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 third instalment, John examines the specimens collected on the Baudin expedtion.

Read on below.

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

Nicolas Baudin’s expedition to Australia (1801–1803) is a perfect illustration of the obsessive collecting impulse of the time. In the late eighteenth century, institutions and private citizens with cabinets of curiosity had an insatiable thirst for natural history objects. The bigger the collection, the greater the prestige attached to it. Size really did matter!

Of course, scientific concerns were also a factor. Long before Charles Darwin articulated the theory of evolution, naturalists were keenly aware of the variety that existed within what appeared to be the same species. If you only had one specimen of a plant or animal in your collection, how could you be sure it was typical? Best to play it safe, then, and collect as many samples as possible.

A drawer full of birds of the same species in the Paris Museum

True to this principle, Baudin’s two ships took back to France thousands upon thousands of specimens – well over 100,000 for zoology alone – all packed in crates or preserved in jars.

When the Naturaliste, Baudin’s consort ship that he sent home from Sydney, arrived back in France on 7 June 1803, it unloaded 64 crates of specimens – 14 labelled ‘mineralogy’, 15 ‘zoology’, 12 ‘birds’ and the remainder containing dried plants, seeds, shells, insects, madrepores, eggs, samples of wood and sundry other objects, including ethnographic artefacts. This is all documented by Michel Jangoux in a chapter of ‘Roaming Freely Throughout the Universe’.

When Baudin’s ship the Géographe returned home nine months later, it more or less doubled that first collection. The combined harvest was truly bountiful. In another chapter of ‘Roaming Freely’, the same Michel Jangoux reproduces the summary lists of invertebrate specimens collected during the expedition, as compiled by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck of the Paris Museum – insects, crustaceans, arachnids, echinoderms and molluscs numbering around 16,000 in total and representing nearly 2,000 species, many of them believed to be new to science. And that’s just one of the categories of zoological specimens!

Left to right: Page one of François Péron’s inventory of the crates of specimens on board the Géographe; Lesueur’s illustration of molluscs and zoophytes from the Atlas of the voyage account; Gastropod shell, Conus miles, Charles-Alexandre Lesueur (Le Havre Museum)

Included in the expedition’s natural history collection were many living plants and animals – some 30 or so live animals arrived back in France on the Naturaliste, while 73 made the journey on the Géographe.

The plants, sadly, did not fare so well: only 12–15 of 800 plants were in full vegetation by the time the Naturaliste returned; in contrast, 300 living plants made it back in reasonable condition on the Géographe, though that was just a proportion of a much larger collection. The rats and cockroaches had taken a toll, as had the variable climatic conditions during the voyage.

It’s not hard to imagine how the dozens of crates might have been readily accommodated down in the holds, but it must have been more than a little chaotic up on deck, with all the cages of live animals and containers of plants crammed into such a limited space. Moving around the ship would have been a difficult business. We should spare a thought for the animals, as well, penned in cages and exposed to the elements. The seven kangaroos on the Géographe suffered considerably from this exposure, to the point where Baudin ordered the botanist Leschenault and midshipman Ransonnet to vacate their cabins so as to provide the poor marsupials with shelter from the weather. That’s one small victory for the animals!

Left to right: The Géographe and Naturaliste at anchor in Timor;
Model of the Géographe

The obvious question to ask, then, is: what became of all these animals and plants, preserved and living?

And let’s not forget all the rocks! As we might expect, the professors of the Paris Museum were anxious to get their hands on this treasure trove and they wasted no time sending an emissary to meet each of the two ships. In the case of the Géographe, they sent their eminent colleague Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire himself to the port of Lorient to organise safe passage for the collection to Paris. This greatly alarmed Baudin’s zoologist François Péron, who had made his way to Paris: he had carefully numbered all the crates and the specimens they contained to match the numbers in his notebooks where he recorded their provenance and made his observations. If the specimens were removed from their crates and reorganised for dispatch without his supervision, the whole collection would become divorced from his notes, gravely compromising its value for study. Sadly, as Michel Jangoux recounts in ‘Roaming Freely’, this is exactly what happened …

François Péron’s list of live animals on board the Géographe, organised into mammals (‘mammifères’), birds (‘oiseaux’) and quadrupeds, and showing their number and provenance

The collection did, nevertheless, find its way back to Paris, though not all of the specimens went to the museum.

Much to the chagrin of the professors, a sizeable number, including almost half of the live animals and all of the ethnographic objects, were destined for Madame Bonaparte. This was part of the deal from the outset. The frontispiece to Péron’s published account of the voyage accordingly shows kangaroos, black swans and emus roaming the grounds of Josephine’s garden at Malmaison, west of Paris, framed by Australian vegetation.

Frontispiece from the Voyage de découvertes aux Terres Australes

Following the death of Josephine in 1814 and the fall of Napoleon, many items in the Malmaison collection, including the precious ethnographic collection from Australia and the Pacific, were either destroyed by invading troops or sold off and dispersed, never to be seen again.

The Paris Museum had, however, already recovered from Malmaison a number of specimens, notably the remains of animals that had died in the intervening years. Its own share of the Baudin bounty was somewhat diminished by circumstances: some specimens had been sold to private collectors, others were sent to schools for educational purposes, still others were later given to various European powers as part of reparations for the Napoleonic wars. This explains why objects from the Baudin expedition can be found today in places such as Leiden, Geneva and Florence.

The Museum of Natural History in Paris nevertheless still houses thousands of the specimens from Baudin’s voyage. These include the herbarium, which was long thought to have been lost but had simply been incorporated into the Museum’s larger collection, Baudin’s ferns being integrated in the drawers containing all the other ferns from around the globe, and so on.

Birds of prey in the Paris Museum

Of the zoological specimens brought back by the Baudin expedition, one of the most fascinating collections is that of the birds. According to Louis Dufresne, who was the Museum’s taxidermist at the time, 599 bird skins, preserved using arsenic soap, were brought back by the Naturaliste in 1803; 422 bird skins and 34 live birds then came back on the Géographe.

These birds were progressively stuffed and mounted. They have recently been identified and documented by Dutch ornithologist Justin Jansen as part of his PhD thesis (see ‘Roaming Freely’ for his study of Péron’s work on albatrosses). Like the dried plants, the birds are all to be found distributed, according to type, throughout the Museum’s ornithological collections.

On a visit to Paris in 2016, Jean Fornasiero and I caught up with Justin, who offered to show us the birds from the Baudin expedition. This involved meeting him at the Museum and being conducted on a tour through its labyrinth of underground corridors. All of the birds in the Museum’s collection are stored in large metal filing cabinets on runners. Each specimen has a label indicating its provenance, so Justin has had to look at every single bird to identify and document those collected by the Baudin expedition. That’s painstaking work!

A duck from Australia collected by Péron

Our reward for following Justin on this tour was being granted access to the locked vault housing the Museum’s rare or extinct animals.

This was a great privilege. It was quite a thrill to see such rarities as the dodo bird or the albino quail shot by king Louis XV. But for a couple of historians who have spent many years working on the Baudin expedition, nothing can match the excitement of seeing the famed dwarf emu collected by Baudin on King Island and Kangaroo Island, and which became extinct very shortly after. Archival research can be a slog, but it sometimes has fringe benefits!

Rare and extinct animals, left to right: Albino quail hunted by Louis XV, Paris Museum; Dodo skeleton, Paris Museum

Rare and extinct animals, left to right: Dwarf emu specimens, Paris Museum; Dwarf emu as by Lesueur for the Atlas of the Voyage de découvertes aux Terres Australes

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