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Terre Napoleon

E >> Ernest Scott >> Terre Napoleon




We must now leave the sphere of conflict in which the destinies of the
world were being shaped, and enter upon another phase of this history.
The reader will:

"slip across the summer of the world,
Then, after a long tumble about the Cape
And frequent interchange of foul and fair,"

--will accompany for a while an illustrious British explorer in his task
of filling up the map of the globe.


CHAPTER 1. FLINDERS AND THE INVESTIGATOR.

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.

On April 7, 1802, His Majesty's ship Investigator, 334 tons, Commander
Matthew Flinders, was beating off the eastern extremity of Kangaroo
Island, endeavouring to make the mainland of Terra Australis, to follow
the course of discovery and survey for which she had been commissioned.
The winds were very baffling for pursuing his task according to the
carefully scientific method which Flinders had prescribed for himself. He
had declared to Sir Joseph Banks, the President of the Royal Society,
before he left England, that he would endeavour so to explore the then
unknown coasts of the vast island for which he himself afterwards
suggested the name Australia, "that no person shall have occasion to come
after me to make further discoveries."* (* Flinders to Banks, April 29,
1801, Historical Records of New South Wales 4 351.) This principle of
thoroughness distinguished his work throughout the voyage. Writing
thirteen years later, after the long agony of his imprisonment in
Mauritius, he said that his "leading object had been to make so accurate
an investigation of the shores of Terra Australis, that no future voyage
to the country should be necessary" for the purpose; and that had not
circumstances been too strong for him, "nothing of importance should have
been left for future discoverers upon any part of these extensive
coasts."* (* Flinders, A Voyage to Terra Australis 2 143.) Nobody can
study Flinders' beautiful charts without recognising them as the work of
a master of his craft; and so well did he fulfil his promise, until the
debility of his ship and a chain of misfortunes interposed to prevent
him, that the Admiralty charts in current use are substantially those
which Flinders made over a hundred years ago.* (* Sir J.K. Laughton in
Dictionary of National Biography 19 328.)

His method, though easy enough to pursue in a modern steamer,
comparatively indifferent to winds and currents, was one demanding from a
sailing ship hard, persistent, straining work, with unflagging vigilance
and great powers of endurance. It was this. The Investigator was kept all
day so close along shore that the breaking water was visible from the
deck, and no river mouth or inlet could escape notice. When the weather
was too rough to enable this to be done with safety, Flinders stationed
himself at the masthead, scanning every reach of the shore-line. "Before
retiring to rest," he wrote, "I made it a practice to finish the rough
chart for the day, as also my astronomical observations and bearings."
When darkness fell, the ship hauled off from the coast, and every
morning, as soon after daylight as possible, she was brought in-shore
again, great care being taken to resume the work at precisely the point
where it was suspended the night before. "This plan," he wrote, "to see
and lay down everything myself, required constant attention and much
labour, but was absolutely necessary to obtaining that accuracy of which
I was desirous."

Before Flinders reached Kangaroo Island, he had, in this painstaking
manner, discovered and mapped the stretch of coast westward from the head
of the Great Australian Bight, charted all the islands, and, by following
the two large gulfs, Spencer's and St. Vincent's, to their extremities,
had shattered the theory commonly favoured by geographers before his
time, that a passage would be found cleaving the continent from the Gulf
of Carpentaria to the Strait which George Bass had discovered in 1798.*
(* Pinkerton, in his Modern Geography (1807) volume 2 588, published
after Flinders had made his principal discoveries, but before the results
were known, reflected the general opinion in the passage: "Some suppose
that this extensive region, when more thoroughly investigated, will be
found to consist of two or three vast islands, intersected by narrow
seas." The Committee of the Institute of France, which drew up the
instructions for the expedition commanded by Baudin, directed him to
search for a supposed strait dividing Australia longitudinally into "two
great and nearly equal islands" (Peron, Voyage de Decouvertes aux Terres
Australes 1 5). With these passages may be compared the following from
Kerr's General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, published
in 1824, ten years after the appearance of Flinders' book: "There are few
voyages from which more important accessions to geographical knowledge
have been derived than from this voyage of Captain Flinders, especially
when we reflect on the great probability that New Holland...[observe that
Kerr had not adopted the name Australia, which Flinders suggested only in
a footnote] will soon rank high in population and wealth. Before his
voyage it was doubtful whether New Holland was not divided into two great
islands, by a strait passing between Bass Straits and the Gulf of
Carpentaria. Captain Flinders has put an end to all doubts on this point.
He examined the coast in the closest and most accurate manner; he found,
indeed, two great openings; these he sailed up to their termination; and
consequently, as there were no other openings, and these were mere
inlets, New Holland can no longer be supposed to be divided into two
great islands. It must be regarded as forming one very large one; or
rather, from its immense size, a species of continent" (Kerr 18 462).)

That part of the southern coast of Australia lying between Cape Leeuwin
and Fowler Bay, in the Bight, had been explored prior to Flinders' time,
partly by Captain George Vancouver, one of Cook's men, in 1791, and
partly in 1792 by the French commander, Bruni Dentrecasteaux, who was
despatched in search of the gallant La Perouse--"vanished trackless into
blue immensity."* (* Carlyle, French Revolution book 2 cap 5.) Flinders
carefully revised what they had done, commencing his elaborate,
independent survey immediately after the Investigator made the Leeuwin,
on December 6, 1801. He had therefore been just four months in this
region, when he left his anchorage at Kangaroo Island--four months of
incessant daily and nightly labour diligently directed to the task in
hand. Always generous in his praise of good work, he paid a warm tribute
to the quality of the charts prepared by Beautemps Beaupre, "geographical
engineer" of La Recherche, Dentrecasteaux's corvette. "Perhaps no chart
of a coast so little known as this is, will bear a comparison with its
original better than this of M. Beaupre," he said; and though he put
forward his own as being fuller in detail and more accurate, he was
careful to point out that he made no claim for superior workmanship, and
that, indeed, he would have been open to reproach if, after having
followed the coast with Beaupre's chart in hand, he had not effected
improvements where circumstances did not permit his predecessor to make
so close an examination. It is an attractive characteristic of Flinders,
that he never missed an opportunity of appreciating valuable service in
other navigators.

But from the time when the Investigator passed the head of the Bight, the
whole of the coast-line traversed was virginal to geographical science.
With a clean sheet of paper, Flinders began to chart a new stretch of the
earth's outline, and to link up the undiscovered with the known portions
of the great southern continent. Our interest in his work is intensified
by the reflection that of all the coasts of the habitable earth, this was
the last important portion still to be discovered. True it is that
research in the arctic and antarctic circles remained to be pursued, and
still remains. Man will not cease his efforts till he knows his planet in
its entirety, though the price of the knowledge may be high. But when he
has compassed the extreme ends of the globe, he will not have found a
rood of ground upon which any one will ever wish to live. The earth lust
of the nations is not provoked by thoughts of the two poles. Ruling out
the frozen regions, therefore, as places where discovery is pursued
without thought of future habitation, it is a striking fact that this
voyage of Flinders opened up the ultimate belt of the earth's contour
hitherto unknown. The continents were finally unveiled when he concluded
his labours. Europe, the centre of direction, had comprehended the form
of Asia, had encircled Africa, had brought America within ken and
control. It had gradually pieced together a knowledge of Australia, all
but the extensive area the greater part of which it was left for Flinders
to reveal. The era of important modern coastal discovery within habitable
regions, which commenced with the researches directed by Prince Henry the
Navigator from 1426 to 1460, and attained to brilliancy with Columbus in
1492 and Vasco da Gama in 1497, ended with Flinders in 1802 and 1803. He
ranges worthily with that illustrious company of "men full of activity,
stirrers abroad, and searchers of the remote parts of the world," of whom
Richard Hakluyt speaks, and is outshone by none of them in the
faithfulness with which his work was done, and in all the qualities that
make up the man of high capacity and character entrusted with a great
enterprise.

When Flinders was appointed to the command of the Investigator, he was
only twenty-seven years of age. But he had already won distinction by his
demonstration that Bass Strait was a strait, and not a gulf, a fact not
proved by George Bass's famous voyage from Sydney to Westernport in a
whale-boat. His circumnavigation of Tasmania--then called Van Diemen's
Land--in the Norfolk; the discovery of the Tamar estuary and Port
Dalrymple; some excellent nautical surveying among the islands to the
north-west of Tasmania; and an expedition along the Queensland coast, had
also earned for him the confidence of his official superiors. His ardour
for discovery, and the exact, scientific character of his charts and
observations, won him a powerful and steadfast friend in Sir Joseph
Banks, who had been with Cook in the Endeavour in 1768 to 1771, and never
lost his interest in Australian exploration. At the beginning of his
naval career Flinders had tasted the "delights of battle." As a
midshipman on the Bellerophon (Captain Pasley), he played his small part
on the "glorious first of June" (1794), when "Black Dick," Lord Howe, won
his greatly vaunted victory over the French off Brest.

But before this event his tastes and aspirations had set in the direction
of another branch of the naval service. A voyage to the South Seas and
the West Indies under Bligh, in the Providence, in 1791, had revealed to
his imagination the glory of discovery and the vastness and beauty of the
world beyond European horizons. The fame and achievements of Cook were
still fresh and wonderful in the mouths of all who followed the sea.
Bligh, a superb sailor--not even the enemies whom he made by his rough
tongue and brusque manner denied that--taught him to be a scientific
navigator; and when he threaded the narrow, coral-walled waters of Torres
Strait, he knew that to the southward were coasts as yet unmarked on any
chart, seas as yet unploughed by any keel. For this work of exploration
Flinders nourished a passion as intense as that which inferior natures
have had for love, avarice, or honours. It absorbed all his life and
thought; and opportunity, becoming in his case the handmaid of capacity,
was abundantly justified by accomplishment.

There is one striking fact which serves to "place" Flinders among
navigators. As has just been observed, he learnt his practical navigation
under Bligh, on that historically unfortunate captain's second
bread-fruit expedition, when he was entrusted with the care of the
scientific instruments. Now, Bligh had perfected his navigation under
Cook, on the Resolution, and actually chose the landing-place in
Kealakeakua Bay, where the greatest English seaman who ever lived was
slain. Here is a school of great sailors: Cook the master of Bligh, Bligh
the master of Flinders; and Flinders in turn had on board the
Investigator as a midshipman, his cousin, John Franklin, to whom he
taught navigation, and who acquired from him that "ardent love of
geographical research" which brought him immortal fame, and a grave
amongst the ice-packs and the snows of the North-West Passage.* (* See
Markham, Life of Sir John Franklin page 43 and Traill, Life of Franklin
page 16. Traill's graceful sentences are worth transcribing: "The example
of the fine seaman and enthusiastic explorer under whom he served must
indeed, for a lad of Franklin's ardent temperament, have been an
education in itself. Throughout his whole life he cherished the warmest
admiration for the character of Matthew Flinders, and in later years he
welcomed the opportunity of paying an enduring tribute to his old
commander's memory in the very region of the world which his discoveries
had done so much to gain for civilisation." It is pleasant to find
Flinders speaking cordially of his young pupil in a letter written during
the voyage. "He is a very fine youth, and there is every probability of
his doing credit to the Investigator and himself.") There is nothing
comparable with this direct succession of illustrious masters and pupils
in the history of navigation. The names of all four are indelibly written
on the map of the world. Three of them--Cook, Flinders, and Franklin--are
among our very foremost navigators and discoverers, men whom a race proud
of the heritage of the sea will for ever hold in honour and affection;
whilst the fourth, Bligh, though his reputation is wounded by association
with two mutinies, was in truth a daring and a brilliant seaman, and a
brave man in a fight. Nelson especially thanked him for noble service at
Copenhagen, and his achievement in working a small, open boat from the
mid-Pacific, where the mutinous crew of the Bounty dropped him, through
Torres Strait to Timor, a distance of 3620 miles, stands memorably on the
credit side of his account.

See what it meant to have been trained in a school that observed the
rules and respected the traditions of James Cook. When at the end of his
long voyage of nine months and nine days, Flinders took the Investigator
through Port Jackson heads into harbour (Sunday, May 9, 1802), he had not
a sick man on board.* (* Voyage 1 226.) His crew finished hearty,
browned, and vigorous. He was able to write from the Cape of Good Hope
that "officers and crew were, generally speaking, in better health than
on the day we sailed from Spithead, and not in less good spirits."
Scrupulous attention to cleanliness and hygiene produced this result in
an age when scurvy was more to be feared than shipwreck. On every fine
day the decks below and the cockpit were washed, dried with stoves, and
sprinkled with vinegar. Care was taken to prevent the crew from sleeping
in wet clothes. At frequent intervals beds, chests, and bags were opened
out and exposed to the sweetening influences of fresh air and sunshine.
Personal cleanliness was enforced. Lime-juice and other anti-scorbutics
were frequently served out: a precautionary measure which originated in
Cook's day, and which down to our own times has caused all British
sailors to be popularly known as "lime-juicers" in the American Navy. The
dietary scale and the cooking were subjects of careful thought. This keen
young officer of twenty-seven looked after his company of eighty-seven
people with as grave and kindly a concern as if he were a grey-bearded
father to them all; and was liberally rewarded by their affection. During
his imprisonment in Mauritius, one of his men stayed with him voluntarily
for several years, enduring the unpleasantness of life in confinement far
away from home, out of sheer devotion to his commander; and did not leave
until Flinders, becoming hopeless of liberation, insisted on his taking
advantage of an opportunity of going to England.

There is a touching proof of Flinders' tender regard for his men in the
naming of a small group of islands to the west of the bell-mouth of
Spencer's Gulf. A boat's crew commanded by the mate, John Thistle, was
drowned there, through the boat capsizing. Thistle was an excellent
seaman, who had been one of Bass's whale-boat crew in 1798, and had
volunteered for service with the Investigator. Not only did Flinders name
an island after him, and another after a midshipman, Taylor, who perished
on the same occasion, but he gave to each of the islands near Cape
Catastrophe the name of one of the seamen who lost their lives in the
accident. In a country where men are valued for their native worth rather
than on account of rank or wealth, such as is happily the case to a very
large degree in Australia--and this is a far finer thing than mere
political democracy--perhaps nothing in the career of Flinders is more
likely to ensure respect for his memory, apart from the value of his
achievements, than this perpetuation of the names of the sailors who died
in the service.

Throughout the voyage he promoted amusements among his people; "and when
the evenings were fine the drum and fife announced the forecastle to be
the scene of dancing; nor did I discourage other playful amusements which
might occasionally be more to the taste of the sailors, and were not
unseasonable."* (* Voyage 1 36.) The work may have been strenuous, and
the commander was unsparing of his own energies; but the life was happy,
and above all it was healthy. The pride which Flinders had in the result
was modestly expressed: "I had the satisfaction to see my people orderly
and full of zeal for the service in which we were engaged." Really, it
was a splendid achievement in itself, and it showed that, if the hardship
of life in a small ship, on a long voyage, could not be abolished, at
least horror could be banished from it.

Compare this genial record with that of the French exploring ships Le
Geographe and Le Naturaliste, which were quite as well equipped for a
long voyage. They had, it is true, been longer at sea, but they had an
advantage not open to Flinders in being able to refit at Mauritius, had
rested again for some weeks at Timor, and had spent a considerable time
in the salubrious climate of southern Tasmania, where there was an
abundance of fresh food and water. When, on June 23, 1802, Le Geographe
appeared off Port Jackson, to solicit help from Governor King, it was
indeed "a ghastly crew" that she had on board. Her officers and crew were
rotten with scurvy. Scarcely one of them was fit to haul a rope or go
aloft. Out of one hundred and seventy men, only twelve were capable of
any kind of duty, and only two helmsmen could take their turn at the
wheel. Not a soul aboard, of any rank, was free from the disease.* (*
Peron, Voyage de Decouvertes 1 331 to 340; Flinders, Voyage 1 230.) Of
twenty-three scientific men and artists who sailed from Havre, in 1800,
only three returned to France with the expedition, and before its work
was over the Commander, Baudin, and several of the staff were dead. The
chief naturalist, Francois Peron, and one of the surgeons, Taillefer,
have left terrible accounts of the sufferings endured. Putrid water,
biscuits reduced almost to dust by weevils, and salt meat so absolutely
offensive to sight and smell that "the most famished of the crew
frequently preferred to suffer the agonies of hunger" rather than eat
it--these conditions, together with neglect of routine sanitary
precautions, produced a pitiable state of debility and pain, that made
the ship like an ancient city afflicted with plague. Indeed, the vivid
narratives of Thucydides and Boccaccio, when they counted:

"the sad degrees
Upon the plague's dim dial, caught the tone
Of a great death that lay upon the land,"

are not more haggard in their naturalism than is Taillefer's picture of
the sufferings of the sailors to whom he ministered. Their skin became
covered with tumours, which left ugly black patches; where hair grew
appeared sores "the colour of wine lees"; their lips shrivelled,
revealing gums mortified and ulcerated. They exhaled a breath so fetid in
odour that Taillefer loathed having to administer to them such remedies
as he had to give; and at one part of the voyage even his stock of drugs
was depleted, so great was the demand upon his resources. Their joints
became stiff, their muscles flaccid and contracted, and the utter
prostration to which they were reduced made him regret that they retained
so much of their intellectual faculties as to make them feel keenly the
weight of despair.* (* Voyage de Decouvertes 1 340.)

When Le Geographe stood outside Sydney Harbour, a boat's crew of
Flinders' bluejackets from the Investigator, themselves fresh from their
own long voyage, had to be sent out to work her into port. So enfeebled
were the French sailors that they could not even muster sufficient energy
to bring their vessel to the place where succour awaited them. While we
deplore this tale of distress, we can but mark the striking contrast with
the English vessel and her jolly crew. Truly, it meant something for a
commander to have learnt to manage a ship in a school nourished on the
example of Cook, whose title to fame might rest on his work as a
practical reformer of life at sea, even if his achievements as a
discoverer were not so incomparably brilliant.

We must now return to the Investigator, which, at the commencement of the
chapter, we left fighting with a contrary wind east of Kangaroo Island.
Although the sloop quitted her anchorage early on the morning of April 7,
at eight o'clock in the evening she had made very little headway across
Backstairs Passage. On the 8th, she was near enough to the mainland for
Flinders to resume his charting, and late in the afternoon of that day
occurred an incident to which the next chapter will be devoted.
Meanwhile, it is important to observe that had the wind blown from the
west or south-west, instead of from the east or south-east, Flinders
would have accomplished the survey of the coast between Cape Jervis, at
the entrance of St. Vincent's Gulf, and Cape Banks, before the French
discovery ship, Le Geographe, emerged from Bass Strait on her voyage
westward. The wind that filled Captain Baudin's sails, and drove his ship
forward towards the seas in which the Investigator was making important
discoveries, was the wind that delayed Flinders at Kangaroo Island. Had
the weather been more accommodating to the English captain and less to
the French, there cannot be the slightest doubt that even the fifty
leagues of coast, or thereabouts, which are all that can be claimed to
have been discovered by Baudin, would have been first charted by
Flinders. But the French expedition was so unfortunate, both as to
results and reputation--so undeservedly unfortunate, in some respects, as
will be shown in later chapters--that this small measure of success may
be conceded ungrudgingly. It is, indeed, somewhat to be regretted that
the small part of the Australian coast which was genuinely their own
discovery, should not have been in a more interesting region than was
actually the case; for the true "Terre Napoleon" is no better for the
most part than a sterile waste, with a back country of sand, swamp, and
mallee scrub, populated principally by rabbits, dingoes, and bandicoots.


CHAPTER 2. THE AFFAIR OF ENCOUNTER BAY.

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.

On the afternoon of April 8,* (* In his manuscript journal, which was
used by the Quarterly reviewer of the first volume of the Voyage de
Decouvertes, in August 1810, Flinders gave the date on which he met Le
Geographe as April 9th (Quarterly Review volume 4 52). But there is no
contradiction. In his journal Flinders gave the date of the nautical day,
which commenced at noon. As he met Baudin's corvette in the late
afternoon, it was, by nautical reckoning, April 9th. But by the calendar,
the civil day commencing at midnight, the date was April 8th, as stated
by Flinders in his published volumes, by both Peron and Louis de
Freycinet, and in the log of Le Geographe. A similar difference of dates,
which puzzled Labilliere in writing his Early History of Victoria 1 108,
occurs as to the first sighting of Port Phillip by Flinders. It is
explained in exactly the same way.) the man at the masthead of the
Investigator reported a white rock ahead. He was mistaken. Glasses were
turned towards it, and as the distance lessened it became apparent that
the white object was a sail. The sloop was at this time in latitude 35
degrees 40 minutes south, longitude 138 degrees 58 minutes east. To meet
another vessel in this region, many leagues from regular trading routes,
in a part of the world hitherto undiscovered, was surprising. The
Investigator stood on her course, and as the strange ship became more
clearly defined it was evident that she was making towards the British
sloop. Flinders therefore "cleared for action in case of being attacked."

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