In August of 1813, New South Wales Governor Lachlan Macquarie received a despatch from the Secretary of State for the Colonies, Lord Bathurst, warning of an impending attack on Sydney by the French and their American allies.
These were perilous times, with Britain and her colonies at war not only with France but with the United States of America. From what he assumed to be a reliable source, Bathurst had received intelligence that four French warships, each carrying 250 troops, were set to sail from France for Port Jackson within three months, and that the squadron would be reinforced en route by an American ship carrying 300 soldiers.
In what seemed a reprise of the ill-fated invasion of 1810, or at least a variation on the theme, the squadron planned to land at Botany Bay, where the invaders, led by Count Dillon, an Irish commander in the French service, would be joined by rebel convicts, then march north to take Sydney by surprise.
Bathurst’s reliable source, so it turned out, was none other than Jørgen Jørgensen, the erstwhile Dog Days King of Iceland. In an incarnation as a spy for Britain, during his lost years between being deported to England from Iceland and being transported from England to Van Diemen’s Land, he claimed to have gleaned the information from Count Dillon, an expatriate French aristocrat he happened to meet one day at a coffee house in the Strand. Presuming the Dane to be an enemy of England, Dillon unfolded the dastardly plot.
‘I lost no time, therefore, in communicating what I had heard to a friend connected with the Colonial Office,’ Jørgensen wrote in one of the many ‘histories’ and letters to the press he penned while in prison. ‘But when an official of high station in that department was informed of it he looked upon the scheme as so wild and so unlikely to be carried into effect at a time when the whole energies of Europe were drawn to a vortex in the life-and-death struggle, that he totally disregarded my information, saying to my friend, “There is no fear. The attempt is not worth their while, and even if they did make it and succeed, England would lose little or nothing. These colonies are not worth keeping, for they already cost us £100,000 a year.”
‘Nothing, therefore, was done by the British government to intercept the expedition and save Australia from foreign domination, but providence interposed to avert the calamity. The two French ships, under Count Dillon, were overtaken by a violent storm and wrecked near Cadiz, and that put an end to the enterprise as far as France was concerned. Not so with the Americans, who proceeded out to Australian waters, where they captured and burnt no less than 17 of our whaling ships.’1
It is true that American raiders wreaked havoc on colonial whalers during the war of 1812, sparking a hike in the price of whale oil on the London market, but it is not true that Count Dillon led an invasion force to Sydney in 1813, simply because he was dead. There had been an Irish brigade of the French army, led by Dillons, since 1688, but the last of that line, Arthur Dillon, was guillotined in 1794 during the revolution.
More likely, Jørgen Jørgensen borrowed this scenario from François Péron, whom he met during the Baudin expedition’s visit to Sydney. Jørgensen, who was at that time a sailor on Matthew Flinders’ Investigator, accompanied Péron on one of his treks inland, and apparently fostered a close relationship with the Frenchman. Many a night might have been spent around the camp fire sharing arak, spilling secrets and spinning yarns, each spy vying to out-lie the other.
In 1817, while Napoleon languished on Saint Helena, Louis XVIII approved an expedition to Australia under the command of Louis de Freycinet. While the aims of the expedition were purely scientific, Freycinet, on returning to many of the places he explored with Baudin, made a point of revisiting Shark Bay, in Western Australia, where he would commit an act of historical vandalism.
Back in 1801 when, as an officer of Le Naturaliste, he was present at the discovery of a pewter plate erected in 1697 by the Dutch navigator Willem de Vlamingh, Freycinet wanted to take the plate as a souvenir, but his commander, Captain Hamelin, would not allow it. The plate, Hamelin told him, had been spared by man and nature for more than a century, and to remove it was a kind of sacrilege.
Untroubled by such sensitivities, Freycinet did what he had so badly wanted to do back in 1801: he removed the oldest known memorial to European presence in Australia and took it home to France, where it would be lost until 1940, when it was discovered by accident gathering dust in a storeroom at the French Academy.
Presented as a gift to Australia by the French government in 1947, the plate was placed in a museum in Canberra, sparking outrage in Western Australia.
The West Australian newspaper opined, ‘Vlamingh’s plate rightly belongs to Western Australia. The French, good fellows, have repented of their forebears’ pillage and have made restitution. It is the Commonwealth now that is prepared to play the dubious game of hanging on to someone else’s property.’2
In 1950, the federal government relented, and the plate was placed on display at the Western Australian Museum, Fremantle, where it remains.
In La Savane park in Fort-de-France, on the Caribbean island of Martinique, there is a headless figure. It is a vandalised statue of Josephine Bonaparte, Empress of France.
The statue, erected in 1859 by Josephine’s grandson, Napoleon III, was beheaded in 1991 and later splattered with red paint by locals in the belief that Josephine, who was born and raised on Martinique, convinced Napoleon in 1802 to reinstate slavery on the island and other French territories.
Although Josephine’s father was a slave-owner, her attitude toward the institution of slavery is unknown, and there is no evidence to support the claim that the reinstatement of slavery on Martinique was due to her influence.
In fact, when Napoleon revoked the law ending slavery in French territories it had no effect on Martinique because Martinique, like Isle de France and other slave-owning French colonies, had ignored the law ending slavery.
Napoleon considered the slave trade too profitable to abolish, a view shared by the hero of Trafalgar, Horatio Nelson, who railed against ‘the damnable and cursed doctrine’ of the great abolitionist William Wilberforce ‘and his hypocritical allies’ whose demands ‘would certainly cause the murder of all our friends and fellow subjects in the colonies’.3
Josephine only barely escaped the guillotine during the French Revolution. Still, despite her being Martinique’s sole claim to fame, her statue remains headless, and the red paint has not been removed.
In Bedford Memorial Park, in Broome, Western Australia, is a bronze bust of Nicolas Baudin above a plaque that reads, in part: ‘Baudin’s expedition secured the most valuable natural history collection of its time – more than 200,000 specimens of flora and fauna were collected, of which 2542 were new to science, doubling the number of known species. It was the first time live animals were transported, which later formed a small Australian zoo at the Empress Josephine’s summer palace at Malmaison on the outskirts of Paris.’
There is no monument in Australia to François Péron.
Take the Metro yellow line from central Paris to its terminus at La Défense, a modern precinct with many tall buildings, including the striking Grande Arche, a twentieth-century version of the Arc de Triomphe. From there, take the 258 bus for 20 stops along a tree-lined thoroughfare of mainly shops and apartment buildings, mostly in classical French style but some modern, and all named after French leaders, starting from Avenue Charles de Gaulle to Avenue Napoleon Bonaparte. The route crosses the Seine, and by the time you get to Avenue Napoleon Bonaparte the bitumen footpaths will have given way to cobblestones. Alight at the second-last stop, and it’s a short walk to Malmaison.
The front of the chateau is imposing, and both sides feature splendidly restored gardens, but the rear is in desperate need of repair. Inside, you can visit the drawing room, with its three large portraits of Josephine, the dining room, the salon, Napoleon’s gold bedroom and Josephine’s two bedrooms – one red, one white. And outside, at the back, in an overgrown enclosure divided by a stream, you might just be able to make out the dark shapes of some waterbirds. Black swans.