Did Bonaparte desire to establish French colonial dominions in Australia?
The case stated.
We will now turn to quite another aspect of the Terre Napoleon story, and
one which to many readers will be more fruitful in interest. An
investigation of the work of Baudin's expedition on the particular
stretch of coast to which was applied the name of the most potent
personage in modern history has necessarily demanded close application to
geographical details, and a minute scrutiny of claims and occurrences. We
enter into a wider historical realm when we begin to consider the motives
which led Bonaparte to despatch the expedition of 1800 to 1804. Here we
are no longer confined to shores which, at the time when we are concerned
with them, were the abode of desolation and the nursery of a solitude
uninterrupted for untallied ages, save by the screams of innumerable
sea-birds, or, occasionally, here and there, by the corroboree cries of
naked savages, whose kitchen-middens, feet thick with shells, still
betray the places where they feasted.
We wish to know why Bonaparte, who had overturned the Directory by the
audacity of Brumaire and hoisted himself into the dominating position of
First Consul in the year before Le Geographe and Le Naturaliste were sent
to the South Seas, authorised the undertaking of that enterprise. Was it
what it purported to be, an expedition of exploration, or was it a move
in a cunning game of state-craft by a player whose board, as some would
have us believe, was the whole planet? Had Bonaparte, so soon after
ascending to supremacy in the Government of France, already conceived the
dazzling dream of a vast world-empire acknowledging his sway, and was
this a step towards the achievement of it? If not that, was he desirous
by this means of striking a blow at the prestige of Great Britain, whose
hero Nelson had smashed his fleet at the Nile two years before? Or had he
ideals in the direction of establishing French colonial dominions in
southern latitudes, and did he desire to obtain accurate information as
to where the tricolour might most advantageously be planted? It ought to
be possible, out of the copious store of available material relative to
Napoleon's era, to form a sound opinion on this fascinating subject. But
we had better resolve to have the material before we do formulate a
conclusion, and not jump to one regardless of evidence, or the lack of
it.
In this inquiry very little assistance is given to the student by those
classical historians of the period to whose voluminous writings reference
might naturally be made. There is not, for example, the slightest
allusion to Baudin's expedition or the Terre Napoleon incidents in
Thiers' twenty-tomed Histoire du Consulat et de l'Empire; nor can the
reader get much assistance from consulting many British works on the same
epoch. An endeavour has, however, been made to set the facts in their
right perspective, by a brilliant contemporary English historian, Dr.
John Holland Rose, somewhat curtly in his Revolutionary and Napoleonic
Era, but more fully in his Life of Napoleon.* (* Life of Napoleon 1 379
to 383. Still later, in his lecture on "England's Commercial Struggle
with Napoleon," included in the Lectures on the Nineteenth Century,
edited by F.A. Kirkpatrick (1908), Dr. Holland Rose pursues the same
theme.) The present writer, after an independent study of the facts, is
unable to share Dr. Holland Rose's view, as will presently appear, but
the desire being less to urge an opinion than to present the case in its
true relations, it will be convenient to state Dr. Rose's presentment of
it before proceeding to look at it from other aspects.
"The unknown continent of Australia," says the historian, "appealed to
Napoleon's imagination, which pictured its solitudes transformed by
French energy into a second fatherland." Bonaparte had "early turned his
eyes to that land." He took a copy of Cook's voyages with him to Egypt,
and no sooner was he firmly installed as First Consul, than he "planned
with the Institute of France a great French expedition to New Holland."
It is represented that the Terre Napoleon maps show that "under the guise
of being an emissary of civilisation, Commodore Baudin was prepared to
claim half the continent for France."* (* Ibid page 381. The Terre
Napoleon region is far from being half the continent of Australia, if
that be what Dr. Holland Rose's words mean. One observes, by the way, a
tendency on the part of English writers to use very small maps when
speaking of the size of things in Australia.) Indeed, his inquiry "about
the extent of British claims on the Pacific coast was so significant as
to elicit from Governor King the reply that the whole of Van Diemen's
Land and of the coast from Cape Howe on the south of the mainland to Cape
York on the north, was British territory." The facts relative to the
awakening of suspicion in Governor King's mind--to be discussed
hereafter--are likewise stated; together with those affecting the
settlements of Hobart and Port Phillip; and it is concluded that "the
plans of Napoleon for the acquisition of Van Diemen's Land and the middle
of Australia, had an effect like that which the ambition of Montcalm,
Dupleix, Lally, and Peron has exerted on the ultimate destiny of many a
vast and fertile territory."* (* Ibid page 382. One or two errors of fact
may as well be indicated. Murray's discovery of Port Phillip was made in
1802, not in 1801, as stated on page 380 of the Life of Napoleon; the
title of Flinders' book was not "A Voyage of Discovery to the Australian
Isles" (page 381), but A Voyage to Terra Australis; Bass, the discoverer
of the Strait bearing his name, was not a lieutenant (page 380), but a
surgeon on H.M.S. Reliance. The Freycinet Peninsula, the French name of
which is mentioned as being "still retained" (page 381), is not, it
should be understood, on the Terre Napoleon coast at all, but in Eastern
Tasmania. Dr. Rose's error as to the retention of other French names has
been dealt with in Chapter 4.)
These passages submit with definiteness the view that Bonaparte, in 1800,
despatched Baudin's ships from motives of political policy. He had
"plans" for the requisition of territory in Australia; he wished to found
a "second fatherland" for the French; Baudin was "prepared to claim half
the continent for France." Now, the reader who turns to Dr. Holland
Rose's book * (* He who turns to it without reading it through will miss
an opulent source of profit and pleasure.) for references to proofs of
these statements, will be disappointed. The learned author, who is
usually liberal in his citation of authorities, here confines himself to
the Voyage de Decouvertes of Peron and Freycinet, the Voyage of Flinders,
and the collection of documents in the seven volumes of the Historical
Records of New South Wales--all works of first-class importance, but none
of them bearing out the broad general statements as to the First Consul's
plans and intentions. Not a scrap of evidence is adduced from memoirs,
letters, or state papers. To represent Napoleon as obsessed with
magnificent ideas of universal dominion, scanning, like Milton's Satan
from the mountain height, the immensity of many realms, and aspiring to
rule them all--to do this is to present an enthralling picture, inflaming
the imagination of the reader; and, perhaps, of the writer too. But we
must beware of drawing an inference and painting it to look like a fact;
we must regard historical data through the clear white glass of
criticism, not through the coloured window of a gorgeous generalisation.
The remainder of our task, then, shall be devoted to examining the
origins of Baudin's expedition. We will inquire into the instructions
given to the commander; we will follow his vessels with a careful eye to
any incidents that may point to ulterior political purposes; we will have
regard to the suspicions engendered at the time, how far they were
justifiable, and what consequences followed from them; we will search for
motives; and we will look at what the expedition did, in case there
should by any chance thereby be disclosed any hint of an aspiration
towards territorial acquisition. We will try to regard the evidence as a
whole, the object being--as the object of all honest historical inquiry
must be--to ascertain the truth about it, freed from those jealousies and
prejudices which, so freely deposited at the time, tend to consolidate
and petrify until, as with the guano massed hard on islets in
Australasian seas, it is difficult to get at the solid rock beneath for
the accretions upon it, and sometimes not easy to discriminate rock from
accretion.