Peron Censured Baudin Because He Examined Part Of The West Coast Before Proceeding To The Unknown South; And When At Length Le Geographe Did Sail North, The Work Done There Was Very Perfunctory.

Baudin himself was no fighting man; nor was there with the expedition a military engineer or any officer capable of reporting upon strategic situations, or competent to advise as to the establishment of a fort or a colony.

Captain Hamelin and Lieutenant Henri de Freycinet afterwards saw active service with the Navy, but the staff knew more about flowers, beetles, butterflies, and rocks than about fortifications and colonisation.

In recent years research has concentrated powerful rays of light on the intricacies of Napoleonic policy. Archives have been thrown open, ransacked, catalogued and codified. Memoirs by the score, letters by the hundred, have been published. Documents by the thousand have been studied. A battalion of eager students have handled this vast mass of material. The piercing minds of eminent scholars have drilled into it to elucidate problems incidental to Napoleon's era. But nothing has been brought to light which indicates that Australia was within the radius of his designs.

The idea that the publication of the Terre Napoleon maps, with their unfounded pretensions to discoveries, was a move on Napoleon's part towards asserting a claim upon territory in Australia, is surely untenable by any one with any appreciation of the irony of circumstances.

No man in history had a deeper realisation of the dynamics of empire than Napoleon had. A nation, as he well knew, holds its possessions by the power behind its grasp. If he had wanted a slice of Australia, and had been able to take and hold it, of what political use to him would have been a few maps, even with an eagle's picture on one of them? When his unconquerable legions brought Italy under his sway, absorbed the Low Countries, and established his dominion on the Rhine, the Elbe, and the Danube, he based no claims on maps and documents. He took because he could. An empire is not like a piece of suburban property, based on title-deeds drawn by a family solicitor. Its validity is founded on forces - the forces of ships, armies, manhood, treaties, funds, national goodwill, sound government, commercial enterprise, all the forces that make for solidity, resistance, permanence. Freycinet's maps would have been of no more use to Napoleon in getting a footing in Australia than a postage stamp would be in shifting one of the pyramids. He was capable of many mean things, but we gravely undervalue his capacity for seeing to the heart of a problem if we suppose him both mean and silly enough to conspire to cheat Matthew Flinders out of his well and hardly won honours, on the supposition that the maps would help him to assert a claim upon Australia. He could have made good no such claim in the teeth of British opposition without sea power; and that he had not.

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