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Updated: June 6, 2025
The French naturalists in Baudin's expedition, found shells similarly circumstanced on the S.W. coast of Australia. The Rev. W.B. Clarke finds proofs of the elevation of the land, to the amount of 400 feet, at the Cape of Good Hope.
Could Baudin's shade visit to-day the shores that he traversed more than a century ago, he would surely acknowledge that orchards of ripening fruit, miles of golden grain, millions of white fleeces, the cattle of a thousand hills, great cities throbbing with immense energies, and a commerce of ever augmenting vastness, ministering to the happiness of free and prosperous populations, are, in the large ledger of humanity, an abundant compensation for the disappearance of the few companies of naked savages whom, when civilisation once invaded their ancestral haunts, neither the agencies of government nor philanthropy could save from the processes of decay.
The prize of discovery slipped from Baudin's reach in consequence of his "dawdling" methods, which brought about those "consequences facheuses et irreparables" deplored by the naturalist.
The Dutch captain, Vlaming, in 1697, had reported finding gigantic human footprints upon the banks of the Swan River, near where the city of Perth now stands; and two of Baudin's officers, whose names were not Munchausen and Sindbad but Heirisson and Moreau, declared that they also had observed the same phenomena at the same place.
But winds and currents should have been considered rather than bare distance; and the simple result of bad seamanship was that Baudin's vessels occupied one hundred and forty-five days on the voyage from Havre to Mauritius, where they stayed to refit, whilst Flinders brought out the Investigator from Spithead the whole way to Cape Leeuwin, where he first made the Australian coast, in one hundred and forty-two days.
The reader who has carefully followed the argument so far, will probably have come to the conclusion that Captain Baudin's statement to Flinders was perfectly true, and that the assertions of Peron and Freycinet which, if veracious, would make Le Geographe the second ship that ever saw Port Phillip cannot be accepted. One other fact will clinch the case and place the conclusion beyond doubt.
Francis, which form the extremity of Nuyts Land, and the English not having carried their researches farther than Westernport, "it follows that all the portion between the last-mentioned port and Nuyts Land was unknown at the time when we arrived on these shores." Peron's words were not candid. It is true that part of the shores in question were unknown when Baudin's ships "arrived."
Would it, one wonders, have made Freycinet a little happier had he known that at this very time the English navigator who had made the discoveries for which Baudin's expedition was sent out, was held in the clutch of General Decaen in Mauritius, and that the way was clear to hurry on the publication of forestalling maps and records whilst Flinders was, as it were, battened under hatches?
The French charting was so inferior that it is scarcely possible to identify the Ile Lucas, which is not marked at all on the large Carte Generale, probably because that was finished before Trafalgar was fought; though the passage in Peron's book is somewhat valuable as showing that the pepper-box sprinkling of names along coasts explored with less sufficiency than pretentiousness was not entirely Baudin's work.
We must also give due weight to the fact that we have no statement of Baudin's point of view on any matter for which he was blamed by colleagues who were at enmity with him.
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