Baudin's one of a series of French expeditions.
The building up of the map of Australia.
Early map-makers.
Terra Australis.
Dutch navigators.
Emmerie Mollineux's map.
Tasman and Dampier.
The Petites Lettres of Maupertuis.
De Brosses and his Histoire des Navigations aux Terres Australes.
French voyages that originated from it.
Bougainville; Marion-Dufresne; La Perouse; Bruni Dentrecasteaux.
Voyages subsequent to Baudin's.
The object of the voyages scientific and exploratory.
The Institute of France and its proposition.
Received by Bonaparte with interest.
Bonaparte's interest in geography and travel.
His authorisation of the expedition.
The Committee of the Institute and their instructions.
Fitting out of the expedition.
Le Geographe and Le Naturaliste.
The staff.
Francois Peron.
Captain Nicolas Baudin.
French interest in southern exploration did not commence nor did it cease
with the expedition of 1800 to 1804. We fall into a radical error if we
regard that as an isolated endeavour. It was, in truth, a link in a
chain: one of a series of efforts made by the French to solve what was,
during the eighteenth century, a problem with which the scientific
intellect of Europe was much concerned.
The tardy and piecemeal fashion in which definiteness was given to
southern latitudes on the map of the world makes a curious chapter in the
history of geographical research. After the ships of Magellan and Drake
had circumnavigated the globe, and a very large part of America had been
mapped, there still lay, south of the tracks of those adventurers who
rounded the Horn and breasted the Pacific, a region that remained
unknown - a Terra Australis, Great Southern Continent, or Terra Incognita
as it was vaguely and variously termed. Map-makers, having no certain
data concerning this vast uncharted area, commonly sprawled across the
extremity of the southern hemisphere a purely fanciful outline of
imaginary land. Terra Australis was the playground of the cartographers
of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. They seemed to abhor blank
spaces. Some of the most beautiful of the old maps make the oceans busy
with spouting whales, sportive dolphins, and galleons with bellying
sails; but what to do with the great staring expanse of vacancy at the
bottom their authors did not know. So they drew a crooked line across the
map to represent land, and stuck upon it the label Terra Australis, or
one of the other designations just mentioned. The configuration of the
territory on different maps did not agree, and not one of them signified
a coast with anything like the form of the real Great Southern Continent.
To the period of fancy succeeded that of patchwork. Came the Dutch, often
blown out of their true course from the Cape of Good Hope to the Spice
Islands, and stumbling upon the shores of Western Australia. To some such
accident we probably owe the piece of improved cartography shown upon
Emmerie Mollineux's map, which Hakluyt inserted in some copies of the
second edition of his Principal Navigations, and which Shakespeare is
supposed to have had in mind when, in a merry scene in Twelfth Night, he
made Maria say of Malvolio (3 2 85): "He does smile his face into more
lines than is in the new map with the AUGMENTATION OF THE INDIES."* (*
See Mr. Charles Coote's paper in Transactions of New Shakespeare Society,
1877 to 1879.
