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.
Drawing on a range of archival sources, the essays presented here offer fresh perspectives on Baudin’s scientific voyagers, their work and its legacy. What emerges is a deeper appreciation of the Baudin expedition’s contribution to the pursuit of science, and of those who pursued it.
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 first instalment, we discover the important role that historical archives played in shedding light on the voyage.
Read on below.
Banner image: Terre De Diemen: Ile Maria. Tombeaux des Naturels, (detail) by Charles-Alexandre Lesueur
Archives are the life blood of the historian, but working on manuscripts can be a mixed blessing.
On the one hand, it’s hard to resist that sense of anticipation when sitting before a pile of documents that might yield new insights into important but neglected stories from the past. It’s the equivalent of setting out on a voyage of discovery. What surprises, what twists and turns, might lie in wait for the zealous explorer? On the other hand, many hours of painstaking and often fruitless labour might be spent in search of that elusive document which holds the missing link to some unresolved mystery from the past. The process can be laboriously slow. Archival research is sometimes (frequently?) a thankless task.
Inside the French National Archives
Working on the manuscripts from Nicolas Baudin’s ‘voyage of discovery’ to Australia (1800–1804) produces that same contrasting mix of excitement and tedium. It’s a mammoth task, given the number of documents involved.
But in order to understand the Baudin story, there’s no alternative but to work systematically through them.
This requires a certain resolve, as not all manuscripts make for a riveting read. Certain officers’ journals, for example, contain endless pages of laconic daily entries that offer nothing but the briefest of observations on the weather and the condition of the sea (alongside the standard tables of nautical observations). Only two days into the journey, for example, one traveller, clearly in control of his emotions, simply noted: ‘Fine weather, nothing new.’ The next day’s entry is even shorter: ‘Id.’ (idem = the same). If the aim was to share the monotony of life at sea, then you’d have to say the writing is highly effective.
Sample pages from Henri Freycinet’s journal
It’s worth persisting, though, as the pattern is sometimes broken – by an unusual event, such as a navigational mishap or a moment of ship-board conflict on which the writer might offer a personal comment (gold!), or more predictably by the account of what took place during the various stopovers and shore visits, most of which, during the Baudin expedition, were rich in incidents involving encounters with people and the natural environment.
Archival research thus has its highs and lows. One thing you never get blasé about, though, is the privilege of being able to turn the pages (in suitably white-gloved hands) of a document written by someone sailing on a ship from France while off the coast of Australia over 200 years ago. Call it a nerdy pleasure if you like, but it’s genuinely exciting to hold the historical journal kept by Baudin, or to read the page of his sea-log on which he wrote the account of his first meeting with Matthew Flinders on 8 April 1802.
First page of Baudin’s historical journal
The fact that these manuscripts have survived the passage of time is a story in itself.
The various journals, as per custom, were collected and put under lock and key on journey’s end, which in the case of the Baudin expedition was on arrival at French-held Mauritius during the homeward voyage. These journals are held today in the French National Archives in Paris, along with sundry papers and files relating to the voyage. The Museum of Natural History in Paris also has in its archives letters written by Baudin and other papers. Some of these documents are in reasonable condition, but others suffered from the ravages of the journey or the passage of time. They are, however, generally well catalogued – French bureaucracy is much maligned, but we should be thankful that good record-keeping is in its DNA!
A page from midshipman Couture’s journal
Unusually, a number of manuscripts relating to the Baudin expedition are to be found not in Paris but in the Natural History Museum in Le Havre, on the Channel coast. The majority of the illustrations from the voyage are also housed here. Why Le Havre and not Paris?
The naturalist François Péron, who had been given responsibility for compiling the historical account of the expedition, and thus had in his possession many documents to help him, died in 1810 before he was able to complete the task. His friend and fellow voyager, the artist Charles-Alexandre Lesueur, was left as the depositor of his companion’s papers. Lesueur left shortly afterwards for the United States of America, which meant that these manuscripts, together with his own drawings and other objects, were not recovered by the authorities in Paris. The accidents of history …
After 20 years in America, Lesueur returned to Le Havre in 1836 and was made the inaugural Director of its new Museum in 1845. He died the following year, but his archives have been a part of the Le Havre Museum’s holdings ever since. Subsequent donations have augmented this archive. It is remarkable that the Lesueur Collection has survived at all. Were it not for the foresight of a few dedicated individuals, who arranged for it to be evacuated soon after the start of World War II, it would most likely have been obliterated by the Allied bombing of German-held Le Havre in 1940–1944.
Le Havre in ruins, winter of 1944–1945, and Le Havre’s Museum today
The extent of that precious manuscript collection and the history of its material conservation are the subject of a fascinating chapter in Wakefield Press’s recently published book ‘Roaming Freely Throughout the Universe’: Nicolas Baudin’s voyage to Australia and the pursuit of science.
Mention is made in that chapter of the delicate state of many of the manuscripts – written on porous paper with corrosive ink – and of the difficulty of deciphering them. I can confirm the latter from personal experience. When transcribing the manuscript of François Péron’s confidential memoir on the English operations in Australia and the Pacific – his famous ‘spy report’ which Jean Fornasiero and I later published in English translation (French Designs on Colonial New South Wales) – we were regularly held up by a word or a phrase, either because the ink on the reverse side of the page had leaked through, making the writing almost illegible, or because Péron’s handwriting itself was just so difficult to read.
By way of illustration, in this image, the words ‘Ces hommes’ (‘These men’) are followed by what seems at first blush to be a group of three words, the second of which looks like ‘si’ (‘so’), after which you might expect an adjective.
But in that case what could the first of these words be, and how would it work syntactically in French? And what could the presumed adjective be (it looks suspiciously like ‘aptes’ = ‘apt’)? The answer, which required a night’s sleep and refreshed eyes to reveal, is that this is in fact one word: ‘enthousiastes’ (enthusiastic). For archival research, sometimes it’s necessary to leave the battlefield and reset the senses in order to win the war!
Test yourself!
Here’s a challenge, for anyone who knows a bit of French and wants to test their reading skills: can you decipher the two words in the middle of this image (below, right-hand column of text, above the piece of paper)? For context, here is the sentence minus those two words: ‘Au reste la nature du païs habité par les Anglais et leur ignorance sur cet article se sont opposés jusqu’à ce jour aux recherches *** *** que le sol peut contenir’. (‘Moreover, the nature of the terrain inhabited by the English and their lack of knowledge on this subject have until now prevented explorations *** *** that might be contained in the soil’.) Find the answer at the bottom of this post.
‘Roaming Freely Throughout the Universe’: Nicolas Baudin’s voyage to Australia and the pursuit of science
The Age of Exploration not only paved the way for European conquest and trade, it also widened the horizons of science. By the second half of the eighteenth century, the link between travel and science was so widely acknowledged that it had become routine practice to include naturalists in all major voyages of exploration.
Nicolas Baudin’s voyage of discovery to Australia (1800–1804), which included both specialist field collectors and aspiring young savants, proved pivotal. Drawing on a range of archival sources, the essays presented here offer fresh perspectives on Baudin’s scientific voyagers, their work and its legacy. What emerges is a deeper appreciation of the Baudin expedition’s contribution to the pursuit of science, and of those who pursued it.