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Nicolas Baudin second to Matthew Flinders to chart Terre Napoléon (South Australia) in 1802 science expedition

Nicolas Baudin second to Matthew Flinders to chart Terre Napoléon (South Australia) in 1802 science expedition
A monument at Baudin Beach, named after Nicolas Baudin's 1802 exploration on South Australia's Kangaroo Island, as part of his expedition collecting thousands of natural specimens around the south and west of Australia.

The official report of Nicolas Baudin’s French expedition (1802-03) named what became South Australia as Terre Napoléon, Kangaroo Island as Isle Decrès, Spencer Gulf as Golfe Bonaparte and St Vincent Gulf as Golfe Joséphine. 

Louis de Freycinet, part of Baudin’s expedition, used the names in his first complete map of Australia in 1811 and his 1812 atlas. By the atlas’s second 1824 edition, emperor Napoleon Bonaparte was dead and many French names were replaced with English ones.

In April 1802, Baudin on his ship Le Geographe met British navy commander Matthew Flinders of the Investigator, also engaged in charting the future South Australia coastline, in Encounter Bay near the tip of Fleurieu Peninsula. This meeting of military navy captains from Britain and France, then at war, was allowed in advance by both countries issuing passports to them if they met. It reflected Europe’s scientific communities sharing late 18th Century solidarity in wanting to advance knowledge.

Adelaide University modern research suggested that François Péron, chief zoologist and intellectual leader of Baudin’s mission, wrote a report to Bonaparte on ways to invade and capture territory on Australia – and the British had to head off serious French intent towards Tasmania during Baudin’s voyages.

With a colourful history in the French military and merchant navy, Baudin began to be noticed by the scientific community and Bonaparte’s government after several 1790s expeditions to the Caribbean collecting natural specimens. In 1798, the government marine ministry suggested that Baudin present to the assembly of professors and administrators of the National Museum of Natural History ideas for an extensive South Seas expedition to search for fauna and flora to be brought back and cultivated in France. The French government decided to proceed with the expedition but confined it to a surveying western and southern New Holland.

In 1800, Baudin was picked by Bonaparte to lead two ships, Geographe and Naturaliste, carrying nine astronomers, naturalists and scientific draughtsmen and botanists. The expedition left France in late 1800, headed straight to Ile de France (later Mauritius) and made first contact with the Australian continent in May 1801. Rounding Cape Leeuwin at southwest Western Australia, Baudin’s group only explored part of the southern coast before going to Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania) where it spent 10 weeks exploring.

Matthew Flinders only departed England in July 1801 in an expedition responding to Baudin’s. But Flinders, after he reach Cape Leeuwin, continued east right along the southern coast of Australia, including a detailed charting of the future South Australia. He had completed most of that charting when he encountered Baudin coming westward from Bass Strait. As Freycinet told Flinders: “If we had not been kept so long picking up shells and catching butterflies in Van Diemen's Land, you would not have discovered the South Coast before us.”

Baudin’s expedition, racked with conflict, was a scientific success. The Naturaliste took back more than 100,000 animal and plant specimens to France in 1804. The Géographe returned with 71 living Australian animals, including a dwarf emu (native to Kangaroo Island) and thousands of botanical specimens.  Baudin made two of his officers give up their cabins to kangaroos to help them survive. The kangaroos survived but Baudin died of tuberculosis on the journey back, in Mauritius, in 1803.

Baudin’s achievements were overshadowed by the circumnavigating of Australia by Flinders whose A Voyage to Terra Australis was published the day before he died on July 18, 1814

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