Many Loose Statements Have Been Written About The Use Which The French
Made Of Flinders' Charts While He Was Held In Captivity.
It has been too
often taken for granted that the evidence of plagiarism is beyond
dispute.
Not only popular writers, but historians with claims to be
considered scientific, are substantially in agreement on this point. Two
examples will indicate what is meant. Messrs. Becke and Jeffery, in their
Naval Pioneers of Australia (page 216), assert that "among other
indignities he suffered, he found that the charts taken from him by
Decaen had been appropriated to Baudin's exploring expedition." Again, to
take a work appealing to a different section of readers, the Cambridge
Modern History also charges the French with "the use of his papers to
appropriate for their ships the credit of his discoveries."* (* Volume 9
page 739 (Professor Egerton). Two more examples may be cited. Thus,
Laurie, Story of Australasia (1896) page 86. "He found that his journals
and charts had been stolen by the French governor of the Mauritius and
transferred to Paris, where the fullest advantage was taken of them by M.
Peron." Again, Jose, Australasia (1901) page 21: "His maps were taken to
France to be published there with French names as the work of French
explorers.")
The charge is, it will be observed, that not only did the French governor
of Mauritius imprison the English navigator despite his passport,
detaining him years after the other members of the Cumberland's company
had been liberated, but that Flinders' charts and papers were improperly
used in the preparation of the history of Baudin's expedition. Indeed,
the accusation is equivalent to one of garrotting: that General Decaen
seized and bound his victim, robbed him, and enabled Freycinet and Peron
to use his work as their own.
So widely has this view been diffused, that probably few will be prepared
for the assurance that there is no evidence to support it. On the
contrary, as will be shown, neither Peron nor Freycinet ever saw any
chart or journal taken from Flinders. Use was made, it is believed, of
one British chart which may possibly have been his - that embodying a
drawing of Port Phillip - but reasons will be given for the opinion that
this, whether it was Flinders' chart or Murray's, was seen by the French
before Baudin's ships left Sydney, and was certainly not copied at
Mauritius.
Before proving these statements, it will be convenient to make the reader
acquainted with the Captain-General or Military-Governor of Mauritius,
Charles Decaen. He was a rough, dogged, somewhat brutal type of soldier,
who had attained to eminence during the revolutionary wars. Born at Caen
in Normandy in 1769, he served during his youth for three years in the
artillery, and then entered a lawyer's office in his native town; but
during the wars of the Revolution, when France was pressed by enemies on
all sides, he threw aside quills and parchments, and, in his twenty-third
year, entered upon his strenuous fighting career.
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