Part 11 (2/2)
The Westernport scheme.
Lord John Russell's claim of ”the Whole” of Australia for the British.
The designs of Napoleon III.
Australia the nursling of sea power.
The question of paramount interest connected with the events considered in the foregoing pages is whether or not the expedition of 1800 to 1804 had a political purpose. It is hoped that the examination to which the facts have been subjected has been sufficient to show that it had not. It was promoted by an academic organisation of learned men for scientific objects; it was not an isolated effort, but one of a series made by the French, which had their counterpart in several expeditions despatched by the British, for the collection of data and the solution of problems of importance to science; its equipment and personnel showed it to be what it professed to be; and the work it did, open to serious criticism as it is in several aspects, indicated that purposes within the scope of the Inst.i.tute of France, and not those with which diplomacy and politics were concerned, were kept in view throughout. So much, it is claimed, has been demonstrated. But the whole case is not exhausted in what has been written; and in this final chapter will be briefly set forth a sequence of reasons which go to show that Bonaparte in 1800 had no thought of founding a new fatherland for the French in Australasia, or of establis.h.i.+ng upon the great southern continent a rival settlement to that of the British at Port Jackson.
It may legitimately be suggested that though all the French expeditions enumerated in a previous chapter, including Baudin's, were promoted for purposes of discovery, the rulers of France were not without hope that profit would spring from them in the shape of rich territories or fields for French exploitation. It is, indeed, extremely likely that such was the case. Governments, being political organisations, are swayed chiefly by political considerations, or at any rate are largely affected by them.
When Prince Henry the Navigator fitted out the caravels that crept timidly down the west coast of Africa, penetrating farther and farther into the unknown, until a new ocean and new realms at length opened upon the view he was inspired by the ideal of spreading the Christian religion and of gaining knowledge about the shape of the world for its own sake; but he was none the less desirous of securing augmented wealth and dominion for Portugal.* (* See Beazley, Henry the Navigator pages 139 to 141; and E.J. Payne, in Cambridge Modern History 1 10 to 15.) It was not solely for faith and science that he:
”Heaven inspired, To love of useful glory roused mankind And in unbounded commerce mixed the world.”
Isabella of Castile did not finance Columbus purely for the glory of discovery. Luis de Santangel and Alonso de Quintanilla, who prevailed upon her to befriend the daring Genoese, not only used the argument that the voyage would present an opportunity of ”spreading her holy religion,”
but also that it would ”replenish her treasury chests.”* (* Justin Winsor, Christopher Columbus page 178.) It is as natural for the statesman to hope for political advantage as for the man of science to look for scientific rewards, the geographer for geographical results, the merchant for extended scope for commerce, from any enterprise of the kind in which the State concerns itself. It would have been a perfectly proper aspiration on the part of French statesmen to seek for opportunities of development in a region as yet scarcely touched by European energy. But there is no more reason for attributing this motive to Bonaparte in 1800, than to the Ministers of Louis XV and Louis XVI, or to the Government of France during the Revolution: and that is the point.
It is to misinterpret the character of the Napoleon Bonaparte who ruled the Republic in the early period of the Consulate, to suppose him incapable of wis.h.i.+ng to promote research for its own sake. He desired the glory of his era to depend upon other achievements than those of war. ”My intention certainly is,” he said to Thibaudeau, ”to multiply the works of peace. It may be that in the future I shall be better known by them than by my victories.” The Memoires of the shrewd observer to whom the words were uttered, give us perhaps a more intimate acquaintance with the Consular Bonaparte than does any other single book; and it is impossible to study them without deriving the impression that he was at this time far more than a great soldier. He was, faults notwithstanding, a very n.o.ble and high-minded man. It was easy for the savants of the Inst.i.tute to show him what a fine field for enterprise there was in the South Seas; and though there is not a shred of evidence to indicate that, in acquiescing in the proposition, he yielded to any other impulse than that of securing for France the glory of discovery, there may yet have been at the back of his mind, so to speak, the idea that if good fortune attended the effort, the French nation might profit otherwise than in repute. To say so much, however, is not to admit that there is any justification for thinking that the acquisition of dominion furnished a direct motive for the expedition. If Bonaparte entertained such a notion he kept it to himself. There is not a trace of it in his correspondence, or in the memoirs of those who were intimate with him at this period. One cannot say what thoughts took shape at the back of a mind like Napoleon's, nor how far he was looking ahead in anything that he did. One can only judge from the evidence available. On some of Flinders' charts there are dotted lines to indicate coasts which he had not been able to explore fully. He would not set down as a statement of fact what he had not verified.
History, too, has its dotted lines, where supposition fills up gaps for which we have no certain information. There is no harm in them; there is some advantage. But we had better take care that they remain dotted lines until we can ink them over with certainty, and not mistake a possibly wrong guess for a fact.
It is also necessary to distinguish between the exalted motives of which we may think the First Consul capable in 1800, and for a year or two after, and the use he would have made five, eight, or ten years later of any opportunities of damaging the possessions and the prestige of Great Britain. In the full tide of his pa.s.sionate hatred against the nation that mocked and blocked and defied him at every turn of his foreign policy, he would unquestionably have been delighted to seize any opportunity of striking a blow at British power anywhere. He kept Decaen at Mauritius in the hope that events might favour an attempt on India. He would have used discoveries made in Australasia, as he would have used Fulton's steamboat in 1807, to injure his enemy, could he have done so effectually. But to do that involved the possession of great naval strength, and the services of an admiral fit to meet upon the high seas that slim, one-armed, one-eyed man whose energy and genius were equal to a fleet of frigates to the dogged nation whose hero he was; and in both these requirements the Emperor was deficient.
Indeed, we can scarcely realise how much Australia owes to Britain's overwhelming strength upon the blue water at the beginning of the nineteenth century. But for that, not only France but other European powers would surely have claimed the right to establish themselves upon the continent. The proportion of it which the English occupied at the time was proportionately no more than a fly-speck upon a window pane. She could not colonise the whole of it, and the small portion that she was using was a mere convict settlement. Almost any other place would have done equally well for such a purpose. It needed some tremendous exertion of strength to enable her to maintain exclusive possession of a whole continent, such as Spain had vainly professed regarding America in the sixteenth century. From the point of view of Australian ”unity, peace, and concord,” the Napoleonic wars were an immense blessing, however great an infliction they may have been to old Europe. In an age of European tranquillity, it is pretty certain that foreign colonisation in Australia would not have been resisted. Great Britain would not have risked a war with a friendly power concerning a very distant land, the value and potentialities of which were far from being immediately obvious. The Englishman, however, is tremendously a.s.sertive when threatened. He will fight to the last gasp to keep what he really does not want very much, if only he supposes that his enemy wishes to take a bit of it. It was in that spirit of pugnacity that he stretched a large muscular hand over the whole map of Australia, and defied his foes to touch it. Before the great struggle it would have been quite possible to think of colonising schemes in the southern hemisphere without seriously contemplating the danger of collision with the British. But the end of the Napoleonic wars left the power and prestige of Great Britain upon the sea unchallengeable, and her possessions out of Europe were placed beyond a.s.sail. This position was fairly established before Napoleon could have made any serious attempt to annoy or injure the English settlement in Australia. Traced back to decisive causes, the owners.h.i.+p of Australia was determined on October 21, 1805, when the planks of the Victory were reddened with the life-blood of Nelson.
The remaining points to be considered are the following.
The Treaty of Amiens was negotiated and signed in 1801 and 1802, while Baudin's expedition was at sea. Had Napoleon desired to secure a slice of Australia for the French, here was his opportunity to proclaim what he wanted. Had he done so, we can have no reasonable doubt that he would have found the British Government compliant. His Majesty's Ministers were in a concessionary mood. By that treaty Great Britain surrendered all her maritime conquests of recent wars, except Trinidad and Ceylon. She gave up the Cape, Demerara, Berbice, Essequibo, Surinam, Martinique, Guadeloupe, Minorca, and Malta.* (* Cambridge Modern History 9 75 et seq; Brodrick and Fotheringham, Political History of England 11 9 et seq.) She was eagerly desirous for peace. Bread was dear, and England seethed with discontent. Napoleon was fully aware that he was in a position to force concessions. King George's advisers were limp. ”England,” wrote Thibaudeau, who knew his master's mind, ”was driven by sheer necessity to make peace; not so Bonaparte, whose reasons were founded on the desire of the French nation for peace, the fact that the terms of the treaty were glorious for France, and the recognition by his bitterest enemy of the position which the nation had bestowed upon him.”* (* Fortescue's English edition page 18.) The value of Australia at this time was scarcely perceived by Great Britain at all. Sydney was just a tip for human refuse, and a cause of expense, not of profit or advantage. The only influential man in England who believed in a future for the country was Sir Joseph Banks; and he, in 1799, had written to Governor Hunter: ”The situation of Europe is at present so critical, and His Majesty's Ministers so fully employed in business of the highest importance, that it is scarce possible to gain a moment's audience on any subject but those which stand foremost in their minds, and colonies of all kinds, you may be a.s.sured, are now put in the background...Your colony is a most valuable appendage to Great Britain, and I flatter myself we shall, before it is long, see her Ministers made sensible of its real value.”*
(* Banks to Hunter, February 1, 1799. Historical Records of New South Wales 3 532.) If that was the feeling in 1799, we can imagine how a claim to the right to found a French settlement in Australia during the nerveless regime of Addington would have been received. It would not have delayed the signing of the Treaty of Amiens by one hour. England at that time would not have risked a frigate or spent an ounce of powder on resisting such a demand. But the subject does not appear to have been even mentioned during the negotiations.
Nor was it mentioned by Napoleon during the years of his captivity at St.
Helena. He talked about his projects, his failures, his successes, with O'Meara, Montholon, Las Cases, Admiral Malcolm, Antommarchi, Gourgaud, and others. Australia and the Baudin expedition were never discussed, though Surgeon O'Meara knew all about Flinders' imprisonment, and mentioned it incidentally in a footnote to ill.u.s.trate the hards.h.i.+ps brought upon innocent non-belligerents during the Napoleonic wars.
Indeed, an interesting pa.s.sage in O'Meara's Napoleon at Saint Helena* (*
Edition of 1888, 2 129.) causes a doubt as to whether Napoleon had a clear recollection of the Flinders case at all. It is true that General Decaen's aide-de-camp had mentioned it to him in 1804, and that Banks had written to him on the subject; but he had many larger matters to occupy him, and possibly gave no more than pa.s.sing thought to it. O'Meara records that among Napoleon's visitors at the rock was an Englishman, Mr.
Manning, who was travelling in France for the benefit of his health in 1805. He had been arrested, but on writing to Napoleon stating his case, was released. He mentioned the incident in the course of the conversation, and expressed his grat.i.tude. ”What protection had you?”
asked Napoleon. ”Had you a letter from Sir Joseph Banks to me?” Manning replied that he had no letter from any one, but that Napoleon had ordered his release without the intervention of any influential person. The occurrence of Banks's name to Napoleon's memory in connection with an application for the release of a traveller may indicate that a reminiscence of the Flinders case lingered in the mind of the ill.u.s.trious exile. So much cannot, however, be stated positively, because Flinders was not the only prisoner in behalf of whom the President of the Royal Society had interested himself, though his was the only case which attracted a very large amount of public attention. But what is chiefly significant is the absence of any reference to Australia and Baudin's expedition in the St. Helena conversations, in which the whole field of Napoleonic policy was traversed with amplitude.
Had the selection of a site for settlement, rather than research, been intended, it seems most likely that Napoleon, with his trained eye for strategic advantages, would have directed particular if not exclusive attention to be paid to the north coast of Australia. If he had taken the map in hand and studied it with a view to obtaining a favourable position, he would probably have put his finger upon the part of the coast where Port Darwin is situated, and would have said, ”Search carefully just there: see if a harbour can be discovered which may be used as a base.” The coast was entirely unoccupied; the French might have established themselves securely before the British knew what they had done; and had they found and fortified Port Darwin, they would have captured the third point of a triangle--the other two being Mauritius and Pondicherry--which might have made them very powerful in the Indian Ocean. And that is precisely what the East India Company's directors feared that Napoleon intended. One of them, the Hon. C.F. Greville, wrote to Brown, the naturalist of the Investigator, ”I hope the French s.h.i.+ps of discovery will not station themselves on the north coast of New Holland”;* (* January 4, 1802. Historical Records of New South Wales 4 677.) and the Company, recognising their own interest in the matter, voted six hundred pounds as a present to the captain, staff, and crew of the Investigator before she sailed from England. But instead of what was feared, the French s.h.i.+ps devoted princ.i.p.al attention to the south, where there was original geographical work to do--a natural course, their object being discovery, but not what might have been expected had their real design been acquisition. Peron censured Baudin because he examined part of the west coast before proceeding to the unknown south; and when at length Le Geographe did sail north, the work done there was very perfunctory. Baudin himself was no fighting man; nor was there with the expedition a military engineer or any officer capable of reporting upon strategic situations, or competent to advise as to the establishment of a fort or a colony. Captain Hamelin and Lieutenant Henri de Freycinet afterwards saw active service with the Navy, but the staff knew more about flowers, beetles, b.u.t.terflies, and rocks than about fortifications and colonisation.
In recent years research has concentrated powerful rays of light on the intricacies of Napoleonic policy. Archives have been thrown open, ransacked, catalogued and codified. Memoirs by the score, letters by the hundred, have been published. Doc.u.ments by the thousand have been studied. A battalion of eager students have handled this vast ma.s.s of material. The piercing minds of eminent scholars have drilled into it to elucidate problems incidental to Napoleon's era. But nothing has been brought to light which indicates that Australia was within the radius of his designs.
The idea that the publication of the Terre Napoleon maps, with their unfounded pretensions to discoveries, was a move on Napoleon's part towards a.s.serting a claim upon territory in Australia, is surely untenable by any one with any appreciation of the irony of circ.u.mstances.
No man in history had a deeper realisation of the dynamics of empire than Napoleon had. A nation, as he well knew, holds its possessions by the power behind its grasp. If he had wanted a slice of Australia, and had been able to take and hold it, of what political use to him would have been a few maps, even with an eagle's picture on one of them? When his unconquerable legions brought Italy under his sway, absorbed the Low Countries, and established his dominion on the Rhine, the Elbe, and the Danube, he based no claims on maps and doc.u.ments. He took because he could. An empire is not like a piece of suburban property, based on t.i.tle-deeds drawn by a family solicitor. Its validity is founded on forces--the forces of s.h.i.+ps, armies, manhood, treaties, funds, national goodwill, sound government, commercial enterprise, all the forces that make for solidity, resistance, permanence. Freycinet's maps would have been of no more use to Napoleon in getting a footing in Australia than a postage stamp would be in s.h.i.+fting one of the pyramids. He was capable of many mean things, but we gravely undervalue his capacity for seeing to the heart of a problem if we suppose him both mean and silly enough to conspire to cheat Matthew Flinders out of his well and hardly won honours, on the supposition that the maps would help him to a.s.sert a claim upon Australia. He could have made good no such claim in the teeth of British opposition without sea power; and that he had not.
The consequences of the suspicion that Napoleon intended to seize a site in Australia, were, however, quite as important as if he had formally announced his intention of doing so. What men believe to be true, not what is true, determines their action; and there was quite enough in the circ.u.mstances that occurred to make Governor King and his superiors in England resolve upon decisive action. King having communicated his beliefs to Ministers, Lord Hobart, Secretary of State for War and the Colonies, in June 1803, wrote a despatch in which he authorised the colonisation of Van Diemen's Land by the removal of part of the establishment at Norfolk Island to Port Dalrymple--”the advantageous position of which, upon the southern coast of Van Diemen's Land, and near the entrance of Ba.s.s Straits, renders it, in a political view, particularly necessary that a settlement should be formed there.”* (* See Backhouse Walker, Early Tasmania page 22.) It will be observed that the Secretary of State's geographical knowledge of the countries under his regime was quite remarkable. A man who should describe Glasgow as being on the southern coast of England, near the eastern entrance of the Channel, would be just about as near the truth as Lord Hobart managed to get.* (* Froude's amusing story of Lord Palmerston, when, on forming a Ministry, he thought he would have to take the Secretarys.h.i.+p of State for the Colonies himself, comes to mind. He said to Sir Arthur Helps, ”Come upstairs with me, Helps; we will look at the maps, and you shall show me where these places are.” Froude's Oceana page 12.)
King moved immediately. He despatched the Lady Nelson and the Albion on August 31 to establish a settlement on the river Derwent, with Lieutenant John Bowen in charge; and in September 1803 the first British colony in Tasmania was planted. It had a variety of adverse experiences before at length the beautiful site of the city of Hobart, at the foot of Mount Wellington, was determined upon; but here, at all events, was a beginning, and the tale from that time forward has been one of steady progress.
As soon as the imagined threat of French invasion lost its impulsion, the colonising energy of the governing authorities subsided. The Tasmanian settlement remained and grew, but Trafalgar removed all fear of foreign interference. Hence it was that nearly forty years elapsed before any real effort was made to settle the lands within Port Phillip. Then the first energies that were devoted towards creating the great state of Victoria were not directed by the Government, which no longer had any political motive for forcing matters, but were made by enterprising stock-owners searching for pastures. It was not till 1835 that John Batman pushed up the river Yarra, found the site of the present city of Melbourne, and said, ”This will be the place for a village!” Trafalgar and the security which it gave to British possessions oversea made all the difference between the early occupation of Tasmania for fear the French should take it, and the leisurely and non-official settlement of the Port Phillip district, when it was quite certain that no foreign power could set a foot upon it without British permission.
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