The reader
of the second edition of the book had a right to expect that he was in
possession of the original text, save for the correction of incidental
errors.
But in 1824 Napoleon was dead, a Bourbon reigned in France, and
Freycinet was the servant of the monarchy to which he owed the command of
the expedition of 1817. The suppression of Napoleon's name and the record
of his actions from Peron's text, was a puerile piece of servility.
There is nothing surprising in Bonaparte's cordial approval of the
enterprise. One has only to study the volumes in which M. Frederic Masson
has collected the papers and memoranda relating to Napoleon's youth and
early manhood to realise how intensely keen was his interest in geography
and travel. In one of those interesting works is a document occupying
eight printed pages, in which Napoleon had summarised a geographical
textbook, with a view to the more perfect mastery of its contents.* (*
See Masson's Napoleon Inconnu; Papiers Inedits; Paris 1895 volume 2 page
44. The text-book was that of Lacroix.) It is curious to note how little
the young scholar was able to ascertain about Australasia from the volume
from which he learnt the elements of that science for which, with his
genius for strategy and tactics, he must have had an instinctive taste.
"La Nouvelle Guinee, la Carpentarie, la Nouvelle Hollande," etc., figure
in his notes as the countries forming the principal part of the southern
hemisphere now grouped under the denomination of Australasia; "la
Carpentarie" thus signalised as a separated land being simply the
northern region of Australia proper, the farthest limit of which is Cape
York.* (* Mallet's Description de l'Univers (Frankfort 1686) mentions
"Carpenterie" as being near the "Terre des Papous," and as discovered by
the Dutch captain, Carpenter.)
It is not a little interesting, that when, in April 1800, twenty
sculptors were commissioned to execute as many busts of great men to
adorn the Galerie des Consuls, the only Englishmen among the honoured
score were Marlborough and Dampier.* (* Aulard, Paris sous le Consulat 1
267.) It is curious to find the adventurous ex-buccaneer in such noble
company as that of Cicero, Cato, Caesar, Demosthenes, Frederick the
Great, and George Washington, but the fact that he was among the selected
heroes may be taken as another evidence of Bonaparte's interest in the
men who helped to find out what the world was like. Perhaps if somebody
had seen him reading Dampier's Voyages, as he read Cook's on the way to
Egypt, that fact would have been instanced as another proof, not of his
fondness for extremely fascinating literature, but of the nourishment of
a secret passion to seize the coasts which Dampier explored.
Napoleon had been a good and a diligent student. The fascinating but
hateful characteristics of his later career, when he was the Emperor with
a heart petrified and corroded by ambition, the conqueror ever greedy of
fresh conquest, the scourge of nations and the tyrant of kings, too often
make one overlook the liberal instincts of his earlier years.
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