New
South Wales Was Marked As Occupying The Whole Of The East.
The styling of
the freshly discovered south Terre Napoleon was a mere piece of
courtiership.
If Napoleon had ever been strong enough to strike a blow at
the British in Australia, the probabilities are that he would have
endeavoured to oust them from New South Wales, and would not have
troubled himself very much about the coasts that were named after him. It
was his way to strike at the heart of his enemy, and the heart of British
settlement in Australia was located at Port Jackson.
It has been represented in one of the best books in English on the
Napoleonic period,* (* Dr. Holland Rose's Life of Napoleon 1 381.) that
"the names given by Flinders on the coasts of Western and South
Australia, have been retained owing to the priority of his investigation,
but the French names have been kept up on the coast between the mouth of
the Murray and Bass Straits for the same reason." That statement,
however, is very much too wide. Capes Patton, Otway, Nelson, Bridgewater,
Northumberland and Banks, Portland Bay and Julia Percy Island, all lie
between the points mentioned, and all of them were named by Grant, who
first discovered them and marked them on his chart. None of the French
names is properly in present employment east of Cape Buffon; for their
Cap Boufflers, which is marked on a few maps, is really the Cape Banks of
Grant. The only names freshly applied by Baudin to natural features of
the mainland on the Terre Napoleon charts, and which are in current use,
are Cape Buffon, Cape Lannes, Rivoli Bay, Cape Jaffa, Cape Rabelais, Cape
Dombey, Guichen Bay, Cape Bernoulli, Lacepede Bay, and Cape Morard de
Galles.
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