Their first sight of New Holland is a dark stripe running north to south. It is the rocky coast of Cape Leeuwin, the most south-westerly point on the continent, where the Indian Ocean meets the Southern Ocean. Entering a shallow bay reaching far inland, the French crisscross the bay, which they name Baie Géographe, looking for a safe anchorage.
There is something odd about this place. Usually, on landfall, gulls and other land birds visit ships, but here there isn’t a bird in sight. Captain Baudin wonders if perhaps the land – arid and inhospitable as it appears from seaward – cannot support birdlife. And yet the lookout claims to have spotted large animals on shore. Probably cattle, says the lookout. More likely a mirage, says the captain.
In fine weather, anchoring a few miles offshore to avoid reefs and shoals, Le Géographe and Le Naturaliste each send a longboat ashore to explore the coast. But before the boats can reach the shore the weather shifts dramatically, whipping up huge waves and carrying one of the boats dangerously close to rocks. The boat’s crew battle to turn back to their ship, but the wind is so strong and contrary that it pushes them out to sea, and the sailors only make it to safety, drenched and exhausted, after rowing for a day and a night.
The second boat has better luck, finding a sheltered cove a little to the south and wading ashore through the breakers. They search for fresh water but find only a dry creek bed, and while the shore is littered with dung resembling horse droppings, the only live animal they find is a tiny lizard, which they duly catch, kill and pickle in a jar of alcohol. The first specimen of the Baudin expedition will not set the scientific world abuzz.
After four days riding out heavy weather, Baudin decides it is safe enough to let the naturalists go ashore, and joins the landing party, as does Captain Hamelin. As Baudin’s boat nears the beach, the Frenchmen catch their first sight of an Aboriginal Australian – a man standing waist-deep in water, spearing fish. The man shouts at them, gesturing for them to go away, and when they continue to approach he storms off in disgust, still yelling. His response is not aggressive, nor does he seem frightened by the sudden arrival of strange white men in giant canoes. Rather, his reaction is that of any fisherman when someone blunders along and scares the fish.
François Péron, on landing in another boat, happens upon human footprints and follows them inland, alone and unarmed, excited by the prospect of making first contact with native New Hollanders. Three hours later, having found nothing and no one, he returns to the beach, where a search party is about to set out to find him. Captain Baudin, who sees this as typical of Péron’s recklessness, is not amused.
Baudin is inclined to order the boats back to their ships and move on, but after news of the discovery of a river – a vital source of fresh water – he decides to let the naturalists stay another day.
Péron, seizing the opportunity, wanders off alone and unarmed again in search of native people, first following a stream, then wading through a swamp until he spies several pairs of footprints in the mud and follows the tracks into bushland. The tracks lead to a clearing on the banks of a stream, where Péron is intrigued to find on a bed of white sand three semicircles of melaleuca trees, each within the other, all stripped of bark to reveal the white wood beneath and, within the innermost semicircle, various geometric shapes made with reeds.
Wrongly assuming that Aborigines could not possibly create what appears to be a place of spiritual significance, Péron leaps to the conclusion that he has stumbled upon evidence of voyagers from ancient Egypt, perhaps the ancestors of the native population, shipwrecked here in the distant past. Péron is not the first to believe it possible that ancient Egyptians visited Australia, nor will he be the last. The claim, while comprehensively debunked by experts, will remain popular with those who prefer their theories unpolluted by facts.
Baudin, before returning to his ship, ordered that all those still ashore leave before sunset, but when Péron makes it back to join his comrades on the coast – on time for once – a violent storm erupts and Le Naturaliste’s longboat is dashed to pieces on the beach. Captain Hamelin manages to get his boat away just before the storm hits but will spend the next 22 hours tossed about by the wind before making it back to Le Géographe. Péron and the others still on the beach are stranded until boats can be sent to rescue them.
Baudin is distressed to learn that 25 men are marooned on a barren shore in foul weather, surrounded by potentially hostile natives, although he seems more upset by the news that his longboat has been destroyed. And he reacts angrily when told that the river – the discovery that persuaded him to allow the naturalists to stay ashore longer than intended – turned out to be just a brackish lagoon. The naturalists are to blame for this calamity, he concludes, and most probably it’s all the fault of that constant irritant, François Péron.
Huddled around a fire on the beach, in the howling wind, the stranded men spend a sleepless night, muskets primed in case of attack, aching with cold and feeling the pangs of hunger.
Péron, who had complained bitterly when Baudin cut the scientists’ shipboard rations to biscuits and salted meat, and replaced the wine allowance with rotgut rum, is now facing the prospect of trying to survive on a one-twenty-fifth share of a meagre supply of rice, biscuits soaked in sea water, three bottles of arrack and 15 pints of water. And he is not one to suffer in silence.
While Péron stares forlornly out to sea, increasingly fearful that the ships will sail away and leave them to their fate, others set out to forage for food. They return with some brackish water, a plant that resembles celery and a dead seagull. In a pot salvaged from the wrecked longboat, the men make a soup with the gull, ‘celery’ and a little rice, and barely an hour later most are vomiting and racked with stomach pain. They have another cold, miserable night ahead of them. And still the wind howls.
At dawn, the ships move as close to shore as possible in the roiling sea. Dropping anchor about a mile offshore, Baudin sends out a boat to determine if it is safe to land. It is not. The best the boat crew can do is to stay outside the breakers and send a swimmer ashore with a lifeline. They manage to drag one of the castaways out through the surf before the pounding waves force them to quit.
The man rescued is François Péron, and when he is hauled back aboard ship bedraggled and exhausted he reports that his comrades ashore are starving and many are ill, presumably due to the seagull soup. That said, he collapses on deck and is helped to his cabin.
Early next morning, noting that although the swell is still heavy the wind has dropped, Baudin sends boats to the beach. Through his telescope he watches as, one by one, men wade out up to their necks in the surf and clamber aboard the boats. By midafternoon, all the scientists are safely back on Le Naturaliste. The officers and sailors are yet to be rescued.
Baudin immediately orders a longboat to return for the remaining men, but the weather is fast turning foul again, with storm clouds gathering and the wind growing stronger.
Meanwhile, Captain Hamelin’s second-in-command, Pierre-Bernard Milius, sets off from Le Naturaliste in a dinghy with several sailors and, for some reason, his dog, intending to help the longboat with the rescue. They are dumped in the surf when a wave overturns the dinghy but they make it to shore where, curiously, they find scattered on the sand clothing, equipment and weapons belonging to the castaways, but not the men themselves.
‘At last, after searching in vain, I realised that they had all returned to the ship in the rain and mist that had come down since leaving Le Naturaliste,’ Milius writes in his journal. ‘Night had fallen, and the sea was so rough that I could not see how I might be able get back on board.’1
Milius is dealing with the dread realisation that now he, his men and his dog are the castaways when, from beyond the breakers, faintly above the roar of the surf, comes the sound of voices. It is a boat from Le Naturaliste, sent out to rescue the would-be rescuers. ‘It would be difficult to describe the gratitude we felt at the sight of that boat,’ Milius writes.2
As with the earlier rescue of François Péron, sailors from the boat swim ashore with lifelines and, one by one, the stranded men are hauled through the surf to the boat, with Milius the last to leave. In the darkness and through towering waves it is a dangerous and terrifying experience but all goes well until one of the sailors, helmsman Thomas Vasse, loses his grip of the line when hit by a wave, and is swept away. In his account of the tragedy, Milius says that he tried to save Vasse but the attempt was futile, not only because of the darkness and the raging sea but because the boat crew were drunk – too drunk to be of any assistance. It is later suggested that Vasse, too, was drunk.
‘I was forced to abandon the coast,’ Milius writes, ‘leaving with regret that I was unable to save a very able seaman. I also lost a very good hunting dog.’3
On making it safely to Le Naturaliste, Lieutenant Commander Milius reports with regret that helmsman second-class Thomas Vasse is missing, presumed drowned. Baudin will later name Vasse River and Vasse Inlet in his memory.
Not everyone is convinced that the helmsman is dead, however. Since his body was not recovered, and because he was known to be a strong swimmer, many among the crew believe it quite possible that Vasse made it to shore. And when Captain Baudin orders that the ships head north at once, without searching for Vasse, rumours of his survival persist and will be embellished over time.
Within a few years of the incident the word around Paris is that Thomas Vasse was washed ashore and trekked 500 kilometres south until picked up by an American whaling vessel. The whaler, which inexplicably was bound for the English Channel – not known as a whaling ground – was intercepted by the British navy. Vasse, being French, was arrested as a prisoner of war and is rotting in an English gaol.
The story, widely circulated by French newspapers, is debunked by François Péron who, upon investigation, declares it a total fabrication.
In 1838, an account by prominent early Western Australian settler George Moore, published in the Perth Gazette, tells another version of events. Moore, a student of Aboriginal language and culture, claims that on a recent visit to that part of the coast his conversations with local Indigenous people shed new light on the matter.
‘Poor Vasse did escape from the waves,’ he writes, ‘but enfeebled as he was with the sickness and exhaustion by his struggles, exposed to the fury of the storm unsheltered and abandoned among the savages, perhaps he would have thought death a preferable lot.
‘But the savages appear to have commiserated his misfortunes. They treated him kindly and relieved his wants to the extent of their power by giving him fish and other food. Thus he continued to live for some time, but for what length of time I have not yet been able to ascertain. He seems to have remained constantly on the beach looking out for the return of his own ship, or the chance arrival of some other.
‘He pined away gradually in anxiety, becoming daily, as the natives express it, “Weril weril” (very thin). At last, they were absent for some time on a hunting expedition, and on their return found him lying dead on the beach, within a stone’s throw of the water’s edge. They describe the body as being then swollen and bloated, either from incipient decomposition or dropsical disease [swelling of the tissues indicating congestive cardiac failure].
‘His remains were not disturbed, even for the purpose of burial, and the bones are yet to be seen. The natives offered to conduct us to the spot but time pressed – we were then upon the point of embarkation and the distance was six or seven miles. The spot indicated is near Toby’s Inlet at the south-eastern extremity of Geographe Bay.’4
That’s not the end of it. In 1841, in a letter to a fellow naturalist, Vasse River settler and botanist Georgiana Molloy claims that a certain Doctor Carr has taken on the task of recovering Vasse’s remains. ‘Some society in Paris has offered a reward or present for them,’ she writes. ‘These natives know where they are, in the vicinity of Cape Naturaliste, and are now employed getting them, or for what I know, have got them.
‘This event happened about 30 years since. This unfortunate gentleman came in shore to explore, was seized and strangled, and the spear went in at the right side of his heart.
‘So runs the sequel. However, until enquiry was made by Doctor Carr, he was never heard of. They represent him as being tall and thin, according to the French author’s description, and when they bring the bones he will easily be identified, as their head and teeth are quite different to ours.’5
Molloy’s account seems second-hand at best. There is no evidence supporting her story, nor is there evidence that a Doctor Carr even existed.
It is possible that one of these versions of Thomas Vasse’s fate is true. Perhaps time will tell, but the riddle of the helmsman is yet to be solved.