after the departure of the Investigator, and lodged in storehouses at Port Jackson for the sole use of the Investigator.
Among the gentlemen who accompanied the expedition was William Westall, landscape-painter.
A passport was also applied for by the French, and granted by the English Government, to Captain Baudin, who was said to be going round the world on a voyage of discovery.
In November, 1801, Captain Flinders sighted the coast of Australia, and proceeded to examine the coast line hitherto unexplored. In the course of his investigations he discovered and surveyed King George's Sound, on which the settlement of Swan River, or Western Australia, was planted in 1829; Port Lincoln, where Sir J. Franklin, a kindred spirit, who was one of the midshipmen in the Investigator, erected a monument to his old commander; Kangaroo Island, Spencer's Gulf, and the coast line of the country which, principally from his report, was selected for the operations of the South Australian colonists; and sailed into and surveyed Port Phillip, which had been discovered ten weeks previously by a government schooner, the Lady Nelson, from Port Jackson. Western Port, a bay in the district of Port Phillip, had previously been discovered by Bass in his whale-boat.
In April, 1802, immediately after discovering and surveying Spencer's Gulf, Port Lincoln, and Kangaroo Island, Captain Flinders fell in with Captain Baudin and his ship La Geographe,[1] which apparently, instead of sailing round the world, had sailed direct for Australia; but, instead of pursuing further discoveries from the point where the English navigators had ended, they repaired to Van Diemen's Land, following the track of their countryman, Admiral D'Entrecasteaux, and there remained many months, thus losing the opportunity of discovering and taking possession (which was the secret object of their voyage) of more than one site for a colony; just as La Pérouse a very different man from Baudin lost by a few days the chance of discovering Port Jackson.
- ↑ "The situation of the Investigator when I hove to for the purpose of speaking Captain Baudin was 35° 40' south and 138° 58' east. At the above situation, the discoveries by Captain Baudin upon the south coast have their termination to the west, as mine in the Investigator have to the eastward; yet Monsieur Peron, naturalist to the French expedition, has laid a claim for his nation to the discovery of all parts between Western Port, in Bass's Straits, and Nuyts' Archipelago; and this part of New South Wales is called Terre Napoleon; my Kangaroo Island, which they openly adopted in the expedition, has been converted into L'Isle Decres; Spencer's Gulf is named Golfe Bonaparte; the Gulf of St. Vincent, Golfe Josephine; and so on along the whole coast to Cape Nuyts, not even the smallest island being without some similar stamp of French discovery." Monsieur Freycinet, First-lieutenant of the Geographe, said at the house of Governor King, at Port Jackson, to Flinders, "'Captain, if we had not been kept so long picking up shells and catching butterflies at Van Diemen's Land, you would not have discovered the south coast before us.' I believe M. Peron wrote from overruling authority, and that it smote him to the beart." Flinders' Voyage to Terra Australis.
