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Terre Napoleon

E >> Ernest Scott >> Terre Napoleon




It is also necessary to distinguish between the exalted motives of which
we may think the First Consul capable in 1800, and for a year or two
after, and the use he would have made five, eight, or ten years later of
any opportunities of damaging the possessions and the prestige of Great
Britain. In the full tide of his passionate hatred against the nation
that mocked and blocked and defied him at every turn of his foreign
policy, he would unquestionably have been delighted to seize any
opportunity of striking a blow at British power anywhere. He kept Decaen
at Mauritius in the hope that events might favour an attempt on India. He
would have used discoveries made in Australasia, as he would have used
Fulton's steamboat in 1807, to injure his enemy, could he have done so
effectually. But to do that involved the possession of great naval
strength, and the services of an admiral fit to meet upon the high seas
that slim, one-armed, one-eyed man whose energy and genius were equal to
a fleet of frigates to the dogged nation whose hero he was; and in both
these requirements the Emperor was deficient.

Indeed, we can scarcely realise how much Australia owes to Britain's
overwhelming strength upon the blue water at the beginning of the
nineteenth century. But for that, not only France but other European
powers would surely have claimed the right to establish themselves upon
the continent. The proportion of it which the English occupied at the
time was proportionately no more than a fly-speck upon a window pane. She
could not colonise the whole of it, and the small portion that she was
using was a mere convict settlement. Almost any other place would have
done equally well for such a purpose. It needed some tremendous exertion
of strength to enable her to maintain exclusive possession of a whole
continent, such as Spain had vainly professed regarding America in the
sixteenth century. From the point of view of Australian "unity, peace,
and concord," the Napoleonic wars were an immense blessing, however great
an infliction they may have been to old Europe. In an age of European
tranquillity, it is pretty certain that foreign colonisation in Australia
would not have been resisted. Great Britain would not have risked a war
with a friendly power concerning a very distant land, the value and
potentialities of which were far from being immediately obvious. The
Englishman, however, is tremendously assertive when threatened. He will
fight to the last gasp to keep what he really does not want very much, if
only he supposes that his enemy wishes to take a bit of it. It was in
that spirit of pugnacity that he stretched a large muscular hand over the
whole map of Australia, and defied his foes to touch it. Before the great
struggle it would have been quite possible to think of colonising schemes
in the southern hemisphere without seriously contemplating the danger of
collision with the British. But the end of the Napoleonic wars left the
power and prestige of Great Britain upon the sea unchallengeable, and her
possessions out of Europe were placed beyond assail. This position was
fairly established before Napoleon could have made any serious attempt to
annoy or injure the English settlement in Australia. Traced back to
decisive causes, the ownership of Australia was determined on October 21,
1805, when the planks of the Victory were reddened with the life-blood of
Nelson.

The remaining points to be considered are the following.

The Treaty of Amiens was negotiated and signed in 1801 and 1802, while
Baudin's expedition was at sea. Had Napoleon desired to secure a slice of
Australia for the French, here was his opportunity to proclaim what he
wanted. Had he done so, we can have no reasonable doubt that he would
have found the British Government compliant. His Majesty's Ministers were
in a concessionary mood. By that treaty Great Britain surrendered all her
maritime conquests of recent wars, except Trinidad and Ceylon. She gave
up the Cape, Demerara, Berbice, Essequibo, Surinam, Martinique,
Guadeloupe, Minorca, and Malta.* (* Cambridge Modern History 9 75 et seq;
Brodrick and Fotheringham, Political History of England 11 9 et seq.) She
was eagerly desirous for peace. Bread was dear, and England seethed with
discontent. Napoleon was fully aware that he was in a position to force
concessions. King George's advisers were limp. "England," wrote
Thibaudeau, who knew his master's mind, "was driven by sheer necessity to
make peace; not so Bonaparte, whose reasons were founded on the desire of
the French nation for peace, the fact that the terms of the treaty were
glorious for France, and the recognition by his bitterest enemy of the
position which the nation had bestowed upon him."* (* Fortescue's English
edition page 18.) The value of Australia at this time was scarcely
perceived by Great Britain at all. Sydney was just a tip for human
refuse, and a cause of expense, not of profit or advantage. The only
influential man in England who believed in a future for the country was
Sir Joseph Banks; and he, in 1799, had written to Governor Hunter: "The
situation of Europe is at present so critical, and His Majesty's
Ministers so fully employed in business of the highest importance, that
it is scarce possible to gain a moment's audience on any subject but
those which stand foremost in their minds, and colonies of all kinds, you
may be assured, are now put in the background...Your colony is a most
valuable appendage to Great Britain, and I flatter myself we shall,
before it is long, see her Ministers made sensible of its real value."*
(* Banks to Hunter, February 1, 1799. Historical Records of New South
Wales 3 532.) If that was the feeling in 1799, we can imagine how a claim
to the right to found a French settlement in Australia during the
nerveless regime of Addington would have been received. It would not have
delayed the signing of the Treaty of Amiens by one hour. England at that
time would not have risked a frigate or spent an ounce of powder on
resisting such a demand. But the subject does not appear to have been
even mentioned during the negotiations.

Nor was it mentioned by Napoleon during the years of his captivity at St.
Helena. He talked about his projects, his failures, his successes, with
O'Meara, Montholon, Las Cases, Admiral Malcolm, Antommarchi, Gourgaud,
and others. Australia and the Baudin expedition were never discussed,
though Surgeon O'Meara knew all about Flinders' imprisonment, and
mentioned it incidentally in a footnote to illustrate the hardships
brought upon innocent non-belligerents during the Napoleonic wars.
Indeed, an interesting passage in O'Meara's Napoleon at Saint Helena* (*
Edition of 1888, 2 129.) causes a doubt as to whether Napoleon had a
clear recollection of the Flinders case at all. It is true that General
Decaen's aide-de-camp had mentioned it to him in 1804, and that Banks had
written to him on the subject; but he had many larger matters to occupy
him, and possibly gave no more than passing thought to it. O'Meara
records that among Napoleon's visitors at the rock was an Englishman, Mr.
Manning, who was travelling in France for the benefit of his health in
1805. He had been arrested, but on writing to Napoleon stating his case,
was released. He mentioned the incident in the course of the
conversation, and expressed his gratitude. "What protection had you?"
asked Napoleon. "Had you a letter from Sir Joseph Banks to me?" Manning
replied that he had no letter from any one, but that Napoleon had ordered
his release without the intervention of any influential person. The
occurrence of Banks's name to Napoleon's memory in connection with an
application for the release of a traveller may indicate that a
reminiscence of the Flinders case lingered in the mind of the illustrious
exile. So much cannot, however, be stated positively, because Flinders
was not the only prisoner in behalf of whom the President of the Royal
Society had interested himself, though his was the only case which
attracted a very large amount of public attention. But what is chiefly
significant is the absence of any reference to Australia and Baudin's
expedition in the St. Helena conversations, in which the whole field of
Napoleonic policy was traversed with amplitude.

Had the selection of a site for settlement, rather than research, been
intended, it seems most likely that Napoleon, with his trained eye for
strategic advantages, would have directed particular if not exclusive
attention to be paid to the north coast of Australia. If he had taken the
map in hand and studied it with a view to obtaining a favourable
position, he would probably have put his finger upon the part of the
coast where Port Darwin is situated, and would have said, "Search
carefully just there: see if a harbour can be discovered which may be
used as a base." The coast was entirely unoccupied; the French might have
established themselves securely before the British knew what they had
done; and had they found and fortified Port Darwin, they would have
captured the third point of a triangle--the other two being Mauritius and
Pondicherry--which might have made them very powerful in the Indian
Ocean. And that is precisely what the East India Company's directors
feared that Napoleon intended. One of them, the Hon. C.F. Greville, wrote
to Brown, the naturalist of the Investigator, "I hope the French ships of
discovery will not station themselves on the north coast of New
Holland";* (* January 4, 1802. Historical Records of New South Wales 4
677.) and the Company, recognising their own interest in the matter,
voted six hundred pounds as a present to the captain, staff, and crew of
the Investigator before she sailed from England. But instead of what was
feared, the French ships devoted principal attention to the south, where
there was original geographical work to do--a natural course, their
object being discovery, but not what might have been expected had their
real design been acquisition. Peron censured Baudin because he examined
part of the west coast before proceeding to the unknown south; and when
at length Le Geographe did sail north, the work done there was very
perfunctory. Baudin himself was no fighting man; nor was there with the
expedition a military engineer or any officer capable of reporting upon
strategic situations, or competent to advise as to the establishment of a
fort or a colony. Captain Hamelin and Lieutenant Henri de Freycinet
afterwards saw active service with the Navy, but the staff knew more
about flowers, beetles, butterflies, and rocks than about fortifications
and colonisation.

In recent years research has concentrated powerful rays of light on the
intricacies of Napoleonic policy. Archives have been thrown open,
ransacked, catalogued and codified. Memoirs by the score, letters by the
hundred, have been published. Documents by the thousand have been
studied. A battalion of eager students have handled this vast mass of
material. The piercing minds of eminent scholars have drilled into it to
elucidate problems incidental to Napoleon's era. But nothing has been
brought to light which indicates that Australia was within the radius of
his designs.

The idea that the publication of the Terre Napoleon maps, with their
unfounded pretensions to discoveries, was a move on Napoleon's part
towards asserting a claim upon territory in Australia, is surely
untenable by any one with any appreciation of the irony of circumstances.

No man in history had a deeper realisation of the dynamics of empire than
Napoleon had. A nation, as he well knew, holds its possessions by the
power behind its grasp. If he had wanted a slice of Australia, and had
been able to take and hold it, of what political use to him would have
been a few maps, even with an eagle's picture on one of them? When his
unconquerable legions brought Italy under his sway, absorbed the Low
Countries, and established his dominion on the Rhine, the Elbe, and the
Danube, he based no claims on maps and documents. He took because he
could. An empire is not like a piece of suburban property, based on
title-deeds drawn by a family solicitor. Its validity is founded on
forces--the forces of ships, armies, manhood, treaties, funds, national
goodwill, sound government, commercial enterprise, all the forces that
make for solidity, resistance, permanence. Freycinet's maps would have
been of no more use to Napoleon in getting a footing in Australia than a
postage stamp would be in shifting one of the pyramids. He was capable of
many mean things, but we gravely undervalue his capacity for seeing to
the heart of a problem if we suppose him both mean and silly enough to
conspire to cheat Matthew Flinders out of his well and hardly won
honours, on the supposition that the maps would help him to assert a
claim upon Australia. He could have made good no such claim in the teeth
of British opposition without sea power; and that he had not.

The consequences of the suspicion that Napoleon intended to seize a site
in Australia, were, however, quite as important as if he had formally
announced his intention of doing so. What men believe to be true, not
what is true, determines their action; and there was quite enough in the
circumstances that occurred to make Governor King and his superiors in
England resolve upon decisive action. King having communicated his
beliefs to Ministers, Lord Hobart, Secretary of State for War and the
Colonies, in June 1803, wrote a despatch in which he authorised the
colonisation of Van Diemen's Land by the removal of part of the
establishment at Norfolk Island to Port Dalrymple--"the advantageous
position of which, upon the southern coast of Van Diemen's Land, and near
the entrance of Bass Straits, renders it, in a political view,
particularly necessary that a settlement should be formed there."* (* See
Backhouse Walker, Early Tasmania page 22.) It will be observed that the
Secretary of State's geographical knowledge of the countries under his
regime was quite remarkable. A man who should describe Glasgow as being
on the southern coast of England, near the eastern entrance of the
Channel, would be just about as near the truth as Lord Hobart managed to
get.* (* Froude's amusing story of Lord Palmerston, when, on forming a
Ministry, he thought he would have to take the Secretaryship of State for
the Colonies himself, comes to mind. He said to Sir Arthur Helps, "Come
upstairs with me, Helps; we will look at the maps, and you shall show me
where these places are." Froude's Oceana page 12.)

King moved immediately. He despatched the Lady Nelson and the Albion on
August 31 to establish a settlement on the river Derwent, with Lieutenant
John Bowen in charge; and in September 1803 the first British colony in
Tasmania was planted. It had a variety of adverse experiences before at
length the beautiful site of the city of Hobart, at the foot of Mount
Wellington, was determined upon; but here, at all events, was a
beginning, and the tale from that time forward has been one of steady
progress.

As soon as the imagined threat of French invasion lost its impulsion, the
colonising energy of the governing authorities subsided. The Tasmanian
settlement remained and grew, but Trafalgar removed all fear of foreign
interference. Hence it was that nearly forty years elapsed before any
real effort was made to settle the lands within Port Phillip. Then the
first energies that were devoted towards creating the great state of
Victoria were not directed by the Government, which no longer had any
political motive for forcing matters, but were made by enterprising
stock-owners searching for pastures. It was not till 1835 that John
Batman pushed up the river Yarra, found the site of the present city of
Melbourne, and said, "This will be the place for a village!" Trafalgar
and the security which it gave to British possessions oversea made all
the difference between the early occupation of Tasmania for fear the
French should take it, and the leisurely and non-official settlement of
the Port Phillip district, when it was quite certain that no foreign
power could set a foot upon it without British permission.

There was one other occasion when the recurrence of French exploring
ships in Australian waters revived the idea that foreign settlement on
some portion of the continent was contemplated. just as the appearance of
Baudin's expedition at the commencement of the century expedited the
colonisation of Tasmania, and prompted a tentative occupation of Port
Phillip, so the renewed activity of the French in the South Seas during
the years 1820 to 1826, was the immediate cause of the foundation of the
Swan River Settlement (1829), the nucleus of the present state of Western
Australia. Steps were also taken to form an establishment at Westernport,
where, on the arrival of H.M.S. Fly with two brigs conveying troops,
evidences were found showing that the French navigators had already paid
a call, without, however, making any movement in the direction of
"effective occupation." The Swan River Settlement grew, but the
Westernport expedition packed up its kit and returned to Sydney when the
alarm subsided.

There is perhaps some warrant for believing that the French Government,
when it sent out Freycinet in the Uranie and the Physicienne from 1817 to
1820, and the Baron de Bougainville in the Esperance and the Thetis from
1824 to 1826, desired to collect information with a possible view to
colonise in some part of Australasia; though the fear that these
commanders were themselves commissioned to "plant" a colony was quite
absurd, and the express exploratory purpose of their voyages was
abundantly justified by results. Lord John Russell, in after years,
related that "during my tenure of the Colonial office, a gentleman
attached to the French Government called upon me. He asked how much of
Australia was claimed as the dominion of Great Britain. I answered, 'The
whole,' and with that answer he went away."* (* Russell's Recollections
and Suggestions (1875) page 203.) Lord John Russell was at the head of
the Colonial Office in the second Melbourne Administration, 1839 to 1841,
a long time after the French explorers had gone home and published the
histories of their voyages. But it is still quite possible that the
researches made by Freycinet and the Baron de Bougainville prompted the
inquiry of the Colonial Secretary's visitor. The phrase, "a gentleman
attached to the French Government," is rather vague. The question was
clearly not asked by the French Ambassador, or it would have been
addressed to the Foreign Secretary, who at that time was Lord Palmerston,
and whose reply would certainly not have fallen short of Lord John's,
either in emphasis or distinctness. It may well be, however, that the
Government of King Louis Philippe--whose chief advisers during the period
were Thiers (1839 to 1840) and Guizot (from July 1840)--desired to make
their inquiry in a semi-official manner to avoid causing offence.

Yet the fact cannot escape notice, that at this particular time the
French were busily laying the foundation of that new colonial dominion
with which they have persevered, with admirable results, since the
collapse of their oversea power during Napoleon's regime. Though their
aptitude for colonisation had been "unhappily rendered sterile by the
faults of their European policy,"* (* Fallot, L'Avenir Colonial de la
France page 4.) the more far-seeing among their statesmen and publicists
did not lose sight of the ideal of creating a new field for the diffusion
of French civilisation. They commenced in 1827 that colonising enterprise
in Algiers which has converted "a sombre and redoubtable barbarian coast"
into "a twin sister of the Riviera of Nice, charming as she, upon the
other side of the Mediterranean."* (* Hanotaux, L'Energie Francaise
(1902) page 284.)

Lord John Russell was not likely to be regardless of this movement, nor
unaware of the strongly marked current of opinion in France in favour of
expansion.

Twenty years later Lord John Russell had the position of Australia, as a
factor in world politics, brought under his notice again, through a
document to which he evidently attached importance, and which is still
the legitimate subject of historical curiosity. He was then Secretary of
State for Foreign Affairs in the second Palmerston Administration (1859
to 1865). A great change had meanwhile taken place affecting the economic
value of this large island in the South Seas. Apart from the growth of
its commerce and the productive capacity of its great fertile areas, the
gold discoveries of the early fifties--the nuggets of Ballarat and the
rich auriferous gravels of wide belts of country--had turned the eyes of
the world towards the land of whose agricultural and mineral resources so
little had been previously known. France, too, had passed through a new
series of changes in her very mutable modern history, and a Bonaparte
once more occupied the throne, as Napoleon III.

One day the British Foreign Minister received, from a source of which we
know nothing--but the Foreign Office in the Palmerstonian epoch was
exceedingly well informed--a communication which, having read, he did not
deposit among the official documents at Downing Street, but carefully
sealed up and placed among his own private papers. His biographer, Sir
Spencer Walpole, tells us all that is at present known about this
mysterious piece of writing. "There is still among Lord John's papers,"
he says, "a simple document which purports to be a translation of a
series of confidential questions issued by Napoleon III on the
possibility of a French expedition, secretly collected in different
ports, invading, conquering, and holding Australia. How the paper reached
the Foreign Office, what credit was attached to it, what measures were
suggested by it, there is no evidence to show. This only is certain. Lord
John dealt with it as he occasionally dealt with confidential papers
which he did not think it right to destroy, but which he did not wish to
be known. He enclosed it in an envelope, sealed it with his own seal, and
addressed it to himself. It was so found after his death."* (* Walpole,
Life of Lord John Russell 2 177.)

Oddly enough, the period within which Lord John received the piece of
information which he carefully kept to himself in the manner described,
corresponds with that of the most notorious effort of Napoleon III to
assert his power beyond the confines of Europe.

In 1853, the year after the establishment of the second Empire, the
Government of Napoleon III had annexed New Caledonia, commencing on this
island the policy of transportation in the very year in which Great
Britain ceased to send convicts to Australia. Thus for the first time did
France secure a footing in the South. This was a safe step to take, as
the annexation was performed with the concurrence of Great Britain. But
Napoleon's oversea move of nine years later was rash in the extreme.

From 1862 to 1866--after a joint Anglo-French-Spanish movement to compel
the Republic of Mexico to discharge her debts to European bondholders,
and after a disagreement between the allies which led to the withdrawal
of the British and the Spaniards--forty thousand French troops were
engaged upon the quixotic task of disciplining Mexican opinion,
suppressing civil war, and imposing upon the people an unwelcome and
absurd sovereign in the person of Maximilian of Austria. His throne
endured as long as the French battalions remained to support it. When
they withdrew, Maximilian was deposed, court-marshalled, and shot. The
wild folly of the Mexican enterprise, from which France had nothing to
gain, illustrated in an expensive form the unbalanced judgment and the
soaring megalomaniac propensities of "the man of December." That he
should institute such inquiries as are indicated by the document
described by Lord John Russell's biographer, even though the preservation
of friendly relations with Great Britain was essential to him, was quite
in accordance with the "somewhat crafty" character of the man of whom a
contemporary French historian has said: "He knew how to keep his own
counsel, how to brood over a design, and how to reveal it suddenly when
he felt that his moment had come."* (* M. Albert Thomas in Cambridge
Modern History 11 287.) It is a little singular, however, that Russell
did not allude to the mysterious paper when he wrote his Recollections
and Suggestions, five years after the fall of Napoleon III. There was no
imperative need for secrecy then, and the passage quoted from his book
indicates that the welfare of Australia was under his consideration.

The facts set forth in the preceding pages are sufficient to show that
the people of no portion of the British Empire have greater reason to be
grateful for the benefits conferred by the naval strength maintained by
the mother country, during the past one hundred years, than have those
who occupy Australia. Their country has indeed been, in a special degree,
the nursling of sea power. By naval predominance, and that alone, the way
has been kept clear for the unimpeded development, on British
constitutional lines, of a group of flourishing states forming "one
continent-isle," whose bounds are "the girdling seas alone."

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