CHAPTER 4. TERRE NAPOLEON AND ITS NOMENCLATURE.

Imprisonment of Flinders in Mauritius.

The French atlas of 1807.

The French charts and the names upon them.

Hurried publication.

The allegation that Péron acted under pressure.

Freycinet's explanations.

His failure to meet the gravest charge.

Extent of the actual discoveries of Baudin, and nature of the country discovered.

The French names in current use on the so-called Terre Napoleon coasts.

Difficulty of identifying features to which Baudin applied names.

Freycinet's perplexities.

The new atlas of 1817.

What happened to Matthew Flinders when, after a brief sojourn in Sydney Harbour, he left to continue his explorations in the northern waters of Australia, is generally known. While he was at work in the Gulf of Carpentaria, the condition of the Investigator caused him much uneasiness, and when she was overhauled, the rotten state of her timbers compelled him to return. She was then condemned as unseaworthy. On again sailing north in the Porpoise, he was wrecked on the Barrier Reef. Making his way back to Sydney in a small open boat built from the wreckage, and well named the Hope, he was given the use of the Cumberland, a mere barge of only twenty-nine tons, in which to carry himself and part of his shipwrecked company to England. Compelled by the leaky condition of the crazy little craft, and the inefficiency of the pumps, to put into Mauritius, then a French possession, he was detained as a prisoner by the French governor, General Decaen, for six and a half years.

There is no need, for our immediate purpose, to linger over these occurrences, inviting as they are, with a glint of Stevensonian romance in the bare facts, and all the pathos that attaches to the case of a brave and blameless man thwarted and ruined by perversity and malignity. Frequently have the facts been wrongly written, as for instance when Blair states, in his Cyclopaedia of Australia, that Baudin in Le Geographe called at Mauritius after Flinders was imprisoned, and, instead of procuring his release, "persuaded the Governor to confine him more rigorously." Poor Baudin--he had been in his grave three months when Flinders appeared at the island in dire distress, and Le Geographe itself left the day before his arrival.

What is clear, however, is that Flinders was detained in a captivity that broke down his health and wrecked his useful life, first on General Decaen's own responsibility, and later--though the evidence on this point is not specific--in accordance with influences from Paris; and that during his imprisonment an attempt was made to deprive him of credit for his discoveries by the publication of the first volume of the French official history and its accompanying atlas.

MAP OF TERRE NAPOLÉON

From Freycinet's Atlas, 1808.

The atlas published in 1807* (* The date on the imprint of volume 1, though the charts bear the date 1808. A second part of the atlas, containing a few additional small charts, was issued in 1811.) contained two large charts, the work of Lieutenant Louis de Freycinet. The first was a "Carte generale de la Nouvelle Hollande," with the title inscribed upon a scroll clutched in the talons of an imperial eagle, a most fearsome wild-fowl, that with aggressive beak and flaming eye seemed to assert a claim to the regions denominated on what it held. This was the most complete map of Australia published up to the date named. The second was entitled "Carte generale de la Terre Napoleon." In this case the title was held by feathered Mercury in graceful flight, displaying the motto "Orbis Australis dulces exuviae." An exquisite little vignette under the title (by Lesueur) should not escape notice. Upon both charts, the whole of southern Australia, from Wilson's Promontory to Cape Adieu in the Bight, was styled Terre Napoleon.

To nearly every cape, bay, island, peninsula, strait, and gulf in this extensive region was affixed a name, in most cases, though not in all, that of some Frenchman of eminence during the revolutionary and Napoleonic period. The Spencer's Gulf and St. Vincent's Gulf, which Flinders had discovered, were respectively named Golfe Bonaparte and Golfe Josephine.* (* The latter was named "in honour of our august Empress," said Péron. It was a pretty piece of courtiership; but unfortunately Napoleon's nuptial arrangements were in a state of flux, and when the trenchant Quarterly reviewer of 1810 came to discuss the work, the place of Josephine was occupied by Marie Louise. The reviewer saucily suggested: "Bonaparte has since changed it for Louisa's Gulf.") The large island which Flinders had pointed out to Baudin, and which he informed that officer he had named Kangaroo Island, became Ile Decres. The Yorke's Peninsula of Flinders was styled Presqu'Ile Cambaceres; his Investigator Strait became Detroit de Lacepede; and his Backstairs Passage, Detroit de Colbert. To-day the Terre Napoleon charts look like a partial index to the Pantheon and Pere Lachaise.

Laplace, Buffon, Volney, Maupertuis, Montaigne, Lannes, Pascal, Talleyrand, Berthier, Lafayette, Descartes, Racine, Moliere, Bernadotte, Lafontein, Condillac, Bossuet, Colbert, Rabelais, D'Alembert, Sully, Bayard, Fenelon, Voltaire,* (* Voltaire's name is on the Terre Napoleon sectional chart, but it seems to have been crowded out of the large Carte Generale. As there is no actual bay in Spencer's Gulf to correspond with the Baie Voltaire shown on the Terre Napoleon chart, the omission does not matter much. But one would have liked to have Voltaire's opinion on the subject of his exclusion.) Jeanne d'Arc, L'Hopital, Massena, Turenne, Jussieu, Murat--soldiers, statesmen, scientists, authors, philosophers, adorn with their memorable names these most un-Gallic shores. The Bonaparte family was pleasantly provided for. Thus we find the Isles Jerome, Baie Louis and Baie Hortense (after Josephine's daughter). Outside the Terre Napoleon region, on the north coast, the name Golfe Joseph Bonaparte bespoke geographical immortality for another member of the family.

But we miss Rousseau and Turgot, deplore the absence of Corneille and La Bruyere, and feel that at least a sand-bank or two might have been found for Quesnay and the economists, if only as a set-off against the disparagement of Burke.

Yet it is on the whole an illustrious company, representative of the best and brightest in French intellect and character. When the brave old Spanish navigators of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries discovered a new port or cape, they commonly gave it the name of the saint on whose day in the calendar it was found; and the map of Central and South America is a memorial at once of their piety and their enterprise. But Baudin's expedition having no such guide--Comte's Positivist Calendar, if not of later date, would have been useful--their selection of names was quite an original effort. Unfortunately, the "discoveries" to which the names were applied were not original.

Two facts are incontrovertible: (1) that Flinders had discovered and charted the whole of the south coast of Australia from Fowler Bay to Encounter Bay--except the south of Kangaroo Island, which is represented by a dotted line on his charts--before he met Le Geographe on April 8, 1802; and (2) that the French officers knew that he had done so. Flinders explained to Baudin the discoveries which he had made when they met in Encounter Bay, and afterwards when the Investigator and the French ships lay together in Port Jackson he showed him one of his finished charts to illustrate what he had done. "So far from any prior title being set up at that time to Kangaroo Island and the parts westward," wrote Flinders, "the officers of the Geographe always spoke of them as belonging to the Investigator."

The French names would appear to have been applied by Baudin, if Freycinet is to be believed; for he uses the phrase "les nommes que Baudin a donnes."* (* Voyage de Decouvertes 2 Preface page 23.) But when Freycinet wrote those words Baudin was dead, and the publication of the charts had evoked much indignation on account of the gross wrong done to Flinders. In one or two cases the names were certainly not Baudin's, as will be made clear in a later chapter.* (* Take, for instance, Ile Decres, the name given to Kangaroo Island. Decres did not become Minister for the Navy till October 3, 1801. Baudin was then at sea, and probably never knew anything about Decres' accession to office. It is pretty well certain that the name was not given to the island until after the return of the expedition, when Baudin was dead.) Certainly Baudin was in no sense responsible for the publication. Péron and Freycinet were the men who put their names to the charts and volumes; and they were by no means exculpated by the suggestion that Baudin devised a nomenclature calculated to deprive Flinders of the credit that he had won.

Both Péron and Freycinet knew, too, when they issued their volume and atlas, that Flinders was being held in captivity in Mauritius; and the dead captain was certainly not guilty of the meanness and mendacity of hurrying forward the issue of books that pretended to discoveries never made, while the real discoverer was prevented from asserting his own rightful claims.

That the publication was hurried forward as soon as Napoleon's government gave the order to print, is evident from the incompleteness of the atlas of 1807. It contained a table of charts--"Tableau General des planches qui composent l'atlas historique"--which were not inserted in the book; and in one of the four copies of this rare volume which the author has been able to examine, the previous owner, or the bookseller from whom it was purchased, collating the contents with the table, had pencilled in the margin, "All wanting," being under the impression that the copy was imperfect. But the charts detailed in the table were not issued with the book. They were not ready, and the table stands as an eloquent indicator of the hurry in which the publication was performed. The first volume of the Voyage de Decouvertes contains numerous marginal references to charts not contained in the atlas issued with it. Readers of the book must have been puzzled by these references,* (* As the present writer was when he began to study the subject closely, and as the Quarterly reviewer was in 1810.

He said: "The atlas is of quarto size; it contains not a single chart nor any sketch or plan of a coast, island, bay, or harbour, though frequent references are made to such in the margin of the printed volume" (page 60). The reviewer should have said, "except the two cartes generales" described on a previous page.) when they turned to the atlas and found no charts corresponding with them. Freycinet's complete folio volume of charts was not published till 1812, five years after the issue of the book which they were necessary to explain. Flinders had then been released; but it is significant that he was held in the clutches of General Decaen, despite constant demands for his liberation, until the preparation of the French charts was sufficiently advanced to make it impossible for his own to be issued until theirs had been placed before the world.

Flinders, generous in his judgments of other men even when smarting under great grievances, put forth an excuse for Péron, suggesting that he had acted under pressure. "How, then, came M. Péron to advance what was so contrary to truth?" he wrote. "Was he a man destitute of all principle? My answer is, that I believe his candour to have been equal to his acknowledged abilities, and that what he wrote was from overruling authority, and smote him to the heart. He did not live to finish the second volume."

This would be an acceptable way of disposing of the question if we could reasonably accept the explanation. But can we? Freycinet denied that any pressure was exerted. Those who knew Péron's character, he wrote,* (* Voyage de Decouvertes 2 page 21.) were aware that he would have refused to do anything with which his conscience could reproach him. He was so able and zealous a man of science, that we should like to believe that of him. justice demands that we should give full weight to every favourable factor in the case as affecting him. Flinders was a British naval officer, and naval men at that period were disposed to see the hand of Napoleon in every bit of mischief. But the "pressure" theory does not sustain examination.

The task thrust upon Péron in the writing of the historical narrative of the voyage was one for which he had not prepared himself, and which did not properly pertain to him. The death of Baudin, whose work this would naturally have been, compelled the naturalist to become historian. He had not kept the log, and it may be reasonably assumed that he had not concerned himself in a particular degree with those events of which he would have made careful notes had it been intended from the beginning that he should be the official recorder. He had applied himself with passionate energy to the collection and classification of zoological specimens. This was his special vocation, and he pursued it worthily. It is probably safe to say that no expedition, French or English, that ever came down to Australasian waters, added so much that was new to the world's scientific knowledge, or accumulated so much material, as did this one whose chief naturalist was Francois Péron. When it is added that two of the greatest figures in British scientific history, Darwin and Huxley, were among the workers in this fruitful field, it will be admitted that the acknowledgment is not made in any niggard spirit.

But we are now concerned with Péron as historian of what related to Terre Naploeon and the surrounding circumstances. Here his statements have been shown to be unreliable. It is probable that he wrote largely from memory; almost certainly from insufficient data. Further, he was weak and ill when engaged upon the book. The hardships and unhealthy conditions of the voyage had undermined his constitution. One would conclude from his style of writing that he was by temperament excitable and easily subject to depression. A zealous savant, to whom fishes and birds, beetles and butterflies, were the precious things of the earth, and for whom the discovery of a new species was as great a source of joy as a glorious victory was to his imperial master, Péron appeals to us as a pathetic figure whom one would rather screen from blame than otherwise. He suffered severely, and did his final work under the difficulty of breaking health. He died in 1810, before his second volume was ready for publication.

Freycinet wrote a series of notes by way of preface to volumes 2 and 3, in attempted justification of the Terre Napoleon maps.* (* The second volume of the Voyage de Decouvertes was published--out of its due order--in 1816, the third in 1815.) He was put on the defensive because "the audacious attempt which was made in the first volume of this work, to rob Captain Flinders of the well-earned merit of his nautical labours and discoveries, while he was basely and barbarously kept in prison in a French colony, was regarded with becoming indignation throughout Europe, and with shame by the better part of the French nation."* (* Quarterly Review volume 17 (1817) page 229.) That that is a fair description of the state of feeling among people concerned with the advancement of knowledge, is beyond question; and the French above all, with their love of enterprise, their sentiment of honour, their eager applause of high achievement, their chivalrous sense of justice, and their quick sympathy with suffering wrongly inflicted and bravely borne, would have no taste for laurels plucked in their name from the brow of him who was entitled to wear them.

Thoroughly repugnant to French intellect and feeling was conduct of this description. National animosities were more bitter at this period than they have ever been at any other time, but science knows no nationality. Even when the two governments had ceased to have relations with each other, we still find English and French men of science communicating on friendly terms; and Napoleon himself was willing to grant the requests of an English savant while English arms and English diplomacy were at furious war with him. Thus Sir Joseph Banks, who was a corresponding member of the Institute of France, could write in 1805, "I have obtained the release of five persons from the gracious condescension of the Emperor, the only five, I believe, that have been regularly discharged from their parole."

Freycinet, then, had to defend his charts. But there never was a more complete example of the remark that "qui s'excuse s'accuse." He argued that when Le Geographe cruised along the coasts discovered by Flinders, there was no published work in which they were described, therefore the French were justified in applying their own names. But this plea ignored the fact that if the coasts were not charted in any work published before 1807, they had been, to the full knowledge of the French officers, charted by Flinders, whose work would have been published earlier if he had not been forcibly detained. Again he argued* (* Preface to volume 3.) that, inasmuch as "jamais Péron ni moi"--where Freycinet assumed part of the responsibility--knew of the work done by Flinders until his book was published, the work of the French was truly one of discovery; and as to the names given by the English navigator, "it is certain that we could not employ them without knowing them." But it was not true that Freycinet, Péron, or Baudin was unaware of the discoveries made by Flinders.

Even were there not his specific statement that he explained his discoveries and showed one of his charts to illustrate them, it would be incredible that while the French and English ships lay together for some weeks at Port Jackson, with tents erected on the same piece of ground, the officers frequently meeting on friendly terms, Freycinet and Péron should not have learnt what the Investigator had been doing. Both the French authors are individually mentioned by Flinders as having been present on one or other of these occasions, and Freycinet does not deny the statement. Further, Captain Hamelin reported to the French Government, in 1803, that Flinders had traced the coast from the Leeuwin to Encounter Bay, and had discovered a large and beautiful island which he had named "L'Ile des Kangaroux."* (* Moniteur, 27 Thermidor, Revolutionary Year 11.)

It is true that the French were not acquainted with Flinders' names, except in the one case of Kangaroo Island. He told Baudin what name he had given in that case. Nevertheless they ignored it, and called the island Ile Decres. But even when they did know of the names given to features of the coast by a previous English navigator, Péron and Freycinet disregarded them. Grant's Narrative of the Voyage of the Lady Nelson was published, together with his eye-chart of the coast from Cape Banks to Wilson's Promontory, in 1803. Flinders states positively that Grant's "discoveries were known to M. Péron and the French expedition in 1802";* (* Voyage 1 201.) as indeed we might well suppose, for Grant was not the man to allow any one with whom he came in contact to remain unaware of his achievements, and he was in Sydney just before the French arrived there. They would hear of him from many people. Yet Grant's names, inscribed in plain print on his published chart, were all ignored on the Terre Napoleon charts--his Cape Nelson becoming Cap Montaigne; his Cape Otway, Cap Desaix; his Cape Schanck, Cap Richelieu; and so forth.

The contention that the south coast exploration of the French was "entirely a work of discovery,"* (* Freycinet, 2 page 23.) although they were forestalled in it by Flinders and Grant, is neither true nor sensible. If it could be held that the voyage of a vessel sailing without a chart or a pilot along a coast previously unknown to its officers was "entirely a work of discovery," then a ship that should sail under such conditions along any piece of coast--say from Boulogne to La Hague--would accomplish "a work of discovery." Discovery is a matter of priority, or the word is meaningless.

Freycinet's notes nowhere meet the gravest feature of the case--the prolongation of the imprisonment of Flinders until the French could complete their own charts for publication. The talk about not knowing what Flinders' names were, the affected ignorance of his prior claims, were crudely disingenuous. Freycinet knew perfectly where Flinders was, and why his charts were not issued. The Moniteur contained several references to his case. Sir Joseph Banks repeatedly pressed leading members of the Institute to lend their influence to secure his liberation. But Freycinet, who had shared in the generous hospitality of the British governor in Sydney--extended at a time when the French crews were sorely stricken--and should have been moved by gratitude, to say nothing of justice, to help in undoing an act of wrong to a fellow-navigator, does not seem to have taken the slightest step in this direction, nor does he in any of his writings express any regret concerning the unhappy fate that overtook the English captain.