Edited by Jean Fornasiero and John West-Sooby ‘Roaming Freely Throughout the Universe’: Nicolas Baudin’s voyage to Australia and the pursuit of science is a collection of essays written in the context of the French explorers’ belief that studying in situ was the only way for science to move forward.

In a special three-part guest series on the blog, John West-Sooby discusses how the book came to be, and the discoveries made along the way. In this second instalment, John examines the drawings produced on the Baudin expedtion.

Read on below.

Banner image: Terre De Diemen: Ile Maria. Tombeaux des Naturels, (detail) by Charles-Alexandre Lesueur

Drawing was a widely practised art back in Baudin’s day, a time when the impulse to sketch seems to have been especially strong among the peripatetic. Without cameras or smartphones, travellers wanting a visual record of their journey had to resort to sketching the people and places they encountered. These drawings served to complement their verbal jottings – or in some cases replaced them entirely. As we all know, a picture is worth a thousand words. Perhaps more, depending on the talent of the artist (or conversely, the shortcomings of the writer).

Scientists – those who worked in the field, at least – constituted a special category of traveller. For professional reasons, they often had, of necessity, well-developed sketching or drawing skills. Not every specimen could be collected and taken home, so a quick sketch to accompany the notes was a useful reminder of what was observed. It would be interesting to know how many scientists have that ability nowadays …

Nicolas Baudin’s expedition provides ample evidence of the artistic skills of those who sailed with him to Australia’s shores in 1801–1803. A case in point is the journal of Stanislas Levillain, who joined the expedition as an ‘amateur zoologist’ and who also served as Baudin’s secretary. He was one of the more expressive and endearing characters on the voyage: as explained in one of the chapters of ‘Roaming Freely Throughout the Universe’: Nicolas Baudin’s Voyage to Australia and the Pursuit of Science, he always wore his heart on his sleeve. Levillain had no pretensions as an artist but nevertheless felt compelled to sprinkle his journal with sketches, a number of which are quite accomplished. Some of his drawings had a scientific purpose, but others seem to have been simply intended as mementos of his voyage.

Sketches from Levillain’s journal, left to right:
Fish; The French camp site in Shark Bay (WA); Grass tree

This propensity for sketching as a means of keeping a personal record of the voyage was shared by many of Levillain’s travelling companions.

This sometimes produced amusing scenes reminiscent of the modern tourist group stopping, as if on cue, to take photographs of anything new that looms into view. Just two weeks after leaving France, for example, the two French ships came within sight of their first port of call, Tenerife. The island, with its spectacular volcano, proved an irresistible siren call for all the budding artists on board. As Baudin noted, ‘everyone went off to get his portfolio and his pencils and, to fore and aft of the ship, there was not a soul to be seen who was not busy sketching’.

Sketches by Charles-Alexandre Lesueur, left to right:
View of Tenerife; Sketch of clouds at the equator

Sketches by Charles-Alexandre Lesueur, left to right:
Sketch of the botanist Leschenault writing or drawing;
Sketch of the helmsman on board the Géographe

Not that there was any danger of the expedition returning to France without a substantial pictorial record. No less than five artists set out on the journey.

Two of these were enlisted by Baudin himself, to illustrate his ‘historical journal’ – an account of the voyage which included numerous scientific reports and was possibly intended for publication, though it was destined to remain incomplete. It’s just as well that Baudin signed up these two young artists – Charles-Alexandre Lesueur and Nicolas Martin Petit – as the three officially appointed artists jumped ship once the expedition reached Mauritius. Without Lesueur and Petit, we might simply have the rough sketches of Levillain and others to contemplate, instead of the rich collection of illustrations with which many of us are now familiar.

Some of these drawings are kept in the National Museum in Paris, but the majority are held by the Museum of Natural History in Lesueur’s home town of Le Havre. This collection also includes drawings made by Lesueur during his subsequent travels – in the south of France, the USA and back home again in Normandy. The set of sketches and drawings from the voyage to Australia includes those he and Petit drew directly onto the pages of Baudin’s historical journal. These illustrations were later cut out and removed, regrettably. This explains the rough shape of the paper on which these sketches now appear when exhibited.

Drawings of fish by Lesueur or Petit,
extracted from Baudin’s historical journal

If you go to the Le Havre Museum to consult its archival collections, it’s useful to know how all of the drawings (and manuscripts) have been catalogued.

When the curator, Jacqueline Bonnemains, decided to put some order into this vast collection of documents, during the second half of the 20th century, she organised them according to place (mainly for landscapes and people) or type (for animals). Each of these documents was attributed a two-digit number according to its category, followed by a three-digit individual number. The number 76, for instance, is the prefix for all the fish drawings (as seen above), 79 is for birds, 80 for mammals and so on. In terms of place, 14 is the prefix for drawings of Tenerife, 15 for Mauritius, 16 for Sydney, etc. As Gabrielle Baglione (current curator) and Cédric Crémière (recent museum director) note in their chapter in ‘Roaming Freely’, this system – like all cataloguing systems, no doubt – inevitably necessitated compromises: some documents could qualify for two (or more) categories, either because their subject matter crosses boundaries or because they bear multiple texts/images representing completely different subjects. It’s nevertheless a useful inventory and you quickly get used to working with its idiosyncrasies.

Organising this archive was a vital first step; ensuring its longevity has been the next. To this end, some 15 years ago Gabrielle and Cédric secured funding for the ambitious project of restoring the drawings.

Two or three days per week, a small team of restoration experts came from Paris to undertake this work. It was a delicate task, which involved removing the dust and other impurities that had accumulated over the previous 200 years and repairing any damage to the drawings, before setting them in new and improved storage frames. The guiding principle behind modern restoration work is that any intervention (apart from cleaning, of course) has to be reversible.

It was fascinating to witness this process, as I had the privilege to do when I was at the Museum working on one of François Péron’s manuscripts. At that time, the restorers were working on the starfish illustrations. Laid out all around me were Lesueur’s wonderful drawings of these sea creatures, in various stages of restoration. The before and after contrast was striking: prior to restoration and viewed in isolation, the drawings seemed clear and bright enough; but set alongside those that had been restored and refreshed, the unrestored drawings looked positively dull. Anyone who was lucky enough to visit the Art of Science exhibition, which featured the illustrations of Lesueur and Petit and toured Australia in 2016–2018 (and which was the subject of another beautiful Wakefield Press book), will have been able to appreciate the results of that restoration project – a powerful example of the value of funding the GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums) sector!

Starfish drawings by Charles-Alexandre Lesueur

‘Roaming Freely Throughout the Universe’: Nicolas Baudin’s voyage to Australia and the pursuit of science