Viva le Freo!

COULD Freo have been a French colony? Bastille Day commemorates the anniversary of the storming of Bastille prison in Paris on July 14, 1789.
With the end of the monarchy, a scientific revolution was taking place in maritime exploration led by early French explorers including Baudin, de Freycinet, la Perouse, d’Entrecasteaux and Duperrey.
StreetWise shares here a largely unknown chapter of history when French revolutionaries on the Nicolas Baudin expedition planned to invade the fledgling British colony with the help of French and Irish deportees during their five-month stay at Port Jackson in Sydney in 1802.
Peron’s plot involved having 1800 French soldiers take the Sydney colony in less than 45 minutes. Attacking at night, transport ships would carry 3000 additional rifles for Irish political prisoners. Captured English troops would be shipped back to Europe and traded with French prisoners.
Had they succeeded, Australia may have come under Napoleonic rule, Baudin having visited WA the  previous year.
The invasion plan was concocted by Francois Peron, zoologist on Baudin’s expedition.
Though scientific in its mission, Peron felt the political aspects of the Baudin expedition were more important than its scientific aims to study the natural world. He called for NSW to be, “destroyed as soon as possible”, because, “We could do it easily now; we will not be able to do it in 25 years”.
Considering himself a formidable ‘spy’ who had gathered valuable intelligence, Peron describes in detail Sydney and its satellite towns including population figures to show how quickly the British colony had expanded since 1788.
He notes a thriving colony with whaling and sealing industries and farms producing wool, hemp and wine. He also considered as inadequate the military and naval defences protecting the fledgling British colony. Left unexploited, France’s ambitions in the region will be lost.
Peron claims to have won the confidence of Sydney’s governor Philip King, civil and military officers, doctors and religious leaders: “My double title of doctor and naturalist made me less suspect and allowed me to ask a mass of questions, which coming from anyone else would have been badly received.”
In a 100-page memoir held at the Natural History Museum at Le Havre, Peron argues, “the prosperity of the English colony and imperialistic arrogance and annexation of New Holland justified a French invasion”.
In a separate report, Peron claims the invasion would be supported by an Irish uprising, “against their tyrants”, and two French frigates whose troops would land at Botany Bay to cut off Port Jackson.
Peron’s invasion plans did not eventuate and Baudin died on Mauritius on the way back to France in 1803, leaving Peron to complete the official report of the four-year expedition. Peron died in 1810, leaving cartographer Louis de Freycinet to complete the history of the Baudin expedition.

De Freycinet

IN 1818, de Freycinet revisited Australia with his wife Rose, whose diary entries of her husband’s journey of discovery inspired a 2001 WA Museum expedition to find their ship Uranie wrecked in the Falkland islands in 1821 (issues #4 and #5 – 2017 at https://streetwisemedia.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/FSW4-April-2017.pdf and https://streetwisemedia.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/FSW5-July-2017.pdf).
The three-week search by the visiting museum team, of which StreetWise was a member as a West Australian correspondent, identified the French wreck in Uranie Bay. A week later, at Ascension island the seven-member team led by WAM archaeologist Michael McCarthy discovered British explorer William Dampier’s ship Roebuck, which visited Shark Bay for nine days in 1699 (issue #10 – October 2018 at https://streetwisemedia.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/FSW10-Oct-2018.pdf).
De Freycinet’s scientific expedition on a military vessel circumnavigated the earth and in 1811 produced the first map to show a full outline of the coastline of Australia, just three years before British explorer Matthew Flinders could publish his (as he was a prisoner on Mauritius).
He also completed detailed reports on geography, people, government, commerce and art. De Freycinet died in 1842.

St Alouarn

IN 1771, nearly half a century before Peron envisaged a French Australia, King Louis XVI sent an expedition to find and claim the unknown southern continent, two years after British captain James Cook visited the east coast.
The Fortune with Yves-Joseph de Kerguelen-Tremarec as captain and Gros Ventre commanded by Louis Francois Marie Aleno de Saint Alouarn discovered what appeared to be the west coast of a long coast in the southern Indian Ocean.
Cook, in 1770, had charted and claimed the east coast for Britain. When St Alouarn visited New Holland in 1772, neither British nor Dutch officials had issued a formal claim over the western part of New Holland.
St Alouarn anchored at Turtle Bay on the northern tip of Dirk Hartog Island in Shark Bay where he claimed New Holland for King Louis (Unfortunately, St Alouarn, like Baudin, died on the way home and his French claim over western Australia was never followed up with a permanent settlement).
To mark the annexation, St Alouarn’s crew buried a bottle (in which the proclamation had been inserted) and two coins, one of which was discovered in 1999 near where Hartog left a pewter plate inscribed with details of his 1616 visit.
StreetWise celebrates Hartog’s legacy in the October Spring-Summer edition.