Baudin Himself Was No Fighting Man; Nor Was There With The
Expedition A Military Engineer Or Any Officer Capable Of Reporting Upon
Strategic Situations, Or Competent To Advise As To The Establishment Of A
Fort Or A Colony.
Captain Hamelin and Lieutenant Henri de Freycinet
afterwards saw active service with the Navy, but the staff knew more
about flowers, beetles, butterflies, and rocks than about fortifications
and colonisation.
In recent years research has concentrated powerful rays of light on the
intricacies of Napoleonic policy. Archives have been thrown open,
ransacked, catalogued and codified. Memoirs by the score, letters by the
hundred, have been published. Documents by the thousand have been
studied. A battalion of eager students have handled this vast mass of
material. The piercing minds of eminent scholars have drilled into it to
elucidate problems incidental to Napoleon's era. But nothing has been
brought to light which indicates that Australia was within the radius of
his designs.
The idea that the publication of the Terre Napoleon maps, with their
unfounded pretensions to discoveries, was a move on Napoleon's part
towards asserting a claim upon territory in Australia, is surely
untenable by any one with any appreciation of the irony of circumstances.
No man in history had a deeper realisation of the dynamics of empire than
Napoleon had. A nation, as he well knew, holds its possessions by the
power behind its grasp. If he had wanted a slice of Australia, and had
been able to take and hold it, of what political use to him would have
been a few maps, even with an eagle's picture on one of them? When his
unconquerable legions brought Italy under his sway, absorbed the Low
Countries, and established his dominion on the Rhine, the Elbe, and the
Danube, he based no claims on maps and documents. He took because he
could. An empire is not like a piece of suburban property, based on
title-deeds drawn by a family solicitor. Its validity is founded on
forces - the forces of ships, armies, manhood, treaties, funds, national
goodwill, sound government, commercial enterprise, all the forces that
make for solidity, resistance, permanence. Freycinet's maps would have
been of no more use to Napoleon in getting a footing in Australia than a
postage stamp would be in shifting one of the pyramids. He was capable of
many mean things, but we gravely undervalue his capacity for seeing to
the heart of a problem if we suppose him both mean and silly enough to
conspire to cheat Matthew Flinders out of his well and hardly won
honours, on the supposition that the maps would help him to assert a
claim upon Australia. He could have made good no such claim in the teeth
of British opposition without sea power; and that he had not.
The consequences of the suspicion that Napoleon intended to seize a site
in Australia, were, however, quite as important as if he had formally
announced his intention of doing so. What men believe to be true, not
what is true, determines their action; and there was quite enough in the
circumstances that occurred to make Governor King and his superiors in
England resolve upon decisive action. King having communicated his
beliefs to Ministers, Lord Hobart, Secretary of State for War and the
Colonies, in June 1803, wrote a despatch in which he authorised the
colonisation of Van Diemen's Land by the removal of part of the
establishment at Norfolk Island to Port Dalrymple - "the advantageous
position of which, upon the southern coast of Van Diemen's Land, and near
the entrance of Bass Straits, renders it, in a political view,
particularly necessary that a settlement should be formed there."* (* See
Backhouse Walker, Early Tasmania page 22.) It will be observed that the
Secretary of State's geographical knowledge of the countries under his
regime was quite remarkable. A man who should describe Glasgow as being
on the southern coast of England, near the eastern entrance of the
Channel, would be just about as near the truth as Lord Hobart managed to
get.* (* Froude's amusing story of Lord Palmerston, when, on forming a
Ministry, he thought he would have to take the Secretaryship of State for
the Colonies himself, comes to mind. He said to Sir Arthur Helps, "Come
upstairs with me, Helps; we will look at the maps, and you shall show me
where these places are." Froude's Oceana page 12.)
King moved immediately. He despatched the Lady Nelson and the Albion on
August 31 to establish a settlement on the river Derwent, with Lieutenant
John Bowen in charge; and in September 1803 the first British colony in
Tasmania was planted. It had a variety of adverse experiences before at
length the beautiful site of the city of Hobart, at the foot of Mount
Wellington, was determined upon; but here, at all events, was a
beginning, and the tale from that time forward has been one of steady
progress.
As soon as the imagined threat of French invasion lost its impulsion, the
colonising energy of the governing authorities subsided. The Tasmanian
settlement remained and grew, but Trafalgar removed all fear of foreign
interference. Hence it was that nearly forty years elapsed before any
real effort was made to settle the lands within Port Phillip. Then the
first energies that were devoted towards creating the great state of
Victoria were not directed by the Government, which no longer had any
political motive for forcing matters, but were made by enterprising
stock-owners searching for pastures. It was not till 1835 that John
Batman pushed up the river Yarra, found the site of the present city of
Melbourne, and said, "This will be the place for a village!" Trafalgar
and the security which it gave to British possessions oversea made all
the difference between the early occupation of Tasmania for fear the
French should take it, and the leisurely and non-official settlement of
the Port Phillip district, when it was quite certain that no foreign
power could set a foot upon it without British permission.
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