their conversation. But in any case you may rest well assured that if the French Government had ordered me to remain some days either in the north or south of Van Diemen's Land, discovered by Abel Tasman, I would have stopped there without keeping my intention secret from you." Baudin's additional statement that, prior to the flag incident, he had taken care to place in four prominent parts of the island "proofs sufficient to show the priority of our visit," must, however, have brought a smile to King's lips, and certainly makes one wonder what Baudin meant by "priority"; since King Island had previously been visited by Flinders, had been fully charted, and was the frequent resort of sealers. As a matter of fact, the Snow-Harrington, which had succoured Boullanger and his boat crew of abandoned Frenchmen in the previous March, had, after that fortunate meeting, stayed at the island ten weeks, when there were killed the enormous number of six hundred sea-elephants and four thousand three hundred seals.* (* Backhouse Walker, Early Tasmania page 21.) Besides, Baudin assured King that "I intend" that the island "shall continue to bear your name," forgetful that it would not have had a name already if his own visit had been "prior" to others.
The second, unofficial, letter which Baudin wrote to the governor repeated his positive assurances that the suspicions concerning his objects were without foundation, but on account of the personal regard which he entertained for King, he determined to tell him frankly his opinion regarding the forming of European settlements and the dispossessing of native peoples. The view expressed by him bears the impress of the "ideas of '89," ideas which laid stress on the rights of man and human equality, and professed for the backward races a special fraternal tenderness. "To my way of thinking," said the commodore, "I have never been able to conceive that there was any justice or equity on the part of Europeans, in seizing, in the name of their governments, a land for the first time, when it is inhabited by men who have not always deserved the title of savages, or cannibals, which has been given to them, while they were but children of nature, and just as little savages as are actually your Scotch Highlanders* (* Had Baudin been reading about the Sage of Lichfield? "Well, sir, God made Scotland." "Certainly," replied Dr. Johnson, "but we must always remember that he made it for Scotchmen; and comparisons are odious, Mr. Strahan, but God made Hell." Caledonian Societies, of which there are many in various parts of the world, will observe with gratitude Baudin's concession that Highlanders did not eat their fellowmen.) or our peasants of Brittany, who, if they do not eat their fellowmen, are nevertheless just as objectionable. From this it appears to me that it would be infinitely more glorious for your nation, as for mine, to mould for society the inhabitants of the respective countries over whom they have rights, instead of wishing to dispossess those who are so far removed by immediately seizing the soil which they own and which has given them birth. These remarks are no doubt impolitic, but at least reasonable from the facts; and had this principle been generally adopted you would not have been obliged to form a colony by means of men branded by the law, and who have become criminals through the fault of the Government which has neglected and abandoned them to themselves. It follows, therefore, that not only have you to reproach yourselves with an injustice in seizing their lands, but also in transporting on a soil where the crimes and the diseases of Europeans were unknown, all that could retard the progress of civilisation, but which has served as a pretext to your Government. I have no knowledge of the claims which the French Government may have upon Van Diemen's Land, nor of its designs; but I think that its title will not be any better grounded than yours."
After this taste of Baudin's reflections, it is really a pity that we possess so little from his pen. Had he lived to be the historian of the expedition, his work would have been very different in character from that of Péron; though it is hardly likely that an elaboration of the views expressed in the personal letter to King would have been favoured with the imprint "de l'Imprimerie Imperiale." Péron's anthropological studies among Australian aboriginals led him to conclusions totally at variance with the nebulous "state of nature" theories of the time, which pictured the civilised being as a degenerate from man unspoiled by law, government, and convention. The tests and measurements of blacks which he made, and compared with those of French and English people, showed him that even physically the native was an inferior animal; his observations of ways of life in the wild Bush taught him that organised society, with all its restraints, was preferable to the supposed freedom of savagery; and he deduced the philosophical conclusion that the "state of nature" was in truth a state of subjection to pitiless forces, only endurable by beings who felt not the bondage because they knew of no more ennobled condition.* (* A more distinguished man was cured of his early Rousseauism by an acquaintance with peoples far higher in the scale of advancement than Australian aboriginals. "Up to sixteen years of age," said Napoleon in a scrap of conversation recorded by Roederer, "I would have fought for Rousseau against all the friends of Voltaire. Now it is the contrary. I have been especially disgusted with Rousseau since I have seen the East. Savage man is a dog.") Baudin carried away from his visits to the abodes of untutored races no truer notion than came from his own unsubstantiated sentiments, nourished by no contact with facts, but imbibed uncritically from the rhetorical rhapsodists of Rousseau's school. Crabbe summed them up in half a dozen lines:
"Tis the savage state
Is only good, and ours sophisticate!
See! the free creatures in their woods and plains,
Where without laws each happy monarch reigns,
King of himself--while we a number dread,
By slaves commanded and by dunces led."
Péron spoke of savage peoples, not with less sympathy but with a sympathy grounded on knowledge; and he wasted no words about the "injustice" of occupying lands which the aboriginal only used in the sense that lands are "used" by rabbits and dingoes. Péron's appreciation of well-observed facts gave him some political insight in the philosophical sense, and he comprehended the development of which the country was capable. Could Baudin's shade visit to-day the shores that he traversed more than a century ago, he would surely acknowledge that orchards of ripening fruit, miles of golden grain, millions of white fleeces, the cattle of a thousand hills, great cities throbbing with immense energies, and a commerce of ever augmenting vastness, ministering to the happiness of free and prosperous populations, are, in the large ledger of humanity, an abundant compensation for the disappearance of the few companies of naked savages whom, when civilisation once invaded their ancestral haunts, neither the agencies of government nor philanthropy could save from the processes of decay.
The account given by Péron of the flag-raising incident was quite accurate, but he presented his readers with a wholly untrue version of Governor King's letter to Baudin. With the document before us, we must doubt whether Péron ever saw it. The passage printed by him in quotation marks bears hardly a resemblance to the courteous terms of the actual letter, which did not contain any such threat as that "all these countries form an integral part of the British Empire," and "it will be my duty to oppose by every means in my power the execution of the design you are supposed to have in view." It seems probable that Péron heard the letter read, or its contents summarised, but, in writing, mixed up the substance of it with blustering language which may have been used by Acting-Lieutenant Robbins.* (* Backhouse Walker also held this view. Early Tasmania page 18.) At all events, King used no word of menace, while conveying plainly that the establishment of a French settlement would require "explanation."
There is no good reason for disbelieving Baudin's disclaimer. It was plain and candid; and there was nothing in his actions while he was in Australian waters which belied his words. The baseless character of the gossip promulgated by Lieutenant-Colonel Paterson, and the alleged exhibition of the map indicating the exact spot where the French intended to settle in Frederick Henry Bay, were disposed of by the fact that Baudin's ships went nowhere near that place after leaving Sydney. If any French officer did show Paterson a chart, he must have been amusing himself by playing on the suspicions of the Englishman, who was probably "fishing" for information. Baudin's conduct, and that of his officers, never suggested that search for a site for settlement was part of the mission of the expedition; and, in the face of the commodore's emphatic denials, positive evidence, or a strong chain of facts to the contrary, would have to be forthcoming before such a story could be entertained. Suspicions were natural enough in face of the strained feelings, the wars, the plots and counter-plots of diplomacy, Napoleon's menaced invasion of England, and all the other factors that made for racial animosity at the beginning of the nineteenth century; but viewing the circumstances in the perspective made by the lapse of a hundred years, cool judgment must dismiss the jealous alarms of 1802 as being unfounded.
Yet a patriotic Frenchman, as Péron was, could not witness this remarkable growth of a new offshoot of British power in the South Seas without regret and misgiving. "Doubtless," he commented on Robbins' action, "that ceremony will appear silly to people who know little about English polity; but for the statesman such formalities assume a much more serious and important character. By these public and repeated declarations England seems every day to fortify her pretensions, to establish her rights, in a positive manner, and to devise pretexts to repulse, even by force of arms, all other peoples who may wish to form settlements in these distant countries." We shall not honour Péron the less because he expressed an opinion so natural to a man solicitous for his country's prestige.
It has been stated by one or two writers that the action of Robbins put an end to the cordial relations which had previously existed between him and the French. But that is an error. They had cause to be offended, but the young man was treated with indulgence. Péron records that both Grimes and Robbins visited the tents of the French after the flag incident, and shared their frugal dinner; and Baudin informed King that, the Cumberland having lost an anchor, his forge was at work for a whole day supplying the wants of the British schooner--a service akin to heaping coals of fire on the head of the zealous acting-lieutenant. At the same time, other members of the French expedition experienced very kind treatment from British fishermen. Faure, one of the scientific staff, was sent in a small boat to complete a chart of the island. A violent storm compelled him to go ashore on the western end, where he and his sailors were for three days most hospitably entertained by sealers, who, on their departure, forced upon them some of their finest furs as presents. "How is it," comments Péron, "that such touching hospitality, of which voyages offer so many examples, is nearly always exercised by men whose poverty and roughness of character seem to impose such an obligation least upon them. It seems that misfortune, rather than philosophy and brilliant education, develops in mankind that noble and disinterested virtue which induces us to minister to the woes of others."
Le Naturaliste sailed for Europe from King Island on December 8, carrying with her all the plants and natural history specimens collected up to date, as well as the charts. The collections were, as King wrote to Sir Joseph Banks, "immense."* (* Historical Records 4 844.) Le Geographe and the Casuarina left on December 27, and sailed direct for Kangaroo Island, to resume in that neighbourhood the charting which Baudin had abandoned in the previous year. They did not, as the logs show, make any attempt to examine Port Phillip. Robbins and his seventeen guardians of British rights on the Cumberland remained for some time longer making a thorough examination; after which they sailed for Port Phillip, and Grimes made the first complete survey of that great sheet of water.