At night, by candlelight and lantern, under canvas ashore and in their cramped quarters aboard ship, naturalists of the Baudin expedition can be found scribbling and crosschecking notes on specimens and experiments. François Péron, too, is putting pen to paper, not in the cause of science but of conquest.
‘The defences of the country are not formidable,’ Péron writes in his secret report, ‘and have not needed to be because of the prevailing ignorance in Europe concerning the nature of this colony. While the English government is at present directing men’s minds towards agriculture, it has not neglected to provide what the physical nature of the land and the nature the colony demand.
‘Two classes of men are much to be feared at present. Firstly, the criminals – mostly condemned to a long servitude, harshly treated, compelled to perform the most difficult and fatiguing labour. This infamous class – the vile refuse of civilised society, always ready to commit new crimes – needs to be ceaselessly restrained by force and violence. The English government therefore maintains a strong police force.
‘It is so efficient that perfect security reigns everywhere, and – what might seem paradoxical to those who do not know the details of the administration of this colony – fewer robberies are committed than in a European town of equal population.
‘As for murder, I have not heard of such a crime being committed there, nor indeed did I hear of one occurring since the foundation of the colony.’1 Apparently, he does not count Aborigines murdered by whites.
‘A second social class, more formidable still – also much more respectable, but having most to complain about and, for us, the most interesting class – is composed of legions of the unfortunate Irish, whose desire to free their country from the English yoke caused them to arm, in alliance with us, against the English government [in the rebellion of 1798]. Overwhelmed by force, they were treated with pitiless force. Almost all of those who took up arms in our favour were mercilessly transported – mixed with thieves and killers. The first families of Ireland count their friends and relatives upon the coasts of New Holland.
‘Persecuted by that most implacable kind of hatred – the hatred born of national animosity and differing convictions – they are cruelly treated, and all the more so because they are feared.’2
It could be to the advantage of the French, Péron suggests, that the colony has such a large population of Irish dissidents, mostly condemned to penal servitude for many years or for life, and forced to labour in appalling conditions. Such people would be ready and willing allies should the French seize the colony.
‘The Irish, ruled by a rod of iron, are quiet today,’ he writes. ‘But if ever the government of our country, alarmed by the rapidly increasing strength of this colony, should move to invade or destroy it, at the mere mention of the French name every Irish arm would be raised.’3
He notes that when Le Géographe – to all appearances a French man-of-war – docked at Sydney Cove, Irish convicts rushed to meet her, crowding the docks. ‘Everywhere, they raised their bowed foreheads, bent under an iron rule,’ says Péron, ‘and if the crowd had not been so rapidly dispensed there would have been a general uprising. One or two were put to death on that occasion, and several were deported to Norfolk Island. In any case, that formidable portion of the population will always compel the English to maintain many troops upon this continent until, eventually, time and intermarriage have cauterised the recent wounds of the poor Irish and softened their resentment.’4
Jacques Hamelin, captain of Le Naturaliste, is ideally suited to the task of recruiting the Irish, having fought beside them in a battle dear to every Irish rebel’s heart – fondly remembered as the Castlebar Races.
During the rebellion of 1788, 1000 French troops under the command of General Jean Humbert landed unopposed at Kilcummin Bay, near the town of Killala, in County Mayo.
On stepping ashore, Humbert proclaimed an alliance.
‘Liberty! Equality! Fraternity! Union!’ he declared. ‘After several unsuccessful attempts, behold at last Frenchmen arrived among you. Union! Liberty! The Irish Republic! Such is our shout. Let us march. Our hearts are devoted to you. Our glory is in your happiness.’5
The Irish, inspired by the American and French revolutions, and led by Theobald Wolfe Tone – an exiled rebel now an officer in Napoleon’s army – had invited the French to help them overthrow the English overlords who had ruled the island for 600 years. Help was a long time coming, but with Napoleon’s blessing it had arrived at last, and an Irish army of 1000 men was waiting to join the French.
Wasting no time, the allies easily captured Killala, then marched on to Castlebar to face a force of 6000 British redcoats and militia, well equipped with artillery and supplies. The British commander, General Gerard Lake, deployed his forces in anticipation of a frontal attack by the main route into the town, assuming that the rugged country to the west was impassable for an army on the march.
Lake was wrong. After threading along a wild path known only to locals, and through a narrow mountain pass called the Windy Gap, the Franco-Irish army appeared outside the town of Castlebar in the early morning, taking the British by surprise.
While the British, whose guns were facing the wrong way, scrambled to redeploy, the French launched a ferocious bayonet charge and the British line broke. Infantry and cavalry turned and fled in their thousands, abandoning their wounded, guns and equipment, and did not stop running until they reached the British garrison at Athlone, 130 kilometres away. The encounter, noted in British history as the Battle of Castlebar, would forever be known to the victorious Irish as the Castlebar Races.
Humbert proclaimed an Irish republic, appointed a wealthy Catholic merchant’s son, John Moore, as president, and rallied his forces to march on Dublin through the midlands, gathering more Irish volunteers on the way.
But it was a march to disaster. A week after the victory at Castlebar, Humbert’s allied army was defeated at Ballinamuck by a superior British force. The battle, which began at nine in the morning, was over by noon. Outflanked and hopelessly outnumbered, Humbert surrendered and his soldiers threw down their arms after hardly striking a blow.
When the smoke cleared, French casualties were few, although more than 800 were taken prisoner, but some 500 Irish rebels lay dead on the battlefield, and those fleeing through fields and bogs were pursued by cavalry and cut down. British casualties were estimated at just 12.
An eyewitness to the aftermath wrote, ‘There lay dead about 500. I went next day with many others to see them. How awful to see that heathy mountain covered with dead bodies, resembling at a distance flocks of sheep, for hundreds were naked and swelled with the weather.’6
The French prisoners were afforded every comfort. Treated honourably as brothers-in-arms, they were taken to Dublin by barge and greeted by a military band before being repatriated. Of more than 1000 Irishmen taken prisoner, many were hanged and the rest sentenced to transportation to New Holland or North America, with hundreds more throughout the countryside – rebel or not – slaughtered and their homes and fields put to the torch.
With Humbert’s surrender, the dream of an Irish republic was dashed. Its erstwhile president, John Moore, arrested and sentenced to transportation to North America, died in captivity before his ship sailed.
The Irish rebel leader Theobald Wolfe Tone had been wounded and captured, and, being a commissioned officer in the French army, faced trial by court martial.
Charged with treason, Tone appeared in court in the grand attire of a brigade commander – blue coat with gold-embroidered collar and epaulettes, blue pantaloons with gold lace garters at the knees, and a large cocked hat with a tricolour cockade.
‘I mean not to give you the trouble of bringing judicial proof to convict me legally of having acted in hostility to the government of his Britannic majesty in Ireland,’ he told his accusers. ‘I admit the fact. From my earliest youth I have regarded the connection between Great Britain and Ireland as the curse of the Irish nation, and felt convinced that while it lasted this country could never be free nor happy.
‘Under the flag of the French Republic I originally engaged with a view to save and liberate my own country. For that purpose I have encountered the chances of war among strangers.
‘I have sacrificed all my views in life. I have courted poverty. I have left a beloved wife unprotected and children whom I have adored fatherless. After such sacrifice, in a cause which I have always considered – conscientiously considered – as the cause of justice and freedom, it is no great effort, at this day, to add the sacrifice of my life.’7
Knowing that a guilty verdict was a foregone conclusion, Tone asked the court to grant him a soldier’s death; that he be executed by firing squad rather than hanged as a criminal. His request was denied. Before the sentence could be carried out, however, Tone was found dead in his cell at Dublin’s Provost Prison. His captors called it suicide, claiming he had cheated the hangman by cutting his own throat. His comrades called it murder, suspecting he had been tortured and killed by his guards.
Napoleon grants Tone’s widow, Matilda, a pension for life, and his son William a commission in the army. The Irish grant Wolfe Tone immortality as a rebel martyr.
There is no accurate estimate of the number of rebels transported to New South Wales after the 1798 rebellion, but it could be as high as 800. If only a small percentage of those men are at Port Jackson during the visit of the Baudin expedition, Jacques Hamelin, as a former comrade-in-arms, will surely find a receptive audience. An Irishman who has once tasted victory over the ancient enemy might easily be persuaded to chance his arm once more, and there are martyrs to avenge, notably Wolfe Tone.
Irish convicts met by the French in New South Wales are aware that the British government, reacting to the rebellion and spooked by Irish sympathies with revolutionary France, have declared a legal union between Britain and Ireland. Unlike the union with Scotland it has been achieved not by negotiation but by intimidation and bribery. The Irish parliament has been abolished, Irish courts have lost their independence and, to rub salt into rebel wounds, Saint Patrick’s Cross has been added to the Union Jack.
François Péron, convinced that the transported rebels are spoiling for a fight, makes it his business to strike up casual conversations with Irish convicts, sounding out their views on where they would stand if the French mounted an invasion. He finds that many would be willing to rise up, chains notwithstanding, if a French man-of-war sailed into Port Jackson, guns blazing, but what Péron needs from the Irish is a potential leader.
One Irish rebel, William Maum, is a likely candidate. Maum, a classical scholar, obliges with a description of the state of the colony – in Latin. Péron, despite finding less useful military intelligence in Maum’s report than in Caesar’s Gallic Wars, makes him a tempting offer. He will smuggle him aboard Le Géographe and take him to Isle de France, where he will be commissioned as an officer in the French Navy and commander of the attack on Sydney.
Maum says thanks but no thanks. He has been made similar offers before by the French, he says, and all came to nothing. He does, however, point Péron in the direction of a friend who may be of some use to him, a French convict called Ferdinand Meurant.
Meurant tells Péron how he had hatched a cunning plan to destroy their mutual enemy not by force of arms but by crippling the economy – flooding Britain with counterfeit money.
‘I resolved, therefore, as a good patriot, to undertake that ruin, and to accomplish it in the very heart of London,’ Meurant tells him. ‘France would have held me in the greatest honour, and instead of being branded as a brigand I should have been proclaimed the avenger of my country.
‘Scarcely had I arrived in England when I commenced my operations, and at first they succeeded beyond all my hopes. Assisted by an Irishman no less skilful than myself, and who, like me, was actuated by a noble patriotism, desiring even more fervently than I did the downfall of England, I was soon enabled to counterfeit the notes of the bank with such perfection that it was even difficult for us to distinguish those which came from our own press from the genuine paper.
‘I was at the very point of a triumph,’ Meaurant says. ‘All my preparations were made for inundating England with our manufactured notes. Nothing was wanting except some information in regard to numbering them, when my companion – who up till then I had regarded as an honest man – took it into his head to steal some of the notes, which were as yet defective inasmuch as they lacked a few trifling but indispensable formalities.
‘He was arrested almost immediately, and as he had behaved dishonourably towards me, he did not hesitate to relapse into sin in another aspect. He revealed everything to the authorities. I was arrested and plunged into prison with him. All my instruments, all our banknotes, were seized, and Great Britain was saved from the ruin which I had prepared for her.’8
Convict records confirm that Ferdinand Meurant, an engraver by trade, was transported for life in 1800 for forgery. However, the tale he told Péron is embroidered at best and, at worst, is a total fabrication. Meurant, who fled to Ireland from France after the revolution, was arrested for forgery not in London, as he claimed, but in Dublin. And his claim to being a political prisoner rather than a common criminal is left in serious doubt when Péron, after his meeting with Meurant, discovers that his pocket has been picked.