Deutscher and Hackett

“C. Baudin showd us coloured figures of the natives of Van Diemens land... There were figures of their huts, of their tombs, & of their canoes... All of the natives were painted with woolly hair & C. Baudin on being questiond on this head assurd us that it was really so. The hair of all the figures was of an ochry red in all probability from the ochre with which they colour their whole bodies…”

Robert Brown, meeting Baudin at Encounter Bay

HISTORY OF THE VOYAGE

For many years overshadowed by his English contemporary and direct rival, Matthew Flinders, recent years have seen a renewed interest in the expedition of Nicolas Baudin, with a deeper understanding of the real contributions the voyage made, especially to science and hydrography.

Baudin was born in France in 1754. He had no conspicuous aristocratic patrons, as was imperative in the French Navy of the era, so as a young man he served in the merchant navy and the French East India Company, only joining the Navy proper at the time of the American War of Independence, where he saw action in the Caribbean. After the war Baudin and his brother Alexandre were hired by merchants in Nantes, capitalising on their experience in the Atlantic, to take two trading ships to New Orleans. Testament to the burgeoning internationalism of the time, while in New Orleans they were further commissioned to take a speculative cargo to Mauritius: en route Baudin called at Haiti and the Cape of Good Hope, at the latter port taking up an Austrian botanist called Franz Boos. The two men got along well, and Boos decided to hire Baudin to help ferry him and his specimens to Trieste.

This chance meeting with Boos changed Baudin’s life forever, because it introduced him to the Viennese imperial court, which at the time was investigating opportunities in China and the southern hemisphere. Over the next few years Baudin became one of their most respected ship’s captains, journeying to Canton and again to Mauritius, where he was dogged by bad luck, but went on to add to his far-reaching credentials by captaining a vessel to the Philippines and on to Trinidad.

It was his reputation as an almost impossibly well-travelled seaman with a knack for preserving delicate botanical specimens on long sea voyages that led, in turn, to him being appointed to carry two botanists, Franz Bredemeyer and Joseph van de Schot, to the Indian Ocean and China. On his ship the Jardinière Baudin reached the Indian Ocean in early 1793, and only cyclonic seas in the eastern Indian Ocean prevented him from making what would have been his first Australian landfall, forcing him to run to India for repairs. The Jardinière went on to make an important voyage along the Persian and African coasts before ultimately running aground and wrecking in Table Bay at the Cape of Good Hope. The crates of specimens were saved, and Baudin managed to have them conveyed to Trinidad.

Baudin made his way back to France where he visited one of the great scientists of the era, Antoine de Jussieu, suggesting a new and even grander French-sponsored voyage to the Caribbean, and was duly appointed to the Belle Angélique, for a scientific expedition being undertaken by four prominent botanists, René Maugé, Anselme Riedlé, Stanislas Levaillan and André Pierre Ledru. The voyage, although not without moments of alarm, was a dramatic success, and Baudin returned at the ideal moment, as Napoléon was celebrating his victories in Italy. Baudin seized his opportunity, and with the blessing of Napoléon was soon formally appointed as commander of a new voyage to investigate the still largely uncharted western and southern coasts of New Holland and particularly to follow up on earlier French work in Tasmania. He would be able, Baudin believed, to complete the work left unfinished by the mysterious loss of the two ships of La Pérouse and the disarray left in the wake of the partisan collapse of the expedition of D’Entrecasteaux.

BAUDIN SAILS FOR AUSTRALIA

Richly furnished with equipment and boasting an impressive array of French artists and savants on board, Baudin’s two ships, the Géographe and the Naturaliste, left Le Havre on 19 October 1800. His confidence was at its highest, not least because he had coaxed three of his great friends and confidants from the Belle Angélique voyage, Maugé, Riedlé and Levaillan to join him. None of the four men would survive the voyage.

The two ships made a brief stop in Tenerife and sighted the Cape of Good Hope but did not land, Baudin preferring to press on to the French colony of Mauritius, finally anchoring at the main harbour of Port Louis after a long six months. Armed with letters of recommendation from the highest authorities in France, Baudin had every reason to expect he would be readily accommodated, but everything quickly unravelled. The Governor of the island was of a martial streak and not much minded to support him; many of the merchants took him in the greatest personal dislike; a large cohort of his own scientists took their shipboard quarrels to the next stage and left the expedition; sailors deserted en bloc; his repeated requests to be provisioned expediently were ignored; and Baudin began to resent most of his junior officers. Coming back on board one afternoon, exasperated by his latest refusals, Baudin was dismayed to read a mocking placard that had been posted up on a few street corners, “voyage de découvertes manqué” [failed voyage of discovery].What Frank Horner has neatly described as the near “inexplicable hostility” of the entire island had taken hold.

Baudin put a brave face on it, rejigged his crews, congratulated himself on being rid of what he regarded as more than one armchair scientist or turbulent officer, and eventually set sail for New Holland, sighting Cape Leeuwin on 27 May and anchoring in Géographe Bay three days later. It was an exciting time, but it was also immediately clear that corralling his young officers and savants was not going to be a sinecure, and he was aghast at the loss of one of his more promising sailors drowned (Thomas Vasse, after whom the river is now named), as well as what he regarded as the careless loss of his longboat in heavy swell.

On 11 June the Géographe and the Naturaliste separated in heavy weather and quite inexplicably Baudin made no attempt to rejoin his companion vessel at either of the agreed rendezvous, meaning that it fell to officers on the smaller Naturaliste to make the only extensive survey of both Rottnest Island and the Swan River, while Baudin rushed on to Shark Bay arriving on 27 June, and leaving long before his companion arrived.

The latter vessel stayed on in Shark Bay to make an extensive survey – including the discovery of the Vlamingh plate – while Baudin and the Géographe worked along the difficult coast past the North West Cape. The two ships ultimately arrived in Timor in August and September, where Baudin’s awful luck became something more tragic. The decimation of his crew, the illnesses that plagued the voyage, and most especially the deaths of his three great confreres, all sheeted back to their time trying to refit in Timor (one is reminded of Cook’s Endeavour voyage, although his losses all occurred at the very end of the voyage).

In November they sailed south again, Baudin making the decision to head immediately for Tasmania, making the D’Entrecasteaux Channel in early January 1802. The two vessels began a close survey of the east coast, most particularly D’Entrecasteaux Channel, Bruny Island and Maria Island, when the young voyage artist Petit made his suite of astonishing portraits of the men and women of the region. As they continued north the two ships again became separated. Hamelin on the Naturaliste crossed Bass Strait and made a survey of Western Port before running for Port Jackson. Meanwhile Baudin began his survey of what his cartographers would unhelpfully christen “Terre Napoléon”, meeting Matthew Flinders at Encounter Bay in April. Worn out, Baudin turned for Sydney, but chose again to round the southern tip of Tasmania, meaning that he did not arrive off Port Jackson until 17 June, his crew badly hit by dysentery and scurvy.

By the time they anchored Hamelin had actually already gone to sea with a hare-brained scheme to head back to Mauritius despite not really having enough provisions, but relentless westerlies saw him back in Sydney soon after, with the result that the two ships stayed in Sydney until November. Warmly and hospitably entertained by Governor King, the French spent their time recuperating and making sense of their collections, although their time ashore was once again marred by internal conflicts between Baudin and his officers, even if many of the details remain rather murky given how few of them kept up their journals during this period: quite uncharacteristically, for example, Baudin appears to have kept no journal or log of any kind during his time in Sydney.

THE JOURNEY HOME

As Horner and Starbuck have both since described, Baudin clearly used his time in Sydney to completely restructure the expedition, in no small part because his friendship with King meant that he had more support from the harbour authorities than he had enjoyed since leaving Le Havre. Most importantly, he decided that Hamelin and the Naturaliste would return directly to France taking the first natural history collections.

At the same time, Baudin purchased a small 29-foot schooner which he named the Casuarina, placing Louis de Freycinet in charge, and planning to use it for the difficult in shore surveys. Louis’ appointment should be understood as an early notice of his skills in charting (and, less charitably, perhaps Baudin’s way of making sure that he did not have to keep butting heads with the Freycinet brothers as a duo). The three vessels left Sydney together in November, but at King Island off the south coast Baudin farewelled the Naturaliste, and Hamelin reached Le Havre via Mauritius on 7 June 1803.

Picking their way slowly along the southern coast of Australia the Géographe and the Casuarina made close surveys of King Island, Kangaroo Island and the Gulf of St Vincent (“Golfe Joséphine”), before continuing to King George’s Sound in Western Australia, whence they returned to Shark Bay and the northwest before finally reaching Timor on 7 May 1803. Baudin’s health was parlous but he still demanded they return for a third time to the northwest coast of Australia, though it was basically fruitless. His own condition worsened and with more losses from among his men, he finally broke off the survey in early July and headed for Mauritius, the slower Casuarina getting dropped en route. The two ships straggled into Mauritus in mid-August, where Baudin died on 16 September 1803. After some more wrangling on board command was given to the voyage veteran Pierre-Bernard Milius, who had been allowed to leave the Naturaliste in Port Jackson, had sailed north to Canton and happened to be in Port Louis when Baudin arrived. The decision was made to abandon the Casuarina, and the remaining crew transferred to the Géographe, which returned home on 25 March 1804, almost three-and-a-half years after they had left.

BAUDIN’S LEGACY

Much had changed in the long years they had been away, and although the magnificent zoological and botanical collections they had assembled were regarded with awe by the scientists in Paris and Empress Joséphine Bonaparte at the Château de Malmaison, enthusiasm for Baudin was waning. This happened most particularly after the first published account of the expedition, Bory de Saint-Vincent’s hatchet-job of 1804.

Given Bory had jumped ship in Mauritius in 1801 and was clearly keen to protect his own reputation from the imputation of having deserted the cause, his less-than-subtle barbs might well have been taken with a grain of salt, but with Baudin and his chief supporters all dead, and many of his greatest detractors, Péron and Lesueur among them, having the ear of government, Baudin’s reputation continued to sink. In the end, between the work of Bory, the contributions to the official account of Péron, Lesueur and the two Freycinets, and the later publication of another artist associated with the voyage, and another of those who left in Mauritius, Jacques-Gérard Milbert, it has a flavour of murder on the Orient Express: while it may not be certain who delivered the killer blow, everyone seems to have wielded a knife.

The real tragedy was more complex, however. The great artist and portraitist Petit died unexpectedly only some six months after his return to Paris, and before he had an opportunity to put his papers into any real order. If he kept a journal, and presumably he had done so, it may have been lost at this time: certainly it has never been discovered. The loss of his guiding hand was compounded by bureaucratic malaise, and only after two years of urgent petitioning of Joséphine herself was Péron formally appointed as the chronicler of the voyage, quickly enlisting the help of Lesueur and Louis de Freycinet. The choice of Péron was a strange one. He was young, had no Naval rank to speak of, and no friends at the Ministry of the Marine. Although there is much to recommend the work he first began publishing in 1807, there is no hiding the vitriol with which he attacks the “Commandant” (Baudin remains unnamed throughout). Such attacks may not have been unexpected, but his decision to basically disregard Baudin’s journal makes what Péron did publish unusually personal, as much a lively account of his adventures as a genuine record of the voyage and its ambitions.

To be fair, Péron’s great achievement was to have been a pair of supplementary volumes which, he had hoped, would record both the natural history and the ethnography of the voyage. In this he was planning to explicitly rely on the remarkable talents of his great friend Lesueur, who had produced an awe-inspiring catalogue of drawings and notes on the huge zoological collections made with Baudin, as well as on his own background in the new discipline of anthropology.

THE STUDY OF HUMANITY

All of this wrangling is tremendously significant in terms of the present works of art, because at this point the entire collection was in the private possession of Péron, who had inherited the main group of Petit’s work and was planning to use it as the background for his own conclusions about the peoples of Timor, mainland Australia, Tasmania and Africa. In Péron’s imagination, this section was going to revolutionise the study of humanity.

Much like Cook before him, who had been explicitly briefed on the subject of understanding and respecting the native peoples with whom he came into contact, one of the central planks of Baudin’s instructions had derived from the Société des Observateurs de l’Homme, a group which had been founded only in 1799 to study the “science of man, in his physical, moral and intellectual existence”. It was the Society who popularised the newly coined term “anthropology” to describe the task they were undertaking. Baudin was personally a member, as were his secondin-command Hamelin, as well as Baudin’s old friends Maugé and Riedlé, but the Society is more famous for the involvement of major figures such as Cuvier, Jussieu and Louis de Bougainville.

Passionately aware of the opportunities presented by voyages of exploration, and led by Baudin himself, the Society was asked to provide explicit terms of reference to guide the much hoped-for ethnographic observations in Australia. The expedition ended up being briefed by Baron Cuvier and the now lesser-known Baron Degérando, and Baudin’s artists understood that they were to make the most accurate possible studies of the peoples they met, not neglecting to seek out and keep human remains if at all possible (BAW, p. 37).

Nor was this simply academic: not only did Baudin take his membership in this group extremely seriously, it quite obviously informed all of his sometimes fraught interactions with native peoples, and his strict and much reiterated instructions about avoiding bloodshed. More than that, this anthropological study was directly responsible for Péron’s appointment, as he had personally lobbied the École de Medicine in Paris that the expedition must take along “young medical students, especially commissioned under the title of anthropologists” with a view to developing this work (BAW, p. 38).

In short, this is why so much time and effort were put into the magnificent suite of Aboriginal and Timorese (and, by the second edition, also African) portraits: they were the last tangible remnant of Péron’s planned volume on the peoples of the southern hemisphere. What makes them all the more remarkable is that the official text, and indeed most of the extant journals written by officers and savants on board, are at best sketchy on the whole subject of the Australian Aboriginal people. All of which is compounded by the fact that despite the great caches of Baudin-era manuscripts known in Paris and Le Havre, there is a real paucity regarding the central figures involved in the publication: no journal from Petit, Péron nor Lesueur has ever been found. Just what form this anthropological volume would have taken can now only be speculated about.

PUBLICATION

By 1808, Péron was too ill to continue his work in Paris, and two years later he died at his home town of Cérilly in central France, surrounded by his family and still accompanied by his faithful friend Lesueur. With his death, interest in Baudin’s voyage declined dramatically. Lesueur was still working away on the material but in increasing isolation, and by 1811 it was clear that to all intents and purposes the Paris authorities had washed their hands of both him and his collection of paintings and manuscripts. Freycinet, still obsessed with the cartography of the voyage, had some supporters, but even he was disappointed by the reaction to his great Australian atlas.

By 1815, the year of the Battle of Waterloo, the still reasonably close-knit group of Baudin veterans might have been forgiven for thinking that even the historical account of the voyage would never be completed, but in March Freycinet was given the belated go-ahead to finish the work, although it was clear by this time both of the planned scientific volumes were being abandoned. Lesueur, who saw this as a double rejection, soon left to pursue a career in the United States: by 1816, when the final volume eventually appealed, Freycinet must have felt like the last man standing.

Only as the Bourbon restoration under Louis XVIII started to take hold did Freycinet work out how to parlay his experience into a new command. The second son of aristocratic grandees in the Drôme in south-eastern France (his older brother Henri would become the Baron), he clearly was well-suited to negotiating life during the dismantling of Republican France, and was quickly sent out on his own command of the Uranie (1817-1820).

Freycinet would dedicate the rest of his life to publishing the results of the Uranie voyage, which ultimately appeared in four grand atlases accompanied by a shelf of text volumes, but before he began work on that publication he first sat down and reissued in a neat and coherent way all of the published results of the Baudin voyage, where possible adding many of the plates that had been finished as early as 1807 or 1808 but not included in the first edition. His second edition of the voyage appeared in 1824, and gives an admirable clarity to the achievements of the Baudin voyage, even if it made little attempt to rehabilitate the long-dead commander himself.

As the current group of works underscore (see especially lots 10 – 13), Freycinet also went one step further, reviewing and synthesising much of Petit’s oeuvre in order to create a series of idealised “scenes” of Aboriginal life (an interment, a ritual fight, the abduction of a woman by rival men, a familial group approaching a hearth fire and encampment). These scenes borrowed explicitly from the artistic heritage of Lesueur and especially Petit, but as almost completely imaginary scenes there is a tendency to dismiss them, not least because Freycinet failed to see all of them through to publication. But this misses the central point, that he identified both the quality but also simply how authentic and early Petit and Lesueur’s work was. Freycinet used these pictures and others from the same group, precisely because he felt they gave a better and more unfiltered perspective of Aboriginal life.

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When Baudin and Hamelin anchored their two ships in Géographe Bay in June 1801 expectations among the officers and savants were running high. It was the first major landfall they made in Australia, and after their recent difficult time in Port Louis, all were seeking to test their mettle.

We are so used to thinking of Western Australian voyages in terms of early Dutch exploration, or Dampier’s brief but influential stays in the late seventeenth century, that it is easy to forget just how early and significant for the region Baudin’s visit was: not only were his men going ashore a generation before any European settlement was attempted (Albany in 1826 and the Swan River in 1829), but it was also the best part of two decades before the English with Phillip Parker King made any concerted effort to map the region (Flinders, it should be remembered, wanted to explore the western and north-western coasts as well, but had his plans dashed by the rotten timbers of the Investigator, forcing him to abandon the project and run for Port Jackson from the Gulf of Carpentaria).

What this means is that Baudin’s ships, with all due respect to the polymath Dampier, included the first European scientists and the first professional European artists to explore in Western Australia, quite apart from being responsible for the first serious attempt to synthesise, correct and ultimately publish accurate charts of the whole coastline. In this context it should be remembered that they pre-empted the arrival of Flinders in the region by some six months (the Englishman first sighted Cape Leeuwin on 6 December 1802), the more significant point being how little time Flinders actually spent in the region apart from the detailed survey he made in King George’s Sound (modern Albany on the southern coast), when his artist William Westall produced his first views of Australia.

The significance of this is profound. Although preceded by the long history of Dutch exploration, those voyages, with the notable exception of the published account of Pelsaert, are notoriously under-illustrated (it is a bizarre truth that the most heavily-illustrated Dutch “voyage” to Western Australia before settlement is the completely fictional and quite bizarre account of Denis de Vairasse, first published in 1675).

What this means is that in terms of depicting the west, the canon of known images is extraordinarily small: the striking and sometimes gruesome plates in Pelsaert (not of course on the mainland); the handful of natural history illustrations and maps that appear as engravings in Dampier’s accounts (published 1697 and 1703); the single Black Swan engraved plate in the 1726-published voyage anthology of Valentijn; an engraved view and associated map of King George’s Sound found in Vancouver’s voyage account of 1795. And, of course, all these are published, engraved images, not original artwork. Only Lesueur’s direct contemporary, Flinders’ artist William Westall, would provide any useful comparison, and Westall of course never landed on the actual west coast of the continent.

View Lot 1

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By the time Baudin and Hamelin anchored their two ships in the south-east in January 1801 they had already endured the sort of hardships that might well have stopped less determined voyagers. Their passage around the Cape had been slow, the lack of support they received in French Mauritius could usefully be summarised as bureaucratic sabotage, their work on the western coast had not exactly been harmonious, and Timor had been close to disastrous. Of Baudin’s three biggest supporters on board, two, Riedlé and Levaillain, were already dead, and the third, Maugé, was crippled by the illness that would kill him a few weeks later.

At the same time, they were aware that their investigation of Tasmania was likely to be one of the most politically significant sojourns of the whole expedition because, as many of the main players understood, the possibility of further French incursions in the region hovered in the air (it was this concern that led Governor King to send a junior officer from HMS Buffalo, Acting-Lieutenant Robbins, to claim King Island in late 1802: if his very junior rank wasn’t a giveaway, the fact that he had to borrow gunpowder from a bemused Baudin may be a hint to how hastily this was done).

EARLIER VISITORS

The French lavished attention on the Tasmanian coast. As Péron himself commented, Baudin’s only great predecessors in south-east Tasmania were a select group: Tasman, Furneaux, Cook, Marion du Fresne, Cox (on the Mercury), Hunter (on the Sirius), Bligh (on both the Bounty and the Providence), D’Entrecasteaux and Flinders (in a small boat in 1798, not the Investigator). Notably, the most substantial explorations were those of the Frenchman D’Entrecasteaux.

Crucially, few of these earlier voyages made any artistic record of substance relating to the Tasmanians, in large part due to lack of opportunity. What this means is that the earliest western art relating to the people of Tasmania is that of John Webber, the official artist on Cook’s third voyage, which stopped at Adventure Bay on Bruny Island (at the time still thought part of the mainland) for some six days, 24-30 January 1777.

Of those on board the Resolution only Webber, now recognised as an artist of the first rank, executed any portraits, all of which of course are now held in institutions: three detailed portraits (two men, and a woman and child), and an interview between Cook and a large group of local men, many of whom seem to have been accurately figured. In the official account of 1784 two of the individual portraits were selected to be engraved for publication. Although the finished engravings have a hard and slightly distorted sheen, there is no questioning that Webber’s originals are extremely sensitive portrayals (see Joppien & Smith 3.10 – 3.13).

Besides Webber and Petit, the only other artist who is known to have taken portraits in Tasmania in the late eighteenth – early nineteenth century was Jean Piron, who sailed as artist on the D’Entrecasteaux expedition. The two French ships stayed in south-east Tasmania for a little over two months, principally anchored in Recherche Bay and Adventure Bay (21 April-28 May 1792; and returning 21 January-27 February 1793). Although D’Entrecasteaux took an active interest in native peoples and actively sought them out, only on the second visit in 1793 was any close contact made with the Tasmanians.

The fate of all of the collections made on the D’Entrecasteaux voyage is tied up with the collapse and dissolution of the voyage after the commander’s death at sea in 1793, and particularly during their fateful stop at Surabaya, when the crews were riven by political fighting (having only just found out about the formal proclamation of the French Republic).

Piron’s biography has only recently been unravelled by the historian Edward Duyker. All that survives of his work on the expedition is a collection of 27 very slight pencil sketches in the Musée de l’Homme (Paris), of which only a handful relate to Tasmania. Piron had handed his sketches to his confrère, the botanist La Billardière, who was given the job of preparing an account of the voyage. When published in 1798, it was full of portraits based on Piron’s sketches of the peoples of the wider Pacific, and it therefore particularly included full portraits of a man and a second of a woman and child from Tasmania (the latter oddly similar to the Webber engraving from Cook). It also included two remarkable larger views full of French officers and sailors playfully interacting with a cast of Tasmanians.

It is fair to say that Piron’s work is admired more for its importance than his skill as a portraitist: “unfortunately”, wrote Frank Horner, “the drawings of indigenous people resemble more closely the classical models on which he was trained than the living subjects he saw”, and were made even stiffer and more ‘classical’ by the Parisian engraver (Looking for La Pérouse, pp. 40 & 244).

That, in short, represents the total output by the time Baudin and his artists arrived: basically four important works by Webber, some sketches by Piron, and a small portfolio of not greatly admired engravings. Of the other artists associated with these voyages, chiefly William Bligh, William Anderson, George Tobin and William Ellis, no portraiture is extant (although Bligh did some natural history sketches and Ellis a fine view).

PETIT IN TASMANIA

By comparison with his predecessors, Petit’s work represents an enormous progression. As Rhys Jones has commented, “by far the most important anthropological work of the expedition was done on the shores of south-eastern Tasmania between 13 January and 27 February 1802” (BAW, p. 44).

The Petit drawings would be significant enough in terms of pre-English settlement portraiture, but they are made profound by the ensuing vacuum, because in the decades that followed nothing of significance was added. No-one has said it more clearly than Plomley, who lamented as long ago as 1966 that the European descriptions of the peoples of Tasmania peaked before settlement: “it can be said with some truth that these few travellers, whose observations cover only a few months of time, recorded as much or more of scientific value” as any of the settlers, with the single exception of George Augustus Robinson (‘French Manuscripts’, p. 1). Plomley’s conclusion is supported by that of Jones, who further comments that it was not until the arrival of the convict engraver and portraitist Thomas Bock that anything important was added to the portrait record (BAW, p. 52).

In terms of the important portrait record the series is thus: Webber (1777) – Piron (1792/1793) – Petit (1802) – Thomas Bock (after 1824, but his Aboriginal works more associated with the 1830s and later). The present collection thus radically expands the canon of pre-settlement Tasmanian portraiture, and is the most substantial and important such collection known to be still in private hands.

Equally important is the step forward it represents in terms of understanding Petit himself. The group includes five major portraits, comprising two of the sketch likenesses that Petit drew on the spot while ashore, and three of the major highly finished gouaches he completed on board the Géographe.

Each of the portraits is intimately connected to the collection of Petit’s works in Le Havre, as can be seen from a close study of the catalogue raisonné BAW. In the section on the ‘Aborigines of Van Diemen’s Land’ there are listed 42 different original works (and the five published engravings), but this number needs to be carefully unpacked. Of the 42, there are only eleven of the larger gouaches recorded, meaning that the present group (lots 6, 7 & 8) takes the total of known major studies of this kind to 14.

Le Havre also have a small number of the original sketches that Petit did when he was ashore, and which are similar in style and structure to lot 5b, in the present catalogue, a lively and beautifully captured likeness taken on the spot. The last of our group, no. [5], is something of an anomaly, showing Petit’s ability with pastel and crayon. Once again this would have been one of his portraits done in the moment, but is most unusual in that he has used coloured pastels, a medium he only rarely used in Tasmania (but employed to great effect in New South Wales). Such sketches, the original works in the series Petit produced, have an unfiltered immediacy and are now recognised as primary documentary evidence.

It would require a careful re-evaluation of the Le Havre collection to understand more fully how these first sketches relate to the known Petit oeuvre because not all of the pencil and/or pastel sketches are reproduced in BAW. We may not be able to make a definitive count of comparable works, but we would argue that Le Havre certainly holds four (that is, B:20008.3, 20012, 20020, 20023.1); and possibly, based on the catalogue notes alone, an additional five (B:20004.1, 20007.1. 20013.2, 20017, 20021.1). Somewhere between four and nine, that is, a small enough number to make every new addition of the greatest significance.

The absence of any journal by Petit himself means that it is not always possible to clearly understand how he worked, although Péron does mention him several times in the official account, especially in the Tasmanian visit, and gives a sense of how quickly and with what facility he was able to sketch, especially given how uneasy many of the Aboriginal people were about the French.

CAPTIONS AND LOCATIONS

One of the most significant aspects of the three gouaches in this catalogue is that unlike most of the similar works in Le Havre, each has a detailed caption which notes that the sitter is from the “Ile Van Diemen” at the D’Entrecasteaux Channel (testament to these having been done on the spot is that fact that on one this is given as “Canal de D’Entrecasteaux” (lot 6), and on the other two as the slight variant “Détroit de D’Entrecasteaux” (lots 7 & 8).

These captions are significant, and seem to provide evidence that all three portraits show individuals from an important but little-known interaction that took place on the mainland, at the upper reaches of North West Bay, where the two French ships anchored between 19 January and 5 February 1802. During the entire time that the French were in the south-east there were only five major sites of interactions with the Tasmanian Aboriginal people.

As can be seen from a glance at Freycinet’s map of the region, the French slowly made their way up D’Entrecasteaux Channel, Baudin and Hamelin sending out their boats to make detailed surveys of all the surrounding area, before coming out into open water to travel up to the inner route around Maria Island, and then pressing on making running surveys further along the coast. The focus was on the south-eastern corner, and included the following major interactions with the local Aboriginal tribes, chronologically:

A brief meeting at Cygnet Point;

- A series of meetings at Great Cove, on the southern tip of Bruny Island near the tiny Partridge Island, on one occasion some 55 or more men and women said to have been congregating around the French boats;

- Another series of meetings on the north-western reaches of Bruny Island (to the south-west of what the French called “Cap de la Sortie”), which very much took the attention of the two most important journal writers, Péron and Baudin;

- At the same time a fourth was taking place at North West Bay, around the small tent set up by the astronomer Bernier in order to make his observations, which was much visited by some 40 people who were camping on the mainland;

- And the last, slightly later, on Maria Island during the time when the French were anchored at Oyster Cove.

Of these five, while allowing for the fact that not all of the Le Havre collection has meaningful captions and the journal writers are frequently unhelpfully vague, it is only for the two landings on Bruny Island and the last on Maria Island that it is possible to identify known individuals from Petit sketches.

Of the other two main meetings, Petit could not have made any sketches at the first brief encounter at Cygnet Point, because although it formed an important set piece in the written account of Péron, there are enough details in the various journals to allow us to be quite confident that Petit did not go ashore on that occasion.

This leaves the visit to North West Bay. Although the ships had been anchored there for some days, the critical event seems to have been Baudin’s decision, on 24 January, to establish the observatory in tents on a tiny island in the mouth of the river at the head of North West Bay: this, we presume, is the tiny dot clearly seen on the French maps. What happened next tends to get buried in the better reported interactions that Baudin and Péron had on the northern stretch of Bruny Island in late January.

This is important because the two main officers overseeing the landfall on the mainland, Bernier and Saint-Cricq, did discuss the meetings they had in some revealing detail. For example, on 1 February Bernier had written to Hamelin to say that “he was visited yesterday by twelve natives with two pregnant among them. He recognised among them several whom he had seen on Bruny Island at Great Cove” (quoted in Plomley, The Baudin Expedition and the Tasmanian Aborigines, p. 124).

A few days later Bernier reported to Baudin that they had been much visited by a group of some 20 men and as many women and children on the “island where they were established, for one could wade out to it when the tide was low” (Baudin, Journal, 4 February 1802). They had been delighted, Bernier commented, by the goats and sheep, and had pinched three bottles (a particular prize of the Tasmanians).

All of this leads to the detailed captions supplied by Petit for all three of the gouaches in the present catalogue. On all three he clearly uses D’Entrecasteaux Channel (or Strait), as all of the French did, as a way of identifying the entire region including Bruny Island. The more interesting aspect of the captions is the phrase “Ile Van Diemen.” This is unusually specific, and we believe is meant to clearly differentiate from the more generic “Terre de Diemen”, the phrase used by the French to mean the entire region of Tasmania including all the small adjoining islands. The distinction would certainly make sense, and be an exceedingly simple way of keeping things straight.

That at least one French officer used the term in this basic way is revealed by the journals of Saint-Cricq, because he consciously refers to the mainland as the “Isle Diémen” as a way of differentiating it from the adjoining Bruny Island. Thus, on the 17 January, he writes “Je fûs à terre, sur l’Isle Diémen…”. Again, much more substantially, on 5 February he wrote a long note about being visited by a large group of Aboriginal people in which he speculates – quite wildly, it has to be admitted – about their religion, but in the process specifically used Isle Diémen as against Bruny Island:

“Pendant mon séjour à terre, nous reçumes la visite des mêmes naturels que nous avions vûs dans la grande anse… je ne sais pas si ces hommes traversaient le canal en pirogue (on en a vu quelques unes, mais de loin) ou à la nage, mais ce qui est bien certain, c’est que le lendemain que je les avais vûs à l’Isle Diemen, nos gens les rencontrérent sur l’Isle Bruny.”

There seems to be no reason not to take Petit’s captions at face value, and argue that the present group actually represent a real step forward in identifying and placing the three portraits as literally having been done on Van Diemen’s Land, at the D’Entrecasteaux Channel. This can only mean at North West Bay.

Where was Petit during this period? He definitely made trips ashore on Bruny Island on several occasions during this period, but as ever his precise movements are not completely clear and it is more than possible that he spent time with Bernier & Saint-Cricq rather than make the longer crossing to Bruny Island every time. As ever, he seems rather too junior to be noticed by most, and moves about largely unheralded.

View Lot 5
View Lot 6
View Lot 7
View Lot 8

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All of the individual items in the current catalogue were, up until their sale in Paris and subsequent export in late 2017, in the possession of Count Eric de Gourcuff & his wife Yolaine de Gourcuff (née Suyrot de Mazeau).

The Paris auctioneer, Baron-Ribeyre & Associés S.V.V., implied in their catalogue that the collection had an unbroken provenance stretching back to Admiral Louis Charles du Chaffault de Besné. This was conspicuously unhelpful on their part, chiefly because the Admiral died in the Terror in 1794, seven years before the first of the works here was even contemplated.

However, a simple and understandable error should not obscure the importance of how the family provenance informs and lends weight to the internal evidence of the pictures themselves.

It is possible to recreate the actual history of this group in quite startling detail, stretching all the way back to the private ownership of Petit himself between 1801 and 1804.

PETIT AND LESUEUR

Petit was very much the direct protégé of Baudin, and the commandant took the ethnographic material so seriously that he is known to have shown it to people like Flinders and Brown (see introduction).

After Baudin’s death in Port Louis in 1803 the main guardian of the collection therefore became the artist Petit himself, not least because there was a good deal of confusion about who actually owned artworks that did not form part of a formal journal (on the voyage itself, and for the first years after they returned, the implication is that such loose works were considered the property of the artist). It is known that after Petit’s death a major portfolio of his work passed into the possession of Péron and Lesueur, who continued to work on them under the artistic direction of Milbert during the production of the official voyage account. That the present suite of pictures formed part of that group is quite evident from the ways in which several have marks related to the studio and the engravers, as well as notes by Péron, and also by the addition of the three original works by Lesueur, all of which are also connected to the published views.

None of the material here was formally published in the 1807 atlas, despite its obvious quality, all of it clearly having been shelved along with all of the voyage manuscripts when Péron became ill and began to travel for his health (about 1808). Logically, especially given that the two men lived and worked in the same house in Paris, and that their house is known to have been filled with materials relating to the voyage publication, it must have been the case that after Péron’s death in late 1810 all of the pictures would have ended up in Lesueur’s sole possession.

As we discuss in more detail in Appendix I on the Le Havre collections, by 1811 there was a closing of doors, and Lesueur was increasingly aware that his services would no longer be required, but also that the Parisian museums had effectively made their selections from the material, and that no further use would be made of any of the pictures. He had become the de facto guardian of the visual record of the Baudin voyage.

Between 1811 and 1815 Lesueur continued to work on boutique and specialist publications connected to the discoveries made with Baudin, all exclusively relating to natural history, so presumably the group was now part of his private archive. The appointment of Freycinet to complete the official account may have infuriated Lesueur, but he did not forget the duty he owed the material nor did it mean that he completely relinquished his interest (we know this because all of the Le Havre Baudin voyage art has a direct provenance to his family, meaning that much of it was returned to him, although exactly when is not clear: possibly as late as Lesueur’s return to France in 1837, or even after Freycinet’s death in 1841; again, see Appendix I).

FREYCINET

It is not clear exactly when Lesueur handed over all of the visual records to Freycinet, but the implication is that he did so before he left for the United States in mid-1815. It is known that Lesueur had been in touch in February 1815, as Freycinet passed on Lesueur’s best-wishes in a letter to his brother Henri dated 22 February 1815 (Hordern House, Captain Louis de Freycinet, no. 33). It is also definitely recorded that in September 1816, Lesueur’s father, with whom Lesueur had been living in Paris before he left, sent a packet of material directly to Freycinet which is said to have included 19 sketches of natives by both Lesueur and Petit, along with some notebooks which listed vocabularies from Tasmania and New South Wales compiled by Péron (Horner, French Reconnaissance, p. 368).

This would make sense: Lesueur, on the brink of leaving France perhaps for good, hands over the material to the person he knows can be counted on to look after it.

The material is clearly with Freycinet through the 1820s as he worked on his publications, and the Freycinet connection, already water-tight, is then further strengthened by some of the other lots that were included in the Paris sale from the same collection: precisely as one might expect for a group of works like this held in the family for many years, some new voyage material quite evidently relating to Freycinet was added: a pair of works by the artist on the Uranie Jacques Arago, and a pair of Richard Browne works relating to NSW (Freycinet, surely uniquely in all of France at this time, took a marked interest in the work of Browne, and acquired many of his works).

Last but not least in terms of this Freycinet family provenance, the sale of the group concluded with two lots each of four marine drawings, one lot presumed to be by the same hand, and one of which is signed by “? Frey.” and dated December 1810; the other four in pencil signed “C. de Freycinet” with stamps confirming that they were done in the naval college in Brest, one of which features an 1838 watermark. This was Henri’s second son Charles (1823-1881), who went on to become a rear-admiral. The material was evidently still in the Freycinet family circa 1840.

We are left with no doubt that the wider collection of material, that is the Petit and Lesueur archive as well as the incidental material (Arago and Browne drawings) and the eight drawings by two members of the Frecyeint family, were indeed in the possession of that family.

DE LA ROCHE ST. ANDRÉ

Then, at some point after 1840 and before 1882, the material changed hands from the Freycinets to the family that would own it until its recent sale.

We know that this transfer did not occur after 1882, because the most convincing family story actually connects the group with a woman called Pauline de la Roche Saint-André (1797-1882). She was the only surviving daughter of Henri-Charles de la Roche Saint-André (1765-1836) and his wife Constance-Augustine, née du Chaffault (1772-1799). Hence, that is, the vague story linking the material to Admiral Chaffault: she was his granddaughter.

Perhaps more significantly, her father Henri-Charles de la Roche Saint-André was a very grand career naval officer, having joined the Navy as a 12 year old. He saw action in north America between 1781 and 1784, emigrated during the Revolution, and was wounded at Quiberon while serving with Royalist forces. He was prominent in the Vendée (a committed royalist, that is), and quickly promoted by Louis XVIII after many years in the wilderness.

The similarities between the Freycinet brothers (particularly Henri) and de la Roche are striking: all were experienced naval officers of very similar age and rank, all were equally adept at navigating life under the restoration of Louis XVIII, all of them were involved at a high level with the Ministry of the Marine, and all of them had an association with Rochefort in the Charente-Maritime, and specifically its naval base.

To say they would have known each other is an understatement, especially during the rule of Louis XVIII, which saw a second flourishing of the importance of aristocratic credentials in the French Navy. Men of their caste were well known to each other in the small town of Rochefort (the total civilian and military population there numbered only around 12,000 in 1820).

SUYROT DE MAZEAU

Whatever the precise link between the Freycinets and the de la Roche Saint-André family around 1840, which may have had to do with Henri de Freycinet’s son Charles, the material passed from one to the other. Pauline de la Roche Saint-André married Charles Marie de Suyrot (1787-1880), and the material was definitely in the Suyrot de Mazeau family by descent until its sale. It seems probable that the larger group (that is, the Petit and Lesueur works, along with the Browne and Arago drawings and the later Freycinet drawings) simply remained together as a group from then until now.

We might add that the family’s belief that the material had been in their possession since the mid-nineteenth century is further strongly supported by the known details of the Freycinet family archive, which was first studied in the late 1800s, and was formalised, with the addition of the “Archives de Laage” stamps, in the 1920s. There is certainly no evidence that any of the present works were in the Freycinet archive at the time of either of these reviews (and definitely, of course, none feature the famous red stamps). Moreover, despite the fact that the Freycinet archive did include some works relating to the Baudin voyage, these were almost exclusively maps, just as one would expect given the fact that Freycinet’s real role was as a cartographer. None of the people who have made any study of the Laage collection (notably Charles Duplomb and Marnie Bassett, and indeed Christie’s and Hordern House), have ever identified anything like the present group as forming part of the Freycinet collection in modern times.

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ONLINE:

Australian Dictionary of Biography (http://adb.anu.edu.au/)
The Baudin Legacy Project, University of Sydney
(http://sydney.edu.au/arts/research/baudin/project/)
Dictionary of Australian Artists (https://www.daao.org.au/)

ANEMAAT, Louise. Natural Curiosity: Unseen Art of the First Fleet (Sydney: NewSouth Publishing, 2014)
BAGLIONE, Gabrielle & Cédric CRÉMIÈRE. Charles-Alexandre Lesueur: Peintre voyageur, un trésor oublié (Le Havre: Édition de Conti, 2009)
BAUDIN, Nicolas. The Journal of Post Captain Nicolas Baudin… Translated from the French by Christine Cornell… (Adelaide: Libraries Board of South Australia, 1974)
BLADEN, F.M. (ed.) Historical Records of New South Wales, vol. IV – Hunter and King. 1800, 1801, 1802 (Sydney: Charles Potter, 1896), esp. “Appendix – Baudin Papers”, pp. 941-1010
BONNEMAINS, Jacqueline, Elliott FORSYTH & Bernard SMITH (eds). Baudin in Australian Waters: The Artwork of the French Voyage of Discovery to the Southern lands 1800 – 1804 (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1988)
BORY DE ST. VINCENT, J.B.G.M. Voyage to and Travels through the four principal islands of the African Seas… with a Narrative of the passage of Captain Baudin to Port Louis in the Mauritius (London: Richard Phillips, 1805)
CHRISTIE’S. The Freycinet Collection, Thursday 26 September 2002 (London: 2002)
COLLINS, David. An Account of the English Colony of New South Wales, edited by Brian H. Fletcher (Sydney: A.H. & A.W. Reed, 1975)
DEGÉRANDO, Joseph-Marie. The Observation of Savage Peoples, edited by F.G.T. Moore (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969
DUYKER, Edward. ‘Uncovering Jean Piron: in search of D’Entrecasteaux’s Artist,’ Explorations (December 2005), pp. 37–45
FORNASIERO, Jean & John WEST-SOOBY. French Designs on Colonial New South Wales (Adelaide: Friends of the State Library of South Australia, 2014)
FORNASIERO, Jean, Lindl LAWTON & John WEST-SOOBY (eds). The Art of Science: Nicolas Baudin’s Voyagers 1800 – 1804 (South Australia: Wakefield Press, 2016)
FORNASIERO, Jean, Peter MONTEATH & John WEST-SOOBY (eds). Encountering Terra Australis: the Australian Voyages of Nicolas Baudin and Matthew Flinders (SA: Wakefield Press, 2010)
FREYCINET, Louis de. Reflections on New South Wales 1788 – 1839, edited by Thomas Cullity (Sydney: Hordern House, 2001)
FREYCINET, Louis de. Voyage autour du monde… exécuté sur les corvettes de S.M. l’Uranie et la Physicienne, pendant les années 1817, 1818, 1819 et 1820… (Paris: Pillet Aîné, 1824 – 1844)
GIBLIN, R.W. ‘Flinders, Baudin, and Brown at Encounter Bay,’ Papers of the Royal Society of Tasmania (1929), pp. 1–6
HAMY, E.wT. ‘Les Collections Anthropologiques et Ethnographiques du Voyage de Découvertes aux Terres Australes’, in Bulletin de géographie historique et descriptive (1906), pp. 24–34
HAMY, E.-T. ‘L’Oeuvre ethnographique de Nicolas-Martin Petit Dessinateur à bord du “Géographe” 1801 – 1804’, L’Anthropologie, 2 (1891), 3–24
HARTNOLL & EYRE. Drawings from Captain Cook’s Voyages, ed. Rüdiger Joppien (London: Hartnoll & Eyre, 1976)
HORDERN HOUSE. Baudin & Flinders, February 2013 (Sydney: Hordern House, 2013)
HORDERN HOUSE. Captain Louis de Freycinet and his Voyages to the Terres Australes (Sydney: Hordern House, 2010)
HORDERN HOUSE. “Taken from the Life”: the Farquhar collection of North Pacific drawings, by John Webber (Sydney: Hordern House, 2000)
HORNER, Frank. Looking for La Pérouse: D’Entrecasteaux in Australia and the South Pacific 1792 – 1793 (Melbourne: Miegunyah Press, 1995)
HORNER, Frank. The French Reconnaissance: Baudin in Australia 1801 – 1803 (Melbourne University Press, 1987)
HUNT, Susan & Paul CARTER. Terre Napoléon: Australia through French Eyes 1800 – 1804 (Sydney: Historic Houses Trust/Hordern House, 1999)
JOPPIEN, Rüdiger & Bernard SMITH. The Art of Captain Cook’s Voyages (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1985)
KONISHI, Shino. ‘Depicting Sexuality: A Case Study of the Baudin Expedition’s Aboriginal Ethnography,’ Australian Journal of French Studies 41:2 (2004), pp. 98–116.
LENNIER, G. ‘Catalogue des Manuscrits et Dessins originaux du Voyage aux Terres Australes, qui fonte partie de la Bibliothèque du Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle de la ville du Le Havre,’ Bulletin de la Société zoologique de France (1883), pp. 9–14
LENNIER, G. ‘Note sur l’expédition Française des Terres Australes pendant les années 1801 à 1804, Bulletin de la Société zoologique de France (1883), pp. 1–8
MANDER-JONES, Phyllis. ‘The Artists who Sailed with Baudin and Flinders,’ Royal Geographical Society of Australasia, vol. 66 (South Australia: 1965)
McCORMICK, Tim et al. First Views of New South Wales 1788 – 1825 (Chippendale: David Ell Press, 1987)
MILIUS, Pierre Bernard. The Journal 1800 – 1804, edited by Peter Hambly et al. (West Perth: Kerry Stokes Collection/NLA Publishing, 2013)
MUSÉUM D’HISTOIRE NATURELLE DU HAVRE. L’Autre: Les Naturels vus par l’Occident (1800 – 1804), (Le Havre: Éditions du Muséum du Havre, 2008)
PÉRON, François & Louis de FREYCINET. Voyage de Découvertes aux Terres Australes… (Paris: de l’Imprimerie Impériale, 1807 – 1816)
PÉRON, François & Louis de FREYCINET. Voyage de Découvertes aux Terres Australes… Seconde Édition, revue, corrigée et augmentée par M. Louis de Freycinet… (Paris: Arthus Bertrand, 1824)
PLOMLEY, N.J.B. ‘French Manuscripts referring to the Tasmanian Aborigines,’ Records of the Queen Victoria Museum Launceston, no. 23 (1966), pp. 1–4
PLOMLEY, N.J.B. The Baudin expedition and the Tasmanian Aborigines 1802 (Hobart: Blubber Head Press, 1983)
PLOMLEY, N.J.B. The Tasmanian Tribes & Cicatrices as Tribal Indicators among the Tasmanian Aborigines (Occasional Paper No. 5, Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, Tasmania, n.d. but 1992)
SANKEY, Margaret. ‘The Aborigines of Port Jackson, as seen by the Baudin Expedition,’ Australian Journal of French Studies, XLI: 2 (May – August 2004), pp. 117–125.
SANKEY, Margaret. ‘The Baudin Expedition in Port Jackson, 1802: Cultural Encounters and Enlightenment Politics,’ Explorations, 31 (December 2001), pp. 5–36
SMITH, Bernard & Alwyne WHEELER. The Art of the First Fleet & other early Australian drawings (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1988)
SMITH, Keith Vincent. Bennelong: the Coming In of the Eora, Sydney Cove 1788 – 1792 (East Roseville: Kangaroo Press, 2001)
SMITH, Keith Vincent. ‘Tupaia’s Sketchbook,’ British Library Journal (online: article 10, 2005)
STARBUCK, Nicole. Baudin, Napoleon and the Exploration of Australia (London & New York: Routledge, 2016)
STARBUCK, Nicole. ‘Colonial Vision: French voyager-artists, Aboriginal subjects and the British Colony at Port Jackson,’ in Natalie Edwards, Ben McCann & Peter Poiana (eds), Framing French Culture (University of Adelaide, 2015), pp. 29–52.
STARBUCK, Nicole. Constructing the “Perfect” Voyage: Nicolas Baudin at Port Jackson, 1802 (University of Adelaide: Ph.D. thesis, October 2009)
THOMAS, Sarah. The Encounter, 1802. Art of the Flinders and Baudin Voyages. (Adelaide: Art Gallery of South Australia, 2002)
VINCENT. Thierry. ‘An 1802 Aboriginal Necklace rediscovered in the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle of Le Havre,’ Explorations, no. 53 (December 2012), pp. 3–21

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The official account of the Baudin voyage appeared over ten years, in two quite distinct sections. The two-volume narrative with a small folio atlas of two parts (including some charting, chiefly of specific ports, and the famous views and portraits of native peoples) appeared between 1807 and 1816. The separate large-scale coastal mapping of Australia, an imperial folio atlas accompanied by a volume of partly narrative text together forming the first Australian pilot, was published between 1812 and 1815.

Each of these sections could be acquired as a stand-alone publication. Not only were they issued on different dates, and sold separately, but they were distributed by different booksellers. Some buyers then and collectors now prefer to acquire both sections and thus to have the entire official publication, ideally in matching bindings: this constitutes a “complete set”.

With future French ‘grands voyages’ accounts this separation of the different sections would become increasingly the case. To people schooled in the English tradition, the notion of just buying the parts of the voyage that one wanted to read seems odd but in many ways it is quite sensible. In fact it did happen with English voyages, in the sense that the official works on the astronomy of Cook’s voyages by Wales and Bayly, for example, were published quite separately from the narrative accounts, and are virtually never found in a “set” of Cook’s voyages. They don’t look similar enough for us to think of them as being part of the complete official publication of each voyage.

It may be worthwhile to spell out the publication of this voyage in some detail:

1. NARRATIVE OF THE VOYAGE (‘HISTORIQUE’)

First edition.
a. Text part 1, 1807. This was the text volume completed by Péron before his death.

b. Text part 2, 1816. This was the text volume written by Louis de Freycinet.

c. Atlas part 1, 1807. This was the volume of plates prepared under Péron’s supervision. It has altogether 40 engraved plates, two of them folding, 23 of them coloured.

d. Atlas part 2, 1811. This was the smaller-format volume of maps prepared under Freycinet’s supervision. It contains 14 engraved charts, two of them double-page (the famous maps of Australia and Terre Napoleon). All four of these volumes were also issued in a Large Paper format. Examples of this are very rare.

As can be seen from these dates, in 1807 the first section of the narrative appeared, with a volume of text and an atlas. The second atlas appeared four years later in 1811, while the second text volume did not appear until five years later in 1816. These four volumes published over ten years (sometimes bound as three volumes if the two parts of the atlas are placed together as a single volume) form the complete regular publication of the Baudin voyage.

2. CARTOGRAPHY OF THE VOYAGE
(‘HYDROGRAPHIQUE’ OR ‘NAVIGATION ET GÉOGRAPHIE’)

First and only edition.

a. Text volume, 1815. Prepared by Louis de Freycinet.

b. Atlas volume, 1812. Prepared by Louis de Freycinet.
It contains 32 engraved charts, 25 of them double-page.
All but two of the charts depict the Australian coastline.

These two volumes form the complete cartographic section of the voyage, and were published quite separately from the narrative account.

3. NARRATIVE OF THE VOYAGE (‘HISTORIQUE’)

Second edition. Revised by Louis de Freycinet himself during and after the voyage of the Uranie, this was published in 1824 in four octavo volumes and a single-volume quarto atlas. The atlas contains 68 plates in total, which include most of those in 1c above with an additional 25 engraved plates, accompanied by reduced and revised charts from 1d.

It is on the general map of Australia that Freycinet, in the post-Napoleonic era, has famously changed many of the place-names back to their English versions. We have not seen pointed out before that the celebrated vignette on the engraved title of the atlas volume depicting Malmaison and its Australian menagerie and arboretum has been re-engraved to make a fundamental change of detail: no longer is the map at centre front lettered “Terre Napoleon”; it has quietly become “Nlle Hollande”.

4. THE ENGLISH EDITIONS

a. The only contemporary English edition was a version of the first volume prepared by Péron (1a) and published in 1809.

b. In 2003 the State Library of South Australia issued Christine Cornell’s translation of the second text volume (1b).

c. Finally, in 2010, the same publisher produced Cornell’s complete translation of the text of the revised second edition.

Bearing these remarks in mind, the main forms in which the official publication of the Baudin voyage can be seen are explained here by reference to the list above,

A set of the narrative of the voyage consists of 1a, 1b, 1c, and 1d.

A set of the cartography of the Baudin voyage is made up of 2a and 2b.

A “full set” of the Baudin voyage is made up of 1a, 1b, 1c, 1d, 2a, and 2b.

The second edition of the official account of the voyage is no. 3 in the list above.

A hybrid version is occasionally seen, in the form of a first edition to which has been added the series of new plates prepared for the second edition.

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