"Captain Baudin Informed Me That After Parting With The Naturaliste In The Strait, In A Heavy Gale, He Had Had

Fine weather, and had kept the coast close on board from Westernport to the place of meeting, but that he

Had found no bay or place where a vessel could anchor, the coast having but few bights in it, and those affording nothing to interest." It will be seen that the official report and the account given to the public twelve years later are in close agreement. The important fact to be noticed is that Le Geographe had slipped past Port Phillip without observing the entrance, and that her captain was at this time entirely ignorant of the existence of the harbour which has since become the seat of one of the greatest cities in the southern hemisphere.

Now this statement, which is sufficiently surprising without the introduction of complicating contradictions, becomes quite mysterious when compared with the accounts given by Lieutenant Louis de Freycinet and Francois Peron, the joint authors of the official history of the French voyage. It is astonishing in itself, because a vessel sent out on a voyage of exploration would not be expected to overlook so important a feature as Port Phillip. Here was not a small river with a sandbar over its mouth, but an extensive area of land-locked sea, with an opening a mile and a half wide, flanked by rocky head-lands, fronted by usually turbulent waters, at the head of a deep indentation of the coast. The entrance to Port Phillip is not, it must be acknowledged, so easy to perceive from the outside as would appear from a hasty examination of the map. If the reader will take a good atlas in which there is a map of Port Phillip, and will hold the plate in a horizontal position sufficiently below the level of the eye to permit the entrance to be seen ALONG the page, he will look at it very much as it is regarded from a ship at sea.* (* A reduced copy of the Admiralty chart of the entrance (1907) is prefixed to this chapter. The reader can perform the experiment with that.) It will be noticed that a clear view into the port, except from a particular angle, is blocked by the land on the eastern side (Point Nepean) overlapping the tongue of land just inside the port on the western side (Shortland's Bluff). Not until a vessel stands fairly close and opposite to the entrance, so that the two lighthouses on the western side, at Queenscliff, "open out," can the passage be discerned.* (* Ferguson, Sailing Directions for Port Phillip, 1854 - he was harbour-master at the time - says (page 9): "Vessels having passed Cape Schanck should keep a good offing in running down towards the entrance until they open out the lighthouses, WHICH ARE NOT SEEN BEFORE BEARING NORTH 1/2 EAST OWING TO THE HIGH LAND OF POINT NEPEAN INTERVENING." Findley, Navigation of the South Pacific Ocean, 1863, has a remark about the approach to the port from the west: "In approaching Port Phillip from the westward, the entrance cannot be distinguished until Nepean Point, the eastern point, bears north-north-east, when Shortland's Bluff, on which the lighthouses are erected, opens out, and a view of the estuary is obtained." A Treatise on the Navigation of Port Phillip, by Captain Evans (a pilot of thirty-six years' experience), has also been consulted.) Indeed, a pilot of much experience has assured the writer that ships, whose captains know the port, are sometimes seen "dodging about" (the phrase is the pilot's) looking for the entrance. Yet it may be allowed that if Le Geographe had sailed close in, with the shore on her starboard quarter, and the coast had been examined with care, she would hardly have missed the port; and, her special business being exploration, she certainly ought not to have missed it.* (* In Appendix B, at the end of this chapter, are given quotations from the journals of Murray and Flinders, in which they record how they first saw the port.)

But although Baudin said he had seen nothing "to interest," both Peron and Freycinet, in their volumes - published years later, after they had learnt of the discovery of Port Phillip by Lieutenant John Murray in January 1802 - stated that it was seen from Le Geographe on March 30. Peron wrote that shortly after daybreak, the ship being in the curve of the coast called Baie Talleyrand on the Terre Napoleon maps - that is, between Cape Schanck on the eastern side of Port Phillip heads, and Cape Roadknight on the western side - the port was seen and its contours were distinguished from the masthead.* (* The matter is sufficiently important to justify the quotation of the passages in which Peron and Freycinet recorded the alleged observation, and these are given at length in Appendix A to this chapter.) Peron did not say that he saw it himself. He merely recorded that it was seen. Freycinet did not see it himself either. He was at this time an officer on Le Naturaliste, and was not on the Terre Napoleon coasts at all until the following year, when he penetrated St. Vincent's and Spencer's Gulfs. He, without indicating the time of day, or stating that the port was merely viewed from aloft, asserted that the entrance was observed, though the ship did not go inside.

In the first place, the statements of Peron and Freycinet are not in agreement. To observe the entrance was one thing; to trace the contours from the masthead quite another. To do the first was quite possible, though not, as will be shown, from any part of the route indicated on the track-chart of Le Geographe. But to distinguish the contours of Port Phillip from outside, over the peninsula, was not possible.

Here, at all events, is a sharp conflict of evidence. We must endeavour to elicit the truth.

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