The instructions to Baudin were very similar to those which had been given to Laperouse and Dentrecasteaux in previous years, being drafted by the same hand, and some paragraphs in an "instruction particuliere," show that the French were thoroughly up-to-date with their information, and knew in what parts of the coast fresh work required to be done.* (* "Projet d'itineraire pour le Commandant Baudin; memoire pour servir d'instruction particuliere." Manuscripts, Archives Nationales, Marine BB4 999.)
Nicolas Baudin was not a French naval officer. He had been in the merchant service, and, more recently, had had charge of an expedition despatched to Africa by the Austrian Government to collect specimens for the museum at Vienna. War between France and Austria broke out before he returned; and Baudin, feeling less loyal to his Austrian employers than to his own country, handed over the whole collection to the Museum in Paris. This action, which in the circumstances was probably regarded as patriotic, brought him under the notice of Jussieu, the famous French botanist; and when the South Sea expedition was authorised, that scientist recommended Baudin as one who had taken an interest in natural history researches, and who had given "a new proof of his talent and of his love for science by the choice of the specimens composing his last collection, deposited in the museum." The Minister of Marine minuted Jussieu's recommendation in the margin: "No choice could be happier than that of Captain Baudin,"* and so he was appointed. (* Manuscripts, Bibliotheque Nationale, nouveaux acquisitions, France 9439 page 121.) He was by no means the kind of officer whom Napoleon would have selected had his designs been such as have commonly been alleged.
Two ships of the navy were commissioned for the service. Under the names La Serpente and Le Vesuve they had been built with a view to an invasion of England, contemplated in 1793.* (* Manuscripts, Bibliotheque Nationale, nouveaux acquisitions, France 9439 report of de Bruix to the Minister.) They were re-named Le Geographe and Le Naturaliste on being allotted to a much safer employment. Both were described as solidly built, good sailers, and easy to control; and the officer who surveyed them to determine whether they would be suitable reported that without impairing their sea-going qualities it would be easy to construct upon their decks high poops to hold quantities of growing plants, which it was intended to collect and bring home. On these ships Baudin and his selected staff embarked at Havre, and, a British passport being obtained under the circumstances already related, sailed south in October.
If Baudin had been the keen and capable commander that those who secured his appointment believed him to be, he should have discovered and charted the whole of the unknown southern coast of Australia, before Flinders was many days' sail from England. The fact that this important work was actually done by the English navigator was in no measure due to the sagacity of the Admiralty—whose officials procrastinated in an inexplicable fashion even after the Investigator had been commissioned and equipped—but to his own promptness, competence and zeal, and the peculiar dilatoriness of his rivals. Baudin's vessels reached Ile-de-France (Mauritius) in March, 1801, and lay there for the leisurely space of forty days. Two-thirds of a year had elapsed before they came upon the Australian coast. But Baudin did not even then set to work where there was discovery to be achieved. Winter was approaching, and sailing in these southern seas would be uncomfortable in the months of storm and cold; so he dawdled up the west coast of Australia, in warm, pleasant waters, and made for Timor, where he arrived in August. He remained in the Dutch port of Kupang till the middle of November—three whole months wasted, nearly eleven months consumed since he had sailed from France. In the meantime, the alert and vigorous captain of the Investigator was speeding south as fast as the winds would take him, too eager to lose a day, flying straight to his work like an arrow to its mark, and doing it with the thoroughness and accuracy that were part of his nature.
The French on board Le Geographe and Le Naturaliste were as unhappy as their commander was slow. Scurvy broke out, and spread among the crew with virulence. Baudin appeared to have little or no conception of the importance of the sanitary measures which Cook was one of the earliest navigators to enjoin, and by which those who emulated his methods were able to keep in check the ravages of this scourge of seafaring men. He neglected common precautions, and paid no heed to the counsel of the ship's surgeons. As a consequence, the sufferings of his men were such that it is pitiful to read about them in the official history of the voyage.
From Timor Baudin sailed for southern Tasmania, arriving there in January, 1802, and remaining in the neighbourhood till March. There was no European settlement upon the island at that time, and Baudin described it as a country "which ought not to be neglected, and which a nation that does not love us does not look upon with indifference."* (* Baudin to the Minister of Marine, manuscripts, Archives Nationales BB4 995 Marine.) A severe storm separated Le Geographe from her escort on March 7 and 8, in the neighbourhood of the eastern entrance of Bass Strait. Le Naturaliste spent some time in Westernport, making a survey of it, and discovering the second island, which Bass had missed on his whaleboat cruise. Her commander, Captain Hamelin, then took her round to Port Jackson, to solicit aid from the Governor of the English colony there. Meanwhile Baudin sailed through the Strait from east to west. He called at Waterhouse Island, off the north-east coast of Van Diemen's Land, misled by its name into thinking that he would find fresh water there. The island was named after Captain Henry Waterhouse of the Reliance, but Baudin, unaware of this, considered that it belied its name. "It does not seem," he wrote, "to offer any appearance of water being discoverable there, and I am persuaded that it can have been named Water House only because the English visited it at a time when heavy rains had fallen."* (* Baudin's Diary, manuscripts, Bibliotheque Nationale: "Je suis persuade qu'on ne l'a nomme Wather House que par ce que les Anglais qui l'ont visite y auront eu beaucoup de pluie.") Baudin passed Port Phillip, rounded Cape Otway, and coasted along till he came to Encounter Bay, where occurred an incident with which we shall be concerned after we have traced the voyage of Flinders eastward to the same point.
CHAPTER 14. SOUTH COAST DISCOVERY.
We now resume the story of Flinders' voyage along the southern coast of Australia, from the time when he made Cape Leeuwin on December 6th, 1801.
That part of the coast lying between the south-west corner of the continent and Fowler's Bay, in the Great Australian Bight, had been traversed prior to this time. In 1791 Captain George Vancouver, in the British ship Cape Chatham, sailed along it from Cape Leeuwin to King George's Sound, which he discovered and named. He anchored in the harbour, and remained there for a fortnight. He would have liked to pursue the discovery of this unknown country, and did sail further east, as far as the neighbourhood of Termination Island, in longitude 122 degrees 8 minutes. But, meeting with adverse winds, he abandoned the research, and resumed his voyage to north-west America across the Pacific. In 1792, Bruny Dentrecasteaux, with the French ships Recherche and Esperance, searching for tidings of the lost Laperouse, followed the line of the shore more closely than Vancouver had done, and penetrated much further eastward. His instructions, prepared by Fleurieu, had directed him to explore the whole of the southern coast of Australia; but he was short of water, and finding nothing but sand and rock, with no harbour, and no promise of a supply of what he so badly needed, he did not continue further than longitude 131 degrees 38 1/2 minutes east, about two and a half degrees east of the present border line of Western and South Australia. These navigators, with the Dutchman Pieter Nuyts, in the early part of the seventeenth century, and the Frenchman St. Alouarn, who anchored near the Leeuwin in 1772, were the only Europeans known to have been upon any part of these southern coasts before the advent of Flinders; and the extent of the voyage of Nuyts is by no means clear.