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INTRODUCTION.

A continent with a record of unruffled peace. Causes of this variation from the usual course of history. English and French colonisation during the Napoleonic wars. The height of the Napoleonic empire and the entire loss of the French colonies. The British colonial situation during the same period. The colony at Port Jackson in 1800. Its defencelessness. The French squadron in the Indian Ocean. Rear-Admiral Linois. The audacious exploit of Commodore Dance, and Napoleon's direction to "take Port Jackson" in 1810.

The Investigator at Kangaroo Island. Thoroughness of Flinders' work. His aims and methods. His explorations; the theory of a Strait through Australia. Completion of the map of the continents. A direct succession of great navigators: Cook, Bligh, Flinders, and Franklin. What Flinders learnt in the school of Cook: comparison between the healthy condition of his crew and the scurvy-stricken company on the French vessels.

Meeting of the Investigator and Le Geographe in Encounter Bay. Flinders cautious. Interview of the two captains. Peron's evidence. The chart of Bass Strait. Second interview: Baudin inquisitive. Baudin's account of his explorations.

Conflict of evidence between Baudin, Peron, and Freycinet as to whether the French ships had sighted Port Phillip. Baudin's statement corroborated by documents. Examination of Freycinet's statement. The impossibility of doing what Peron and Freycinet asserted was done.

Imprisonment of Flinders in Mauritius. The French atlas of 1807. The French charts and the names upon them. Hurried publication. The allegation that Peron 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.

Assertions commonly made as to French plagiarism of Flinders' charts. Lack of evidence to support the charges. General Decaen and his career. The facts as to Flinders' charts. The sealed trunks. The third log-book and its contents; detention of it by Decaen, and the reasons for his conduct. Restoration of Flinders' papers, except the log-book and despatches. Do Freycinet's charts show evidence of the use of Flinders' material? How did the French obtain their chart of Port Phillip? Peron's report to Decaen as to British intentions in the Pacific and Indian Oceans, and the effect on his mind. Liberation of Flinders. Capture of Mauritius by the British. English naval officers and the governor. Later career of Decaen.

Did Bonaparte desire to establish French colonial dominions in Australia? The case stated.

Baudin's one of a series of French expeditions. The building up of the map of Australia. Early map-makers. Terra Australis. Dutch navigators. Emmerie Mollineux's map. Tasman and Dampier. The Petites Lettres of Maupertuis. De Brosses and his Histoire des Navigations aux Terres Australes. French voyages that originated from it. Bougainville; Marion-Dufresne; La Perouse; Bruni Dentrecasteaux. Voyages subsequent to Baudin's. The object of the voyages scientific and exploratory. The Institute of France and its proposition. Received by Bonaparte with interest. Bonaparte's interest in geography and travel. His authorisation of the expedition. The Committee of the Institute and their instructions. Fitting out of the expedition. Le Geographe and Le Naturaliste. The staff. Francois Peron. Captain Nicolas Baudin.

The passports from the English Government. Sailing of the expedition. French interest in it. The case of Ah Sam. Baudin's obstinacy. Short supplies. The French ships on the Western Australian coast. The Ile Lucas and its name. Refreshment at Timor. The English frigate Virginia. Baudin sails south. Shortage of water. The French in Tasmania. Peron among the aboriginals. The savage and the boat. Among native women. A question of colour. Separation of the ships by storm. Baudin sails through Bass Strait, and meets Flinders. Scurvy. Great storms and intense suffering. Le Geographe at Port Jackson.

Le Naturaliste at Sydney. Boullanger's boat party. Curious conduct of Baudin. Le Naturaliste sails for Mauritius, but returns to Port Jackson. Re-union of Baudin's ships. Hospitality of Governor King. Peron's impressions of the British settlement. Morand, the banknote forger. Baudin shows his charts and instructions to King. Departure of the French ships. Rumours as to their objects. King's prompt action. The Cumberland sent after them. Acting Lieutenant Robbins at King Island. The flag incident. Baudin's letters to King. His protestations. Views on colonisation. Le Naturaliste sails for Europe.

Le Geographe sails for Kangaroo Island. Exploration of the two gulfs in the Casuarina by Freycinet. Baudin's erratic behaviour. Port Lincoln. Peron among the giants. A painful excursion. Second visit to Timor. Abandonment of north coast exploration. Baudin resolves to return home. Voyage to Mauritius. Death of Baudin. Treatment of him by Peron and Freycinet. Return of Le Geographe. Depression of the staff and crew.

Establishment of the First Empire. Reluctance of the French Government to publish a record of the expedition. Report of the Institute. The official history of the voyage authorised. Peron's scientific work. His discovery of Pyrosoma atlanticum. Other scientific memoirs. His views on the modification of species. Geographical results. Freycinet's charts.

BIBLIOGRAPHY.

LE GEOGRAPHE AND LE NATURALISTE. From the drawing in Freycinet's Atlas of 1807.

MAP OF NEW HOLLAND . From Freycinet's Atlas of 1807.

ADMIRALTY CHART OF ENTRANCE TO PORT PHILLIP.

TRACK CHART OF LE GEOGRAPHE. From Freycinet's Atlas of 1812.

MAP OF TERRE NAPOLEON. From Freycinet's Atlas of 1807.

FRENCHMAN'S ROCK, KANGAROO ISLAND. From a photograph by Mr. Alfred Searcy, Harbourmaster, South Australia.

GENERAL CHARLES DECAEN. After the portrait in the Library at Caen.

CAPTAIN NICOLAS BAUDIN. From an engraving.

FRANCOIS PERON. From the drawing by Lesueur.

TITLE-PAGE OF FREYCINET'S ATLAS OF CHARTS, 1812.

COMPARATIVE CHRONOLOGY.

TERRE NAPOLEON.

INTRODUCTION.

PART 1.

A continent with a record of unruffled peace. Causes of this variation from the usual course of history. English and French colonisation during the Napoleonic wars. The height of the Napoleonic empire and the entire loss of the French colonies. The British colonial situation during the same period. The colony at Port Jackson in 1800. Its defencelessness. The French squadron in the Indian Ocean. Rear-Admiral Linois. The audacious exploit of Commodore Dance, and Napoleon's direction to "take Port Jackson" in 1810.

Australia is the only considerable portion of the world which has enjoyed the blessed record of unruffled peace. On every other continent, in nearly every other island large in area, "war's red ruin writ in flame" has wrought its havoc, leaving evidences in many a twinging cicatrice. Invasion, rebellion, and civil war constitute enormous elements in the chronicles of nations; and Shelley wrote that the study of history, though too important to be neglected, was "hateful and disgusting to my very soul," because he found in it little more than a "record of crimes and miseries." A map of the globe, coloured crimson as to those countries where blood has flowed in armed conflicts between men, would present a circling splash of red; but the vast island which is balanced on the Tropic of Capricorn, and spreads her bulk from the tenth parallel of south latitude to "the roaring forties," would show up white in the spacious diagram of carnage. No foreign foe has menaced her thrifty progress since the British planted themselves at Port Jackson in 1788; nor have any internal broils of serious importance interrupted her prosperous career.

This striking variation from the common fate of peoples is attributable to three causes. First, the development of a British civilisation in Australia has synchronised with the attainment and unimpaired maintenance of dominant sea-power by the parent nation. The supremacy of Great Britain upon the blue water enabled her colonies to grow to strength and wealth under the protection of a mighty arm. Secondly, during the same period a great change in British colonial policy was inaugurated. Statesmen were slow to learn the lessons taught in so trenchant a fashion by the revolt of the American colonies; but more liberal views gradually ripened, and Lord Durham's Report on the State of Canada, issued in 1839, occasioned a beneficent new era of self-government. The states of Australia were soon left with no grievance which it was not within their own power to remedy if they chose, and virtually as they chose. Thirdly, these very powers of self-government developed in the people a signal capacity for governing and being governed. The constitutional machinery submitted the Executive to popular control, and made it quickly sensitive to the public will. Authority and subjects were in sympathy, because the subjects created the authority. Further, there was no warlike native race in Australia, as there was in New Zealand and in South Africa, to necessitate armed conflict. Thus security from attack, chartered autonomy, and governing capacity, with the absence of organised pugnacious tribes, have combined to achieve the unique result of a continent preserved from aggression, disruption, or bloody strife for over one hundred and twenty years.

There was a brief period, as will presently be related, when this happy state of things was in some danger of being disturbed. It certainly would have been impossible had not Great Britain emerged victorious from her protracted struggle, first against revolutionary France, and later against Napoleon, in the latter years of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth.

PART 2.

The events with which this book is mainly concerned occurred within the four years 1800 to 1804, during which Europe saw Bonaparte leap from the position of First Consul of the French Republic to the Imperial throne. After great French victories at Marengo, Hochstadt, and Hohenlinden , and a brilliant naval triumph for the British at Copenhagen , came the fragile Peace of Amiens --an "experimental peace," as Cornwallis neatly described it. Fourteen months later war broke out again; and this time there was almost incessant fighting on a titanic scale, by land and sea, until the great Corsican was humbled and broken at Waterloo.

The reader will be aided in forming an opinion upon the events discussed hereafter, by a glance at the colonial situation during the period in question. The extent of the dependencies of France and England in 1800 and the later years will be gathered from the following summary.

In America France regained Louisiana, covering the mouth of the Mississippi. It had been in Spanish hands since 1763; but Talleyrand, Bonaparte's foreign minister, put pressure upon Spain, and Louisiana became French once more under the secret treaty of San Ildefonso . The news of the retrocession, however, aroused intense feeling in the United States, inasmuch as the establishment of a strong foreign power at the mouth of the principal water-way in the country jeopardised the whole trade of the Mississippi valley. President Jefferson, recognising that the perpetuation of the new situation "would have put us at war with France immediately," sent James Monroe to Paris to negotiate. As Bonaparte plainly saw at the beginning of 1803 that another war with Great Britain was inevitable, he did not wish to embroil himself with the Americans also, and agreed to sell the possession to the Republic for eighty million francs. Indeed, he completed arrangements for the sale even before Monroe arrived.

In the West Indies, France had lost Martinique and Guadeloupe during the naval wars prior to Bonaparte's ascension to supreme authority. These islands were restored to her under the Treaty of Amiens; were once more captured by the British in 1809 to 1810; and were finally handed back to France under the Treaty of Paris in 1814. Tobago and St. Lucia, taken from France in 1803, were not restored.

The British captured Pondicherry and the other French settlements in India in 1793, but agreed to restore them under the Treaty of Amiens. For reasons which will be indicated later, however, the territories were not evacuated by British troops, who continued to hold them till the post-bellum readjustment of 1815 was negotiated.

A similar record applies to Senegal, in West Africa. It had been French since the era of Richelieu, with intervals of capture, restoration, and recapture. The British ousted their rivals once more in 1804, and gave back the conquest in 1815.

A careful examination of these details reveals a remarkable fact. Although the year 1810 saw the Napoleonic empire at the crest of its greatness in Europe; although by that time the Emperor was the mightiest personal factor in world politics; although in that year he married a daughter of the Caesars, and thought he had laid plans for the foundation of a dynasty that should perpetuate the Napoleonic name in association with Napoleonic power--yet, in that very year, France had been stripped of the last inch of her colonial possessions. The nation in whose glorious Pantheon were emblazoned the great names of Montcalm and Dupleix, of Jacques Cartier and La Salle, of Champlain and La Bourdonnais, and whose inveterate capacity for colonisation of even the most difficult kind can never be doubted by any candid student of her achievements in this field, both before and since the disastrous Napoleonic age, was now naked of even so much as a barren rock in a distant sea upon which to plant her flag.

PART 3.

It would be simple to sum up the colonial situation of Great Britain in the period under review, by saying that she gained just in the measure that France lost. But such a crude formula would not convey a sufficient sense of her actual achievements. The end of the great war left her with a wider dominion than that with which she was endowed when she plunged into the struggle; but it left her also with augmented power and prestige, a settled sense of security, and a steeled spirit of resolution--elements not measurable on the scale of the map, but counting as immense factors in the government and development of oversea possessions.

The details of the British colonial empire during the storm epoch, are as follow:--

In Canada she governed a belt of country stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific, divided for administrative purposes into two areas, one of which, Lower Canada--embracing the cities of Quebec and Montreal, and including the basin of the St. Lawrence--was populated principally by people of French origin. It would be too much to suppose that these colonists, who jealously preserved the French language and the French tradition, were indifferent to the doings of their kin across the water; and there were, indeed, many who cherished the hope that events would so shape themselves as to restore the authority of France in this part of the New World. But the habitant was Roman Catholic as well as French, and the hierarchy was profoundly distrustful of the regime which it regarded as the heritage of the hateful ideas of 1789. We may speculate as to what would have happened if Napoleon had set himself to woo the affections of the French Canadians. But throughout the great wars Canada remained loyal to the British connection, despite internal difficulties and discontents.

Great Britain also held Newfoundland, as well as those maritime provinces which have since become federated as part of the Dominion.

In South America she possessed British Guiana, and for a period, as related above, French Guiana also.

In the West Indies, in 1800, her flag flew over the entire crescent of the Windward and Leeward groups from Granada to the Virgins; she was mistress of Trinidad, Tobago, Jamaica, the "still vexd" Bermudas and the whole bunch of the Bahamas; and she had interests in San Domingo. At the Peace of Amiens she retained only Trinidad of the islands captured during the war; and she presented no very stubborn resistance to the negro revolt that lost her any further control over the largest of the sugar islands.

She had the Cape of Good Hope in her custody in 1800, but weakly allowed it to be bartered away by diplomacy at Amiens; only, however, to reassert her power there six years later, when it became at length apparent to British statesmen--as it surely should have been obvious to them throughout--that Australia and India could not be secure while the chief southern harbour of Africa was in foreign possession.

Ceylon was retained as a sparkling jewel for the British crown when so much that had been won in fair fight was allowed to slip away. The capture of Java and its restoration to the Dutch belong to a later period; whilst the growth of British power in India scarcely falls within the scope of a brief review of the colonial situation, though of great importance in its effects.

Malta, which has usually been classed as a colony, though its principal value is rather strategic than colonial, was occupied by the British in September 1800, and the cat-footed efforts of Napoleonic diplomacy to get her out of the island made it a storm centre in European politics in these fiery years. Out she would not come, and did not. Neither Tzar nor Emperor could get her out, by plot or by arms; and there she still remains.

PART 4.

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