5

a new commission

Nantes, 1766

Surely all sailors long for undiscovered lands and unspoilt wilderness, to press their foot into sand that has seen no human imprint before. Is that not what we are all searching for? There is something profoundly thrilling about stepping onto untouched shores. How could anyone resist this call of the wild? Even when we know that our very presence – the act of observation – destroys the thing we were most desirous to find?

It is what I loved most, what I miss the most, from my childhood, that notion of stepping on land that seems untouched by human hands. It was a fantasy easier to maintain in childhood, when I could not see the human impact so well, when there was less pollution, fewer jets, and when the world’s population was half what it is now.

I suppose our early days of sailing around the islands and bays of Eyre Peninsula predisposed me to expect that the world was a place of emptiness and wilderness where people were few and far between. My notion of the world was one of stark limey cliffs rising out of wild blue seas, their flat ridges blanketed by a mosaic of mossy mounded coastal vegetation in a patchwork of grey-blues and olive-greens. Swathes of grass shimmered and rippled like molten gold across the inland, flowing around silvered salt lakes. The white sandy beaches vanished into the distance, backed by long windswept dunes held in place by razor-sharp grass. The sand was so fine and white that it packed squeaky hard as icing sugar beneath your feet. And I pranced like a windswept waif across the fragile surface, fair hair flying, leaving no mortal trace on the hard surface while my heavy-footed parents sank into the softness beneath.

Boats offer a particular advantage to maintaining this sense of isolation. Should some inconvenient fishing boat or picnicking party happen to intrude on your own private wilderness, playing loud music, or launching jet skis or riding trail bikes, you can haul up anchor and move somewhere else. Good fences may make good neighbours, but that is nothing compared to a few good sea miles. With their endless capacity to put distance between yourself and whatever is bothering you, boats offer the ultimate form of escape from the daily irritations of human interaction.

Despite the obvious attractions, I still wonder why people signed up for these early voyages. The risks were so high. A great many did not survive. But perhaps it is the same sense of restlessness that drives so many to emigrate, to move, to start a new life in a new land. For some, like Commerson and Bougainville, the glory and the rewards were clear enough, both financial and personal. For others, like the sailors, the risks of a life at sea were perhaps no worse than those on land, and the benefits of a set naval income (which could not readily be spent) worthwhile. Yet Jeanne gave up a secure and safe position looking after Commerson’s Paris apartment while he was away, answerable to no-one, to embark on an unknown adventure in a world where women were distinctly unwelcome.

What causes a particular group of people to set off from their homes with no clear certainty that they will ever return? I once traced back my family tree, over four or five generations, stopping only when I reached the adults who were not born in Australia. I identified at least 34 ancestors who had emigrated to Australia. What distinguishes these people from the ones who stayed behind – the ones who never seemed to go anywhere?

I read about a genetic study done on a 3000-year-old body pulled from a bog somewhere in Cheshire. The local butcher in a nearby small village turned out to be a direct descendant. Folks in Cheshire knew their place it seems. They were not migrants, sailors or nomads.

There must be something inherited in rootlessness. People descended from colonists – the non-indigenous inhabitants of Canada, Australia, the United States and New Zealand – move house, move state, move long distances within their own countries far more frequently and far further than residents of the United Kingdom and Europe.

It’s possible that some of my ancestors fled religious or cultural persecution: German Lutherans from Prussia or Scottish highlanders from the clearances. Others might have been escaping poverty and hard times: Cornish miners in search of rocks to quarry. But many left behind perfectly respectable businesses: the champagne-makers, hoteliers, farmers and teachers trying their luck in a new world. What made them leave and others stay? Surely it can’t just have been the weather.

And what about the explorers? They were in search of something different. They were not looking for a new home, but were, by and large, not afraid to leave their old one. Many of them would not return. They must have known the risks. But then, they were mostly young, in their teens and twenties, when their perception of risk, their own sense of immortality, was notorious.

Commerson knew the risks. Before he left Paris, he worked on compiling a martyrology of botany, so great were the numbers of botanists who had not returned from their travels. But they still did it, for the lure of fame, fortune or family tradition.

Jeanne was not seeking fame. She was not following a family tradition. I don’t think she was coerced, nor excessively devoted. I don’t think the money would have been any better than if she had stayed in Paris.

What if Jeanne sailed simply for the adventure? For the opportunities that might arise in a new and unexplored world? Commerson was passionately enthusiastic about the trip. Perhaps she shared that excitement. Her bravery, stoicism and self-determination may well have been one of the reasons Commerson was prepared to risk so much to retain her company – the ire of his in-laws and of polite society, and the consequences of defying naval ordinances in a position that could be the making, or breaking, of his career.

Perhaps Jeanne did it for exactly the reason so many others chose to go to sea, as Herman Melville wrote, because they were ‘tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote . . . to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts’. She told Bougainville that she embarked simply because the notion of sailing around the world had ‘piqued her interest’.

That seems as good a reason as any. We should take her at her word.

I wonder what stories stirred Jeanne to travel. When Jean-François de Galaup de Lapérouse set sail from France in 1785 on his famously ill-fated voyage, the only novel listed in his extensive shipboard library was Robinson Crusoe. Like many other sailors, Matthew Flinders was famously ‘induced to go to sea against the wishes of my friends’ from reading the same book.

Jeanne was not likely to have been inspired by a character in a book she could not read. The philosophical novels of Voltaire and others would, presumably, have passed her by unnoticed. Perhaps some travelling theatres passed through La Comelle to entertain with Molière or something colourful and Italian? What message could she take from Charles Perrault’s classic fairytales with long-suffering women and opportunistic men? Or perhaps she preferred the heroines in Madame d’Aulnoy’s fairytales, who were rewarded for overcoming less morally accountable challenges. It may have been the songs of the troubadours, the epic battles of Charlemagne, the stories of French saints or simply the fables of Tybalt the Cat or Hirsent the She-wolf that lit Jeanne’s eyes as she sat around the fireplace. Or perhaps, even in Burgundy, they told the legendary stories of Jeanne d’Arc, the Maid of Orleans, and the naval triumphs of Jeanne de Belleville, the Lioness of Brittany.

She could not have known that one day it would be Jeanne Barret who featured in such stories.

By the 1760s the general shape and structure of the world had been mapped by the European cartographers. Africa, Europe and Asia all had their characteristic shapes. Most of South and North America were known, save some vagaries around Canada and Greenland. But the western Pacific was still largely uncharted. Both Australia (New Holland) and New Zealand were pencilled in, but much of their coastline was indicated only by the vaguest of dotted lines. They were barely recognisable. The detailed maps of South-East Asia petered out beyond New Guinea into a smattering of islands that bore little resemblance to any modern geography. There was a lot of guesswork for the Pacific, at least for Europeans.

A traditional account of history would mention the domination of the Pacific by Spanish, Portuguese and Dutch trading powers. Their focus was on Asia, including the Indian subcontinent and South-East Asia. Australia and the oceanic Pacific, with poor opportunities for trade, were left largely unexplored by these powers. As the influence of Spain and Portugal declined, however, the European battle for imperial control shifted to France and Britain. While France emerged as one of the leading powers in Europe, the much smaller Britain positioned itself in the battle for control over global trade, quite probably on the back of its well-developed skills in piracy. It is a well-rehearsed story told over centuries as if it is the only version of the truth.

But there are other ways to tell this story, other truths. The Pacific was not unknown or even unmapped. The region had been comprehensively explored, discovered, navigated and settled for thousands of years before Europeans first ventured into its waters. The waves of exploration and migration, settlement and colonisation, war and trade across the islands of Asia and Australia and around the Indian Ocean are as complex and ancient as any Eurocentric human history.

The greatest maritime exploration of the Pacific belonged to the Polynesian people, who swept across Samoa, the Society Islands, New Zealand, Hawai‘i and Rapa Nui in an immense expansion between 800 BCE and 1290 CE. In the course of 2000 years, from the founding of the Greek states to the end of the Crusades to Jerusalem, Polynesian people expanded across the largest ocean on the planet, settling islands scattered over some 35 million square kilometres with a single coherent cultural group sharing language, customs, myths and skills.

Pacific history does not begin with Europeans. As Tongan anthropologist Epeli Hau‘ofa tells us, Pacific Indigenous history is not a footnote to the history of empires. It is, in fact, an account of its own great maritime empire, whose navigational and shipbuilding achievements predated and exceeded those of the Vikings, the Portuguese, Spanish and Dutch by centuries, if not millennia.

The narrative of history is, however, that of the written word. And with one swift definition, all oral history is disowned, truncated, belittled and silenced. This ‘unwritten’ history, before European contact, becomes ‘prehistory’ – relegated to folklore, mythology and superstition.

Even when Europeans encountered these great navigators, puzzled over the mystery of their presence on such isolated islands, admired their boats and love of the sea, it seemed that no-one bothered to ask them what they knew or how they travelled. And those who sailed with Bougainville into the Pacific would not be much different. It was as if it was beyond their imagination that people could travel so far, across such vast oceans, in such small vessels.

Louis Antoine de Bougainville was a veteran of the Canadian wars, a talented young man of modest origins fortuitously supported by well-connected family friends, who had the ear of the influential Jeanne Antoinette Poisson, chief mistress to Louis XV and better known as Madame de Pompadour. He seems to have been one of those clever capable men who did well at whatever he attempted and who was, by and large, admired by those he worked with. Mathematician, diplomat, ethnographer, naval commander, humanitarian, strategist and colonist. Dismayed by the loss of the Canadian colonies to Britain, Bougainville hatched a plan with his good friend, the sailor and privateer Nicolas-Pierre Duclos-Guyot, to set up a new colony on the unpopulated islands off the South American coast, which he named the Malouines after the port of St Malo but which are now known as the Falklands.

The French crown was willing to support the plan, but not to finance it, so Bougainville drew on his considerable personal connections to fund the building of two ships as an expedition fleet to the South American islands. The second ship, the Étoile, which Jeanne and Commerson would eventually join, was captained by François Chenard de la Giraudais, another veteran of the Canadian wars. Between them, these friends made several trips to South America, to the new colony on the Falklands, as well as to the Strait of Magellan and to the Spanish settlement of Montevideo, where their presence raised the suspicions of the Spanish authorities.

Spain was not happy with a French settlement appearing so close to their southern colonies. And so, while the colonists were settling in to their new home, the Spanish court was protesting to its counterparts in France. Madame de Pompadour had died. No-one knew whose influence would rise or fall in the circle of royal favourites. France could not afford Spanish animosity. It relinquished its claim to the Falklands and Bougainville’s nascent colony suddenly found itself without a home.

Bougainville’s orders were to sail the frigate Boudeuse to the French settlement on the Falkland Islands, and formally return the islands to the Spanish. If Bougainville doubted the Spaniards’ capacity to retain their newly acquired asset from the grasp of the English, there was nothing he could do about it. His diplomatic duty completed, he would be joined there by the store ship Étoile and the two vessels would continue on their voyage around the world.

The expedition would leave from Nantes, where the Boudeuse was being purpose-built for the voyage by Jean-Hyacinthe Raffeau at the Indret shipyard on the Loire River. We can see the busy riverside of Nantes, including the shipyards, in a series of nineteenth-century watercolour sketches by William Turner. Upright terrace houses on land mirror the forest of masts on water. Figures seem in constant motion on boats, in carts, on foot; buying, selling, building, loading. And low arched bridges and imposing chateaus rise above the markets. You can almost smell the eels sizzling in their butter.

As Jules Verne described his home town, Nantes was dominated by ‘the maritime movement of a big city of commerce, the point of departure and arrival for many long-haul voyages. I see again the Loire, its multiple arms connected by a league of bridges, its quays encumbered with cargoes under the shade of great elms . . . Ships docked in two or three rows. Others go up or down the river. No steamboats . . . we had only the heavy sailing ships of the merchant navy. What memories they stir! In imagination, I climbed their shrouds, I hoisted myself into the crow’s nest, I clung to the apple of their masts! What a desire I had to cross the quivering board which connected them to the quay and set foot on their deck!’

The Loire River was the departure point for ships and voyages, both real and imagined, for centuries.

I want to find where those eels end up, the ones that grew up in the rivulets and creeks of the Morvan before heading down the Loire River. Not all of them make it to the sea. Many of them are caught in nets on their way down the rivers, and cooked for dinner. But eels are hard to come by nowadays, even in Nantes.

I have joined a friend who lectures in French at Flinders University for a tour of historic Bretagne, the larger region that once comprised Brittany. Christèle’s family live in France. Her sister lives in Nantes, which was once Brittany’s capital until a departmental redistribution placed it outside its historic region. This port on the Loire River is too important to miss. It was not just the launching point of Bougainville’s expedition and the birthplace of Jules Verne’s fictional voyages but also the departure point for the long migration of the Arroux River eels to the Sargasso Sea.

There is a worldwide shortage of eels, from Japan to France, and they command a high price for their scarcity. Christèle’s sister tells us you can still get them, fried in butter and parsley with fresh new potatoes, in a little restaurant on the south bank of the Loire, aptly named La Civelle. It is a short ferry ride from the city centre down the river and past the island. The cross-hatched beams of the old docks line the river, broken here and there by industrial inlets – slipways, drydocks and berths. The skyline rises with old warehouses and sheds. Cranes lean over them, no longer a sign of maritime activity, but rather a new phase of real estate development, repopulating the industrial landscape with music, art, shops and housing.

As we head down the river we pass the steampunk theme park inspired by Verne’s work. A giant elephant, two storeys high, stalks between the old warehouses, carrying excited passengers on its exotic umbrella-ed panniers. A group of school girls squeal as the elephant swings its steaming trunk towards them. The workers who once trained in the shipyards and laboured on the docks have now brought the skills that built ships and engines to the production of elaborate carousels, street dragons, spiders and birds. The craftsmanship of centuries merges with the creative imaginings of art to give aesthetic life to new creations in an unexpected modern industry.

Our ferry docks at an enclave of cheap colourful restaurants popular with local office workers and visitors alike. We take a table on a dock looking out over a cluster of chairs that tumble down a cobbled boat ramp towards the river. We relax in the sun with a glass of crisp white, as we wait for the eels, which arrive freshly cooked and sizzling hot in an old pan, as simple and unadorned as they have ever been cooked along this river.

As we finish up our lunch, I watch a small recreational fishing boat slide down the river past the empty decaying dockyards of the once hectic commercial port. And it occurs to me that this is the only boat, other than the ferry, we have seen in the last two hours along this stretch of the Loire, once one of the busiest ports in all of France.

It was unusual for navies to provide a new ship for a voyage of exploration. Normally they would offer tired old ships, already close to the end of their short sailing lives. If they survived the long journey they were typically retired to serve as brigs and prison hulks, as storage or broken up for firewood. Appearances do not matter much for voyages of discovery. Any European ship, they might have argued, was enough to impress an islander in a pirogue. A cannon and a few muskets enough to subdue with superior firepower. A handful of trinkets enough to gain friendship and trade. These were not military voyages. They did not plan for violence or invasion, even though this seemed to follow inevitably in their wake.

And yet Bougainville received a brand-new ship, a fifth-rate frigate no less, for his journey, adapted with French innovation to carry the extra weight of 26 12-pound, rather than the usual 8-pound, cannons on the upper gun deck. The Boudeuse also had six 6-pounders on the quarterdeck and focsle. The ship could carry a full battle complement of 252 men, including twelve officers, into war, although fewer crew were required for peacetime activities.

Bougainville’s second-in-command, Duclos-Guyot, oversaw the fit-out. The ship was 40 metres along the gundeck, 10.5 metres across the beam. The bluff bow was fitted with an ornate figurehead. The sketched plans show a wild-eyed, curly-maned lion astride the head timbers, paws clamped over the royal crest. The wide square stern was studded with a single row of paned windows above two hinged ports for stowing spare timbers and spars. The tafferel above was tastefully enclosed in ornate neoclassical carvings, framing another royal crest, which sat among an array of standards and flags. The carvings would have been painted golden yellow, along with the trim on the upper timbers of the topsides, setting off the bright red hull and tarred black underbelly. Once complete, the ship was decorative but restrained – modest compared to the gilded glories of earlier periods, more suited to the refined tastes of the age of Enlightenment, yet indisputably signalling prosperity and impeccable style.

Why did Bougainville’s expedition warrant a brand-new warship? Was it a compliment to the commander, a war hero and personal favourite of Madame Pompadour? It probably had more to do with the Spanish and the necessary pomp and ceremony for handing over the Falklands to his Catholic Majesty without losing face. Fellow Europeans require much fancier trinkets to impress than those required for the people of other lands.

Despite the frigate’s military nature, the demands of the expedition came first. The central upper deck might have been nominally dedicated to artillery, but beneath that a false deck provided space for the crew, shared with cows, sheep and chickens. Towards the stern was the gunroom, and two small cabins of 2 by 2.5 metres each for the chaplain and the surgeon. Behind this, Bougainville’s cabin stretched 6 metres to the row of windows across the stern and occupied the full 7-metre width of the ship. Two small officer’s cabins squeezed to the front of this space on each side, while the remaining officers’ quarters were sheltered under the quarterdeck above.

It was, all in all, a grand ship to look at and impressive to sail, even if it was not ideally suited to an expedition. It drew too much water for close coastal work and could not store enough supplies to feed its crew for a long journey.

Bougainville, unusually, appointed his officers on the basis of experience rather than their connections. As captain of the Boudeuse, he appointed Nicolas-Pierre Duclos-Guyot, an ‘officer of the blue’: a Breton captain who earnt his position through merit rather than through nobility. Naval positions were more often given to influential aristocratic ‘officers of the red’.

The Étoile, too, was under the command of a Breton sailor. Bougainville had sailed this ship to South America before. He knew it was a reliable and solid vessel, as was the captain, François Chenard de la Giraudais. At 40, La Giraudais was one of the oldest and most experienced men on the expedition. He had been at sea, with his father, since the age of five, slipping between the merchant and royal navies, successively commanding larger fleets and bigger battles. Valued in war, like most officers of the blue he was unceremoniously dumped by the navy in peacetime. He knew enough not to rely on the navy to make his fortune. He was a capable and competent sailor, generous and easygoing, if sometimes too cautious for his less experienced expedition commander.

The other officers of the Étoile were also pragmatic and down-to-earth. Jean-Louis Caro and Joseph Donat seemed to have had little interest in personal intrigues or philosophical debate. They were Breton sailors, plain and simple – loyal, stoic and excellent at their job. They set their own courses.

Not to say the expedition didn’t have any influential aristocrats. It was the French navy after all. Charles-Henri-Nicolas-Othon d’Orange et de Nassau-Siegen, most often known as the Prince of Nassau, was king without a country, perhaps even without claim to a title. Bougainville had met him at a dinner given by the Comte de Maurepas, a prominent statesman. Nassau-Siegen was a charming and erudite young man, with naval experience, but also a prodigious debt and troubled reputation. Bougainville invited him to join them as a volunteer, but over the course of the journey he increasingly took on the duties and responsibilities of an officer.

Bougainville departed from Nantes on 15 November 1766 while the Étoile was still being fitted out in Rochefort. Just two days out to sea the Boudeuse was struck by a violent squall that snapped the fore-topmast, then the main-topmast, which carried away the head of the mainmast. Bougainville had no choice but to return to Brest for repairs.

It takes time, and long sea trials, to finesse the balance of a sailing boat. Caliph’s rig took years to evolve, as did the distribution of ballast. We collected our first ballast from the northernmost of the Bicker Islands off Port Lincoln. On a calm day, we nudged Caliph in against the deep-shelving shoreline to load perfectly rounded football-sized boulders directly into the bilge, just as generations of coastal trading ketches had done before us.

At the height of the age of sail, ships were fragile constructions of timber and rope that floated with delicately balanced precision between air and water – whether riding high and light, or fully laden and wallowing, whether in shallow waters with a short chop, or in great rolling swells like mountain ranges, whether running fully rigged before the wind, or beating mean and tight into it.

Like many French ships, the Boudeuse pushed the boundaries of innovation in naval architecture. It had been built with an ‘enormous’ tumblehome, the upper deck of the hull curving inwards like a tulip-shaped wine glass. Tumblehome improves stability, lowering the weight carried in the ship. It makes the ship more difficult to board at close-quarters, while the sloping flanks deflect cannon balls more effectively than straight sides. But the narrowed width also reduces the angle between the base of the shrouds and the top of the mast, essentially making it harder to support the tall rig. On the Boudeuse, this problem was compounded by the heavy load of stores required for the long voyage planned, which were clustered at the bases of the masts and along the keel, making the masts vulnerable when the ship rolled.

This is why new ships require running in. It takes time to get to know their individual habits and temperament. It takes time to calibrate the distribution of ballast against the resistance of the water and the windage in rigging and sail, in order to achieve perfect performance. New ships need trimming in sea trials to ensure that the rig and the hull are balanced and stable, ballast shifted, rigs modified, masts and spars extended or shortened. It would be disingenuous to expect a newly built ship to embark on a long sea voyage without the benefit of adequate sea trials but there was no time to run in the Boudeuse.

Bougainville ordered the masts shortened, the upper timbers re-caulked, and replaced the 12-pounders with 8-pounders, substantially reducing the ship’s weight. But he still had his doubts about its seaworthiness for a long voyage. He considered sending the ship back from the Falklands and continuing in the solid and reliable Étoile, although in time he would appreciate Boudeuse’s speed and rail over Étoile’s lack of pace.

Those on board would be equally tested – both old hands who could be relied upon and new ones who had yet to prove their worth. They would have to be as tough as the brown burrowing bivalves, the sea dates, that buried themselves almost invisibly within the rocks and withstood all the pounding ferocity of the waves.

‘Glory requires, like Fortune, a race of men both hardy and tenacious,’ Commerson would say as he prepared to embark.

Of course, it was not just the men who would have to be hardy and tenacious on this particular voyage, but a woman too.