"Up To Sixteen Years Of Age," Said Napoleon In A Scrap Of Conversation Recorded By Roederer, "I Would Have Fought For Rousseau Against All The Friends Of Voltaire.

Now it is the contrary.

I have been especially disgusted with Rousseau since I have seen the East. Savage man is a dog.") Baudin carried away from his visits to the abodes of untutored races no truer notion than came from his own unsubstantiated sentiments, nourished by no contact with facts, but imbibed uncritically from the rhetorical rhapsodists of Rousseau's school. Crabbe summed them up in half a dozen lines:

"Tis the savage state Is only good, and ours sophisticate! See! the free creatures in their woods and plains, Where without laws each happy monarch reigns, King of himself - while we a number dread, By slaves commanded and by dunces led."

Peron spoke of savage peoples, not with less sympathy but with a sympathy grounded on knowledge; and he wasted no words about the "injustice" of occupying lands which the aboriginal only used in the sense that lands are "used" by rabbits and dingoes. Peron's appreciation of well-observed facts gave him some political insight in the philosophical sense, and he comprehended the development of which the country was capable. Could Baudin's shade visit to-day the shores that he traversed more than a century ago, he would surely acknowledge that orchards of ripening fruit, miles of golden grain, millions of white fleeces, the cattle of a thousand hills, great cities throbbing with immense energies, and a commerce of ever augmenting vastness, ministering to the happiness of free and prosperous populations, are, in the large ledger of humanity, an abundant compensation for the disappearance of the few companies of naked savages whom, when civilisation once invaded their ancestral haunts, neither the agencies of government nor philanthropy could save from the processes of decay.

The account given by Peron of the flag-raising incident was quite accurate, but he presented his readers with a wholly untrue version of Governor King's letter to Baudin. With the document before us, we must doubt whether Peron ever saw it. The passage printed by him in quotation marks bears hardly a resemblance to the courteous terms of the actual letter, which did not contain any such threat as that "all these countries form an integral part of the British Empire," and "it will be my duty to oppose by every means in my power the execution of the design you are supposed to have in view." It seems probable that Peron heard the letter read, or its contents summarised, but, in writing, mixed up the substance of it with blustering language which may have been used by Acting-Lieutenant Robbins.* (* Backhouse Walker also held this view. Early Tasmania page 18.) At all events, King used no word of menace, while conveying plainly that the establishment of a French settlement would require "explanation."

There is no good reason for disbelieving Baudin's disclaimer. It was plain and candid; and there was nothing in his actions while he was in Australian waters which belied his words. The baseless character of the gossip promulgated by Lieutenant-Colonel Paterson, and the alleged exhibition of the map indicating the exact spot where the French intended to settle in Frederick Henry Bay, were disposed of by the fact that Baudin's ships went nowhere near that place after leaving Sydney. If any French officer did show Paterson a chart, he must have been amusing himself by playing on the suspicions of the Englishman, who was probably "fishing" for information. Baudin's conduct, and that of his officers, never suggested that search for a site for settlement was part of the mission of the expedition; and, in the face of the commodore's emphatic denials, positive evidence, or a strong chain of facts to the contrary, would have to be forthcoming before such a story could be entertained. Suspicions were natural enough in face of the strained feelings, the wars, the plots and counter-plots of diplomacy, Napoleon's menaced invasion of England, and all the other factors that made for racial animosity at the beginning of the nineteenth century; but viewing the circumstances in the perspective made by the lapse of a hundred years, cool judgment must dismiss the jealous alarms of 1802 as being unfounded.

Yet a patriotic Frenchman, as Peron was, could not witness this remarkable growth of a new offshoot of British power in the South Seas without regret and misgiving. "Doubtless," he commented on Robbins' action, "that ceremony will appear silly to people who know little about English polity; but for the statesman such formalities assume a much more serious and important character. By these public and repeated declarations England seems every day to fortify her pretensions, to establish her rights, in a positive manner, and to devise pretexts to repulse, even by force of arms, all other peoples who may wish to form settlements in these distant countries." We shall not honour Peron the less because he expressed an opinion so natural to a man solicitous for his country's prestige.

It has been stated by one or two writers that the action of Robbins put an end to the cordial relations which had previously existed between him and the French. But that is an error. They had cause to be offended, but the young man was treated with indulgence. Peron records that both Grimes and Robbins visited the tents of the French after the flag incident, and shared their frugal dinner; and Baudin informed King that, the Cumberland having lost an anchor, his forge was at work for a whole day supplying the wants of the British schooner - a service akin to heaping coals of fire on the head of the zealous acting-lieutenant. At the same time, other members of the French expedition experienced very kind treatment from British fishermen. Faure, one of the scientific staff, was sent in a small boat to complete a chart of the island. A violent storm compelled him to go ashore on the western end, where he and his sailors were for three days most hospitably entertained by sealers, who, on their departure, forced upon them some of their finest furs as presents.

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