If There
Was A Plan In Manuscript, The Text Of It Has Never Been Published.* (*
"Probably It Was Suppressed Or Destroyed," Says Dr. Holland Rose (Life Of
Napoleon 1 379).
But why should it have been?
There is no reason to
suppose that it contained anything which it was to anybody's interest to
destroy or suppress. Indeed, it is by no means clear that there was such
a document. It is quite likely that the scheme of the Institute was
explained verbally to the First Consul. Why manufacture mysteries?) There
is only one document relating to the expedition in the collected
correspondence of Napoleon;* (* Edition of 1861.) and that concerned an
incident to which reference will be made in the next chapter. The reason
for the absence of letters concerning the matter among Napoleon's papers
is presumably that he left the carrying out of the project to the
Institute; for he was not wont to restrain his directing hand in affairs
in which he was personally concerned.
But there were two leading members of the Institute who had already
concerned themselves with Australasian discovery, and who may safely be
assumed to have taken the initiative in this matter. They were
Bougainville the explorer, who had commanded the expedition of 1766 to
1771, and Charles Pierre Claret de Fleurieu, who had been Minister of
Marine in 1790, and had written a book on the Decouvertes des Francais
dans le sud-est de la Nouvelle Guinee (Paris, 1790), in which he
maintained the prior claims of the French navigators Bougainville and
Surville to discoveries to which later English explorers had in ignorance
given fresh names.
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