6. Baudin's Legacy

Nicolas Baudin’s expedition took a tremendous toll on its scientific party and crew, with much desertion, illness and death experienced. Baudin himself died of tuberculosis in Mauritius in 1803, on the journey back to France. Nevertheless, the expedition was deemed a triumph when it returned to France in 1804.

Baudin’s expedition successfully charted thousands of kilometres of Australia’s coast, complementing the work of navigator Matthew Flinders and helping to determine beyond all speculation that the continent was an island.  The voyage was responsible for issuing French names for hundreds of locations around the Australian coast, approximately two hundred of which are still in use in Western Australia today. Some French place-names familiar to Western Australians that celebrate Baudin’s expedition include Cape Naturaliste, Geographe Bay, Hamelin Bay and Point Peron.

The expedition also secured the most valuable natural history collection of its time. More than 200,000 dried and preserved specimens and objects were collected, of which 2,542 animal and 640 plant species were new to science. It was also the first major collection of live exotic animals to come to France in known historical records. The value of the collection lay not only in its size, but also the care with which the naturalist François Péron had taken in cataloguing the specimens. Each specimen was labelled - the date, the place, and the circumstances of its collection were all meticulously recorded, and complemented by sketches, pencil drawings and water colours by the expedition artists. 

In addition to the flora and fauna gathered and documented, 796 mineral samples were returned to France, many observations were recorded of unknown lands, and contact of anthropological significance with Australian Aboriginal peoples had been made. 

The expedition also left an incredible pictorial legacy, with expedition artists Charles-Alexandre Lesueur and Nicolas-Martin Petit illustrating what was found on the shores and in the waters of the Australian coasts they explored. They created over 1500 drawings and paintings of birds, animals and marine creatures.

The fieldwork and published reports of the expedition established France’s credentials in botany, vertebrate and invertebrate zoology, anthropology, geology and geography in the international scientific community during that time and beyond.

Now, hundreds of years on, some of these natural history records provide important information on how the biodiversity of Australia has changed since the beginnings of European settlement, with many species recorded now endangered or extinct.