He Simply Set Forth The Facts With His Habitual Exactness And
Fairness; And Where Flinders Was Just, There Is Surely No Warrant For
Others To Perpetuate An Accusation Which Originated In A Period Of
Intense National Hatred And Jealousy, And Bears Its Birth-Mark Upon It.
A critical examination of Freycinet's charts is alone sufficient to
shatter the opinion that he utilised the drawings of the English
navigator.
Had he even seen them, his own work would have been more
accurate than it was, and his large chart of New Holland would have been
more complete. It has already been shown that the French chart of the
so-called Terre Napoleon coasts was in large measure defective, many
capes, islands, and bays being represented that have no existence in
fact, and a large portion of the outline being crudely and erroneously
drawn. Not only so, but if Freycinet had had copies of Flinders' charts
before him, use would certainly have been made of them to give greater
completeness to the eastern and north-western shores. Flinders, in his
last voyage in the Investigator, had made important discoveries on the
Queensland coast and in the Gulf of Carpentaria. He had discovered, for
instance, Port Bowen and Port Curtis, which had been missed by Cook, had
given greater definiteness to the islands near the southern end of the
Great Barrier Reef, and had made a dangerous acquaintance with the Reef
itself, discovering one narrow alley through it which is marked on modern
maps as Flinders' Passage. In the Gulf of Carpentaria he had also done
some entirely original work. He had shown, for example, that Cape Van
Diemen, represented as a projection from the mainland on all previous
maps, was really part of an island, which he named Mornington Isle.
Freycinet's charts reveal not the faintest trace of the fresh discoveries
which Flinders had achieved around east and north-east Australia, nor do
they in any particular indicate that their manifold serious imperfections
had been corrected by reference to Flinders' superb charts. In short, the
French work, though beautifully engraved and printed, was, in a
geographical sense, for the most part too poor to justify the suspicion
that Freycinet received aid from the drawings of the persevering captain
of the Investigator.
The circumstances attending the imprisonment of Flinders, and the
precipitate haste with which Freycinet's work was pushed forward,
undoubtedly furnished prima facie justification for the suspicion,
indignantly voiced by contemporary English writers, and which has been
hardened into a direct accusation since, that an act of plagiarism was
committed, dishonest in itself, and doubly guilty from the circumstances
in which it was performed. The Quarterly reviewer of 1817* pointed out
that the few charts in Freycinet's atlas "ARE VERY LIKE THOSE OF CAPTAIN
FLINDERS, ONLY MUCH INFERIOR IN POINT OF EXECUTION." (* Volume 17 pages
229 to 230; the italics are the reviewer's. The plagiarism legend - for
such it is - originated with this Quarterly article. The earliest
biographer of Flinders, in the Naval Chronicle 32 page 177, wrote very
strongly of General Decaen, considering that he was "worthy of his
Corsican master," and that his name "will be consigned to infamy as long
as mankind shall consider it honourable to promote science and civilised
to practise hospitality," but alleged no improper use of the charts.
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