Flinders And
Lieutenant John Murray, Who Discovered Port Phillip, Were Both There
During Part Of The Same Time.
It was then that the French learnt of the
existence of the great harbour of which Baudin was ignorant when he met
Flinders in Encounter Bay; and it is highly probable that by some means
they obtained a copy of the chart which they saw.
Grounds for stating that that is a probability will be advanced a little
later. But let us first see how the drawing of Port Phillip that does
appear on the Terre Napoleon charts got there.
It was taken, as Freycinet acknowledged,* (* Voyage de Decouvertes 3
430.) "from a manuscript chart prepared on the English ship Armiston, in
1804. In 1806 the French frigate La Piedmontoise captured the British
ship Fame. Amongst the papers found on board was this manuscript chart.
It so happened that one of the officers of La Piedmontoise was Lieutenant
Charles Baudin des Ardennes, who had been a junior officer on Le
Naturaliste from 1800 to 1804. (He was no relative of Captain Baudin. The
family of Baudin des Ardennes was very well known in France; and this
officer became a distinguished French admiral.) He took possession of the
manuscript, and handed it over to Freycinet, who made use of it in
preparing his charts.
Probably it was a very rough chart; but even so, if Freycinet had had
anything like a drawing of Port Phillip made on Le Geographe, he would
have turned out a better piece of work. Not only is the outline very
defective, but the "lay" of the Nepean peninsula is so grossly wrong that
this alone would suffice to show that Freycinet did not merely correct
his chart with the aid of that captured from the Fame, but that the whole
drawing of Port Phillip was fitted in, like a patch. However ill a
navigator may draw, he always knows whether a coast along which he is
sailing runs west or north-west. A mariner's apprentice would know that.
But on the Terre Napoleon charts, the peninsula lies due east and west,
whereas in reality, as the reader will see by reference to any good map,
it has a decidedly north-westerly inclination. The patch was not well put
on. The consequence of this bad cobbling was to give a box-like,
rectangular appearance to the bay, utterly unlike the reality. The east
and west sides were carried about as far as Mornington and St. Leonards
respectively, in two nearly straight and parallel lines; Swan Bay and
Swan Island were missed altogether; and the graceful curve of the coast
round by Sorrento and Dromana - a curve most grateful to the eye on a day
when sea and sky are blue, and the silver sands and white cliffs shine in
the clear light - was tortured into a sharp bend. It was a very rough bit
of work.
The fact that an expedition sent out for discovery purposes, and which
named a considerable extent of the coast-line traversed after the Emperor
who had enabled it to be despatched, had to depend upon a manuscript
accidentally obtained from a captured British merchant ship for a chart
of the principal port in the territory so flauntingly denominated, hardly
calls for comment.
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