|
|
 |
|
INDEX
WHO DID DISCOVER AUSTRALIA?
COLONIAL EXPLORATION
|
French Exploration: Louis Claude De Saules De Freycinet - 1801, 1818-20 Le Casuarina - 1803
L'Uranie - 1818-20 After the death of Baudin at Mauritius, and the return of his ships to France, responsibility for the production of the history of the voyage, fell on Péron and then on the occasion of his death, to Freycinet. The charts mentioned above were completed in this period. When the full report was completed in 1816 he newly-married Freycinet proposed another voyage and was successful in obtaining the support of the Institute of France and King Louis XVIII for it. Freycinet's plan was accepted 'very nearly in its entirety' and he was ordered to sail in the 350 ton, 34m long corvette L'Uranie with its complement of 125 men to Rio de Janiero and Cape Town and from there to south west Australia where he was to examine King George Sound. He was then to sail back west to Cape Leeuwin and to proceed north to Shark Bay to establish an observatory on a parallel of latitude as close as possible to that at Rio De Janiero. In conducting his observations and comparing results, he was thereby to help determine the shape of the earth. Among the ship's company were Rose de Freycinet, the captain's wife (who was disguised as a midshipman until the ship reached Gibraltar). L'Uranie departed Toulon on 17 September, 1817, en route for Australia. The primary aim of the expedition was more scientific than geographic, the emphasis being on studies of terrestrial magnetism and astronomical observation. The passage out took a year, as the French conducted exhaustive pendulum observations and collected specimens of flora and fauna at Rio de Janeiro, the Cape of Good Hope, and Mauritius.
As Sub Lieutentant on board Le Naturaliste during Baudin's expedition of exploration of the Australian coast in 1802, Freycinet had been sent ashore to conduct surveys of the area. When the ship's chief helmsman found de Vlamingh plate lying half buried in the sand at the top of Cape Inscription, Freycinet recognised its importance and immediately brought it back for the ship's captain, Hamelin, to examine. In objecting to the notion that the plate be removed and taken back with them to France, and in considering that to do otherwise would have been historical 'vandalism', Hamelin had Vlamingh's plate and a plate of his own re-erected on new posts, the first at the Dutch explorer's site and the second at an as yet undetermined location. Freycinet disapproved, feeling that it should have been removed for safekeeping in France, but was too junior to prevent the return of the relic to its original site on the headland. For this reason, he made sure a visit to Shark Bay was included in the L'Uranie expedition, so as to recover Vlamingh's plate and bring it back to France with him, which he subsequently did. From Australia, L'Uranie sailed to Dutch and Portuguese Timor and the Moluccas where the crew were afflicted with dysentery and, despite the frequent stops, scurvy. On 18 March, 1819, L'Uranie arrived at the Spanish outpost on Guam, in the Mariana Islands, where the crew recuperated and the young Lieutenant Louis Duperrey (who later commanded two expeditions in L'Astrolabe) conducted surveys of the island. In May, the ship headed for Hawaii, arriving in early August to an enthusiastic welcome by the Hawaiians and the fledgling European community in Honolulu. Sailing south and southwest, L'Uranie arrived at Sydney, New South Wales, where the French spent six weeks as guests of the Governor Lachlan Macquarie. On Christmas Day, 1819, L'Uranie sailed for France via Cape Horn. Attempting to enter Berkeley Sound in the Falkland Islands, the ship ran aground and had to be abandoned. Assistance arrived in the form of two American vessels. The French were taken to Montevideo in the Mercury, where they purchased the vessel and renamed her Physicienne before returning to Le Havre on November 13, 1820. Freycinet also survived the tragedy, however, eventually dying in 1842 aged in his sixties. Quoy and Gaimard both survived also and returned to New Holland in 1826 on board the Astrolabe commanded by Count Dumont d'Urville. It was Quoy and Gaimard who had described and named the Western Barred Bandicoot in 1834, naming it after Louis de Bougainville. It is believed they made even further voyages to Australia after 1826. A team from the WA Maritime Museum found the remains of Freycinet's ship, the Uranie, in March 2001. Voyages of Duperrey and d'Urville The corvette L'Astrolabe was launched at Toulon in 1811 as Ecurie, a horse transport ship of 390 tons. During 1813 she was transformed for the transportation of men and ammunition. The new corvette was named La Coquille. Because of her qualities, she was again transformed for survey voyages. In 1822, she set out on her first world voyage of exploration under Lieutenant Commander Duperrey. In 1825, she was renamed Astrolabe in memory of an earlier exploration ship commanded by Jean La Perouse which was lost after surveying California, the west coast of North America, and remote areas of the western Pacific. Thereafter, Astrolabe participated mostly in exploratory expeditions. She sailed on her second voyage of discovery under Capt. Dumont d'Urville, who, in 1837 discovered the continent of Antarctica which he named "Terre Adelie" after his wife. The Astrolabe was sold and broken up in 1851. See Voyages of Louis I. Duperrey and Jules S. Dumont d'Urville RELATED WEBSITES |
After recuperating at Port Jackson under the patronage of Governor King, Baudin was keen to continue his explorations. L'Naturaliste had proved a poor sailer, however, and it was sent home under Hamelin with the expedition's collections and works. A small locally-built schooner Casuarina was purchased in its stead and Freycinet (right) was elevated above others, including his brother Henri, to command. In continuing along the south coast via Tasmania and then back up the west coast with Baudin in L'Geographe, Freycinet was to complete the surveys from which many fine charts were able to be drawn. These included the Gulfs in southern Australia, the south of western Australia and the mid west. 
At Dirk Hartog's Island in Shark Bay, Australia, Freycinet recovered the inscribed pewter plate that Willem Vlamingh in 1697 left by de Vlamingh to record his visit there and that of Dirk Hartog, sailing in Eendracht in 1616 (the Vlamingh plate is now in the Western Australian Maritime Museum in Perth). In recognising the importance of the site, Freycinet's chart of the region refers to the site as Cape Inscription (right). 