One Or Two Errors Of Fact
May As Well Be Indicated.
Murray's discovery of Port Phillip was made in
1802, not in 1801, as stated on page 380 of the
Life of Napoleon; the
title of Flinders' book was not "A Voyage of Discovery to the Australian
Isles" (page 381), but A Voyage to Terra Australis; Bass, the discoverer
of the Strait bearing his name, was not a lieutenant (page 380), but a
surgeon on H.M.S. Reliance. The Freycinet Peninsula, the French name of
which is mentioned as being "still retained" (page 381), is not, it
should be understood, on the Terre Napoleon coast at all, but in Eastern
Tasmania. Dr. Rose's error as to the retention of other French names has
been dealt with in Chapter 4.)
These passages submit with definiteness the view that Bonaparte, in 1800,
despatched Baudin's ships from motives of political policy. He had
"plans" for the requisition of territory in Australia; he wished to found
a "second fatherland" for the French; Baudin was "prepared to claim half
the continent for France." Now, the reader who turns to Dr. Holland
Rose's book * (* He who turns to it without reading it through will miss
an opulent source of profit and pleasure.) for references to proofs of
these statements, will be disappointed. The learned author, who is
usually liberal in his citation of authorities, here confines himself to
the Voyage de Decouvertes of Peron and Freycinet, the Voyage of Flinders,
and the collection of documents in the seven volumes of the Historical
Records of New South Wales - all works of first-class importance, but none
of them bearing out the broad general statements as to the First Consul's
plans and intentions. Not a scrap of evidence is adduced from memoirs,
letters, or state papers. To represent Napoleon as obsessed with
magnificent ideas of universal dominion, scanning, like Milton's Satan
from the mountain height, the immensity of many realms, and aspiring to
rule them all - to do this is to present an enthralling picture, inflaming
the imagination of the reader; and, perhaps, of the writer too. But we
must beware of drawing an inference and painting it to look like a fact;
we must regard historical data through the clear white glass of
criticism, not through the coloured window of a gorgeous generalisation.
The remainder of our task, then, shall be devoted to examining the
origins of Baudin's expedition. We will inquire into the instructions
given to the commander; we will follow his vessels with a careful eye to
any incidents that may point to ulterior political purposes; we will have
regard to the suspicions engendered at the time, how far they were
justifiable, and what consequences followed from them; we will search for
motives; and we will look at what the expedition did, in case there
should by any chance thereby be disclosed any hint of an aspiration
towards territorial acquisition. We will try to regard the evidence as a
whole, the object being - as the object of all honest historical inquiry
must be - to ascertain the truth about it, freed from those jealousies and
prejudices which, so freely deposited at the time, tend to consolidate
and petrify until, as with the guano massed hard on islets in
Australasian seas, it is difficult to get at the solid rock beneath for
the accretions upon it, and sometimes not easy to discriminate rock from
accretion.
CHAPTER 7. GENESIS OF BAUDIN'S EXPEDITION.
Baudin's one of a series of French expeditions.
The building up of the map of Australia.
Early map-makers.
Terra Australis.
Dutch navigators.
Emmerie Mollineux's map.
Tasman and Dampier.
The Petites Lettres of Maupertuis.
De Brosses and his Histoire des Navigations aux Terres Australes.
French voyages that originated from it.
Bougainville; Marion-Dufresne; La Perouse; Bruni Dentrecasteaux.
Voyages subsequent to Baudin's.
The object of the voyages scientific and exploratory.
The Institute of France and its proposition.
Received by Bonaparte with interest.
Bonaparte's interest in geography and travel.
His authorisation of the expedition.
The Committee of the Institute and their instructions.
Fitting out of the expedition.
Le Geographe and Le Naturaliste.
The staff.
Francois Peron.
Captain Nicolas Baudin.
French interest in southern exploration did not commence nor did it cease
with the expedition of 1800 to 1804. We fall into a radical error if we
regard that as an isolated endeavour. It was, in truth, a link in a
chain: one of a series of efforts made by the French to solve what was,
during the eighteenth century, a problem with which the scientific
intellect of Europe was much concerned.
The tardy and piecemeal fashion in which definiteness was given to
southern latitudes on the map of the world makes a curious chapter in the
history of geographical research. After the ships of Magellan and Drake
had circumnavigated the globe, and a very large part of America had been
mapped, there still lay, south of the tracks of those adventurers who
rounded the Horn and breasted the Pacific, a region that remained
unknown - a Terra Australis, Great Southern Continent, or Terra Incognita
as it was vaguely and variously termed. Map-makers, having no certain
data concerning this vast uncharted area, commonly sprawled across the
extremity of the southern hemisphere a purely fanciful outline of
imaginary land. Terra Australis was the playground of the cartographers
of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. They seemed to abhor blank
spaces. Some of the most beautiful of the old maps make the oceans busy
with spouting whales, sportive dolphins, and galleons with bellying
sails; but what to do with the great staring expanse of vacancy at the
bottom their authors did not know. So they drew a crooked line across the
map to represent land, and stuck upon it the label Terra Australis, or
one of the other designations just mentioned. The configuration of the
territory on different maps did not agree, and not one of them signified
a coast with anything like the form of the real Great Southern Continent.
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