If Not That, Was He Desirous
By This Means Of Striking A Blow At The Prestige Of Great Britain, Whose
Hero Nelson Had Smashed His Fleet At The Nile Two Years Before?
Or had he
ideals in the direction of establishing French colonial dominions in
southern latitudes, and did he desire to obtain accurate information as
to where the tricolour might most advantageously be planted?
It ought to
be possible, out of the copious store of available material relative to
Napoleon's era, to form a sound opinion on this fascinating subject. But
we had better resolve to have the material before we do formulate a
conclusion, and not jump to one regardless of evidence, or the lack of
it.
In this inquiry very little assistance is given to the student by those
classical historians of the period to whose voluminous writings reference
might naturally be made. There is not, for example, the slightest
allusion to Baudin's expedition or the Terre Napoleon incidents in
Thiers' twenty-tomed Histoire du Consulat et de l'Empire; nor can the
reader get much assistance from consulting many British works on the same
epoch. An endeavour has, however, been made to set the facts in their
right perspective, by a brilliant contemporary English historian, Dr.
John Holland Rose, somewhat curtly in his Revolutionary and Napoleonic
Era, but more fully in his Life of Napoleon.* (* Life of Napoleon 1 379
to 383. Still later, in his lecture on "England's Commercial Struggle
with Napoleon," included in the Lectures on the Nineteenth Century,
edited by F.A. Kirkpatrick (1908), Dr. Holland Rose pursues the same
theme.) The present writer, after an independent study of the facts, is
unable to share Dr. Holland Rose's view, as will presently appear, but
the desire being less to urge an opinion than to present the case in its
true relations, it will be convenient to state Dr. Rose's presentment of
it before proceeding to look at it from other aspects.
"The unknown continent of Australia," says the historian, "appealed to
Napoleon's imagination, which pictured its solitudes transformed by
French energy into a second fatherland." Bonaparte had "early turned his
eyes to that land." He took a copy of Cook's voyages with him to Egypt,
and no sooner was he firmly installed as First Consul, than he "planned
with the Institute of France a great French expedition to New Holland."
It is represented that the Terre Napoleon maps show that "under the guise
of being an emissary of civilisation, Commodore Baudin was prepared to
claim half the continent for France."* (* Ibid page 381. The Terre
Napoleon region is far from being half the continent of Australia, if
that be what Dr. Holland Rose's words mean. One observes, by the way, a
tendency on the part of English writers to use very small maps when
speaking of the size of things in Australia.) Indeed, his inquiry "about
the extent of British claims on the Pacific coast was so significant as
to elicit from Governor King the reply that the whole of Van Diemen's
Land and of the coast from Cape Howe on the south of the mainland to Cape
York on the north, was British territory." The facts relative to the
awakening of suspicion in Governor King's mind - to be discussed
hereafter - are likewise stated; together with those affecting the
settlements of Hobart and Port Phillip; and it is concluded that "the
plans of Napoleon for the acquisition of Van Diemen's Land and the middle
of Australia, had an effect like that which the ambition of Montcalm,
Dupleix, Lally, and Peron has exerted on the ultimate destiny of many a
vast and fertile territory."* (* Ibid page 382.
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