Terre Napoleon

establish French colonia

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anded close application to geographical details, and a minute scrutiny of claims and occurrences. We enter into a wider historical realm when we begin to consider the motives which led Bonaparte to despatch the expedition of 1800 to 1804. Here we are no longer confined to shores which, at the time when we are concern

the whole planet? Had Bonaparte, so soon after ascending to supremacy in the Government of France, already conceived the dazzling dream of a vast world-empire acknowledging his sway, and was this a step towards the achievement of it? If not that, was he desirous by this means of striking a blow at the prestige of Great Britain, whose hero Nelson had smashed his fleet at the Nile two years before? Or had he ideals in the direction of establishing Fren

same epoch. An endeavour has, however, been made to set the facts in their right perspective, by a brilliant contemporary English historian, Dr. John Holland Rose, somewhat curtly in his Revolutionary and Napoleonic Era, but more fully in his Life of Napoleon.* (* Life of Napoleon 1 379 to 383. Still later, in his lecture on "England's Commercial Struggle with Napoleon," included in the Lectures on the Nineteenth C

on the part of English writers to use very small maps when speaking of the size of things in Australia.) Indeed, his inquiry "about the extent of British claims on the Pacific coast was so significant as to elicit from Governor King the reply that the whole of Van Diemen's Land and of the coast from Cape Howe on the south of the mainland to Cape York on the north, was British territory." The facts relative to the awakening of suspicion in Governor King's mind--to be discussed hereafter--are likewise stated; together with those affecting the settlements of Hobart and Port Phillip; and it is concluded that "the plans of Napoleon for the acquisition of Van Diemen's Land and the middle of Australia, had an effect like that which the ambition of Montcalm, Dupleix, Lally, and Péron has

be disappointed. The learned author, who is usually liberal in his citation of authorities, here confines himself to the Voyage de Decouvertes of Péron and Freycinet, the Voyage of Flinders, and the collection of documents in the seven volumes of the Historical Records of New South Wales--all works of first-class importance, but none of them bearing out the broad general statements as to the First Consul's plans and intentions. Not a scrap of evidence is adduced from memoirs, letters, or state papers. To represent N

fiable, and what consequences followed from them; we will search for motives; and we will look at what the expedition did, in case there should by any chance thereby be disclosed any hint of an aspiration towards territorial acquisition. We will try to regard the evidence as a whole, the object being--as the object of all honest historical inquiry must b