Constructing the "perfect" voyage: Nicolas Baudin at Port Jackson, 1802.

Abstract

In 1802, a French scientific expedition under the command of Nicolas Baudin made an uscheduled visit to the British colony at Port Jackson, New South Wales. It was a pivotal episode in the course of Baudin's Australian voyage. The commander had already fulfilled most of his instructions, though imperfectly, and only the north coast of New Holland remained unexamined. He and his men stayed at anchor in Port Jackson for over five months. When they set sail once more, they embarked on what historians agree was a new phase of the expedition. Baudin and his men did not proceed directly to the north coast, but returned to the southern and western coasts, where they perfected and augmented the work in geography and natural history that they had carried out earlier. This thesis examines what occurred during the sojourn at Port Jackson, as well as the circumstances that led up to it, in order to determine in precise terms why and how this episode came to be a turning point in Baudin's voyage. It asks: was the second campaign just an extension of the first or was it an opportunity for Baudin to redefine the voyage? The Port Jackson sojourn thus serves as a site of interrogation regarding the nature of Nicolas Baudin's leadership and the construction, on British colonial territory, of a French scientific voyage. However, the opportunity to gain real insight into the sojourn of the voyagers at Port Jackson has been limited by a perceived scarcity of resources. The fact that Baudin's journal falls silent here has meant that there is no one privileged source of information on the commander's role or on the day-to-day activities of the expeditioners, and that scholars examining this episode have tended to focus on the details of the larger picture rather than on the larger picture itself. This is not to say that the presence of the Baudin expedition in Port Jackson has left no material traces. In fact, there is a diverse range of archival records – expense accounts, correspondence, inventories of specimens, journals kept by officers and savants and the logbooks of the Géographe – from which the day-to-day life of the commander and his men at Port Jackson can be reconstructed. Commencing with an analysis of the events that led up to the sojourn and influenced Baudin's approach to it, this study examines the relationships that Baudin built in the colony, his manner of command aboard the Géographe and the scientific results of the stay. After then analysing the way in which Baudin managed the sojourn and planned the second campaign, we conclude that Baudin did not simply seek to satisfy the expectations of his superiors but in fact he seized this opportunity to create the “perfect” scientific voyage.