It Was To This Feeling That Sir Joseph Banks
Referred When, In Writing To Flinders, He Said That He Had
Heard that the
French Government were not too well pleased with Baudin's work.* (*
Girard, writing in 1857, stated that rumours
About Baudin's conduct,
circulated before the arrival of Le Geographe, induced the public to
believe that the expedition had been abortive, without useful results,
and that it was to the interest of the Government to forget all about it.
F. Peron, page 46. But Girard cites no authority for the statement, and
as he was not born in 1804, he is not himself an authoritative witness.
He merely repeated Freycinet's assertions.)
The distinguished men of science who stood at the head of the Institute
of France were best qualified to judge of the value of the work done; and
they at least spoke decisively in its praise. The collections brought
home by Le Naturaliste had included one hundred and eighty cases of
minerals and animals, four cases of dried plants, three large casks of
specimens of timber, two boxes of seeds, and sixty tubs of living
plants.* (* Moniteur, 14th Messidor, Revolutionary Year 11 (July 3,
1803).) On June 9, 1806, a Committee of the Institute, consisting of
Cuvier, Laplace, Bougainville, Fleurieu, and Lacepede, furnished a report
based upon an examination of the scientific specimens and the manuscript
of the first volume of the Voyage de Decouvertes, which, in the meantime,
had been written by Peron. They referred in terms of warm eulogy to the
industry which had collected more than one hundred thousand specimens; to
the new species discovered, estimated by the professors at the Musee at
two thousand five hundred; and to the care and skill displayed by Peron
in describing and classifying, a piece of work appealing with especial
force to the co-ordinating intelligence of Cuvier. They directed
attention to the observations made by the naturalist upon the British
colony at Port Jackson; and their language on this subject may be deemed
generous in view of the fact that England and France were then at war.
"M. Peron," reported the savants, "has applied himself particularly to
studying the details of that vast system of colonisation which is being
developed at once upon a great continent, upon innumerable islands, and
upon the wide ocean. His work in that respect should be of the greatest
interest for the philosopher and the statesman. Never, perhaps, did a
subject more interesting and more curious offer itself to the meditation
of either, than the colony of Botany Bay, so long misunderstood in
Europe."* (* The colony was not at Botany Bay, though the mistake was
common enough even in England. But the champion error on that subject was
that of Dumas, who, in Les Trois Mousquetaires, chapter 52 - the period,
as "every schoolboy knows," of Cardinal Richelieu - represents Milady as
reflecting bitterly on her fate, and fearing that D'Artagnan would
transport her "to some loathsome Botany Bay," a century and a quarter
before Captain Cook discovered it!
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