Vasse Felix Vineyard in WA and the Extraordinary French Plan to Invade Australia

 

   

 Dr Tom Cullity, an idiosyncratic and visionary surgeon, named his first vineyard after the unfortunate Timothée Thomas Joseph Ambroise Vasse who’d disappeared 166 years earlier during a storm at Geographe Bay, some thirty miles north-west of where Tom had found the ideal terroir for his new vines. 

     Vasse was a young sailor who went missing when members of a landing party from a French naval expedition led by Nicholas Baudin - which had spent over a week exploring the area where Bussleton now stands, was attempting, in heavy surf, to rejoin their ships which had been riding out a storm some miles off-shore. 

Nicholas Baudin

     To the young midshipman’s surname, Cullity appended, ‘Felix’,     from  the Latin for ‘happy’, ‘blessed’ or ‘fortunate’. It   was an   appellation that’d had come into vogue in what was to   become Australia when, in 1836 Thomas Mitchell, who’d had   his spirit nearly broken in the red heart of the continent, named   the fertile lush lands south of the Murray River, ‘Australia   Felix’ to, as he noted in his journal, “better distinguish it from   the parched deserts of the interior country where we had   wandered so unprofitably and so long.” 

     Just exactly how Vasse perished was to forever remain moot. 

     François Péron - a young scientist as ambitious as he was   opinionated - had joined the expedition at the last minute as a   junior zoologist. Captain Baudin was as careless with his   charges’ health as he was with their loyalty and through death or   desertion of those above him, by the time they reached the   western coast of New Holland, Péron was the senior of his   species on the voyage. He was charged with writing the early   journals of the expedition and of the night of June 8th 1801: 

 “(the) most deplorable (part) in this last disaster, was the loss of one of the best seamen belonging to the Naturalist, whose name was Vasse …. Three times carried away by the force of the waves at the moment when he was endeavouring to embark, he disappeared in the midst of them, without there being any possibility of affording him assistance, or even being assured of his death: the violence of the waves, and the darkness of the night being so great at the time.” 

François Péron

 Rumours swirled for a short time that he’d survived, lived with aboriginals for several years, been rescued by an American vessel which transferred him to an English cruiser and then arrived in England where he was detained (which Péron, ever the Anglophobe termed ‘contrary to the law of nations’). 

     On May 5th 1838, George Fletcher Moore, an Irish immigrant and lawyer who’d migrated to the Swan Colony (in the care of four servants) eight years earlier, began a long letter to the Perth Gazette with a claim that most readers would be aware of the Baudin expedition: 

 “It is known to most of your readers that in the latter end of the year 1800, the French Government fitted out an expedition, consisting of two corvettes … for the purpose of making a voyage of discovery along the Australian shores.” 

 The letter’s focus was on the loss of Timothee Vasse, and he quoted Péron at length before going on to relate that he’d recently visited that part of the coast himself and claimed to have gleaned the following:

 Poor Vasse did escape from the waves, but, enfeebled, as he was, with sickness, exhausted by his struggles, exposed to the fury of the storm, unsheltered, and apparently abandoned among the savages, perhaps he would have thought death a preferable lot. 

But the savages appear to have commiserated his misfortunes; they treated him kindly and relieved his wants to the extent of their power, by giving him fish and other food. Thus he continued to live for sometime, but for what length of time I have not yet been able to ascertain. 

He quotes no source for these claims but then continues in his letter to the Perth Gazette that, 

 “(Vasse’s) remains were not disturbed even for the purpose of burial, and the bones are yet to be seen.”

     Moore had a deep interest in, and knowledge of the Nyungar people, and four years later published a dictionary of their language. His month-long trip to the south west coast had been longer than expected, but as he wrote in his journal, they’d: 

 “touched at several settlements on the coast which I had great desire to see, and, the weather being fine, the delay has been rather agreeable than otherwise.” 

One of these stops had been at the Vasse Inlet where its namesake came to grief and after a stay Moore moved, 

 “six miles farther down the coast (to where) the Bussell family live. We stayed there two days, and spent them very agreeably.” 

    Time was obviously not of the essence and yet Moore claimed that when ‘the natives’ offered to take them to the Vasse’s bones which were distant not more than seven miles at near Toby’s Inlet, “time pressed” and so he forsook this unique opportunity to settle an historical mystery. 

     So what we have here is a bloke who’s deeply interested in an historical event and in getting to the truth of its major unknown and who’s just a morning’s walk from the site that will provide a never to be repeated chance to lay it all to rest. 

     But, er, he doesn’t have time. 

     Really? 

    I know that thirst and passion that drives people like G.F.Moore Esq, and I refuse to accept he’d refuse to accept such an offer. We can put that in the yeah-nah column and confidently ignore his claims that he’d been told poor Vasse’s bones were still on the beach. Just as we can the other wild stories of Vasse ending up in England by the miraculous courtesy of American and English cruisers. 

    But however Timothy perished, if the 27 year old’s luck had been better and he’d survived, it's certain there’d be no ‘Vasse’ River’, no ‘Vasse’ township and one of Australia’s finest vineyards would’ve had a different name. He would’ve forever remained a non-exceptional helmsman second-class of an early white visit to the continent which had more than its share of mortalities.

 

     Far more crucially, if the luck of Vasse’s French expedition had been better, if all their goals, and those back in France who were relying on them, were achieved, not just the winery, not just the Margaret River Region, but the entire continent and nation of Australia would have had different names and – quite likely - a different official language. 

 Timothée Vasse joined Baudin’s expedition which sailed from Le Harve, France in October 1880, seven months after Napoleon Bonaparte had formally approved a voyage “to the coasts of New Holland” with the avowed aims of "observation and research relating to Geography and Natural History”. 

     The two ships of the expedition, the Géographe and the Naturaliste first saw the cliffs of Cape Leuwin on the south west tip of the continent on May 1st 1801. The boats edged northward charting the coastline and on May 30th anchored in a pleasant bay which they named Geographe Bay after their captain’s vessel. 

     The pleasant weather didn’t last a week and after the disappearance of Vasse, Baudin headed back west then north to Timor where sickness ravaged the crews of both boats before they returned to the west coast before reuniting with the Naturaliste and heading south east to Tasmania ,arriving in January 1802. 

     The two boats separated with the Naturaliste heading for Port Jackson and the Geographe heading west along the south coast of the continent. On April 8th 1802 Matthew Flinders in his Investigator, also charting the southern coastline, spotted the sails of the Geographe just forty miles from the mouth of the continent’s greatest river. 

     Neither captain knew that Britain and France had signed the Treaty of Amiens just fourteen days earlier briefly ending that part of the Napoleonic Wars (the peace lasted only another thirteen months). Both ships pulled alongside, flying their ensigns and the white sign of peace and surrender. 

     Explorers back then were provided with passports by foreign countries to assure safe passage – even in times of war - on a specified vessel and Flinders checked that Baudin’s credentials were in order but when he provided the French captain with his own, they were returned unchecked. 

     Flinders’s maps and charts were more detailed and up-to-date than Baudin’s and he provided these so Baudin could make copies to ensure safer passage and two explorers bade each other adieu and parted two days later with respect and in friendship. 

     It wasn’t the last time the tacking tracks of their lives would cross, but future encounters would be more memorable and far more foreboding. Meanwhile the Naturaliste, with Péron onboard, had reached Port Jackson and the zoologist had begun his work ashore. 

    In his time in Australia Péron was largely responsible for the cataloguing of over 10,000 specimens. He was a prescient ecological and ethnological thinker and a pioneering oceanologist but he had other arrows in his quiver. 

     In 1802 Péron and some of his colleagues stayed James Larra’s Freemason’s Hotel which had been established four years earlier in Parramatta. The first mention of the food at this pub – one of the handful of five which were granted the first licences in the colony - had been two years earlier when an Irishman, Joseph Holt, after watching the flogging of an Irish convict named Galvin, had, with the Provost General walked to Parramatta and “went to a tavern, kept by James Larra, an honest Jew, where we dined upon a nice lamprey and some hung beef.” (Nothing quite like meat after watching live human flesh being tenderized with 300 lashes.) 

     But it was the zoologist from Baudin’s expedition who wrote the colony’s first substantial review of pub food – this pub’s food - and in his journal Péron gushed: 

 “we were served with an elegance, and even a luxury ….. the best wines, such as Madeira, Port, Xeres, Cape, and Bourdeaux, always covered our tables; we were served on plate, and the decanters and glasses were of the purest flint; nor were the eatables inferior to the liquors. … Mr. Larra caused us to be served in the French style; and … amongst the convicts who acted as his domestics, was an excellent French cook.” 

 No mention was made of raising a glass to the soul and memory of luckless Timothée Vasse. He was, by then, one of just many who’d perished on the journey. 

     In the mean-time it wasn’t plain sailing for Matthews Flinders. In February 1802 he lost 8 seamen when their cutter capsized whilst searching for fresh water and his voyage to England was abandoned off the Arnhem Land coast when the rotting Investigator was condemned as unseaworthy. He headed to

The Investigator

Timor for repairs and then returned to Port Jackson. In August 1803 Flinders attempted another voyage to England in the Porpoise together with two other ships, the Bridgewater and Cato but within three weeks Porpoise and Cato were smashed on Wreck Reef off the north Queensland coast. 

     The captain of the Bridgewater, claiming later to have believed that all on board both boats had perished, mounted no rescue attempt and headed north through Torres Strait to Batavia and then to Tellicherry in India. Here, his first officer and several others turned their back on the captain who’d turned his back on his colleagues and the Bridgewater left for England. 

     The ship, the captain and all remaining hands promptly disappeared without trace. 

     Back on Wreck Reef, Flinders – a very different sort of captain - saved most of his papers and charts (and his cat, Trim) and engaged the ship’s carpenter to make seaworthy the hull of a six-oared, small-sailed cutter and to give it a light deck. To reflect confidence that a rescue party would return to save those who stayed behind, Flinders left his most treasured possessions, his charts and books, behind as his ‘pledge’ to return. 

     After a 12 day voyage in this small boat – appropriately renamed Hope - Matthew Flinders and a dozen men arrived back in Sydney to raise the alarm for a rescue mission for the rest of the crew. 

     But, of course, you’re wondering what a determined and gifted but ill-lucked English sailor and a bon vivant French zoologist with a taste for fine wine and viands – both on the east coast of the continent - have to the death of a midshipman in a storm – and the naming of a vineyard - back on the west coast. 

     Well, from the start, Baudin’s expedition had two goals. The well-publicised aim to chart the coast line of New Holland and to gather fauna (live for the garden of Napoleon’s mistress, Josephine, and stuffed for the museums of France) and flora, was in reality a cover story for another ambition: to research all aspects of the settlement at Port Jackson in preparation for a French invasion of the colony. Quite simply it was an elaborate, if you’ll pardon my French a reconnaissance classique. 

     Under the subterfuge of zoology and science, François Péron ingratiated himself at every level, backgrounding the discontented Irish – both free and convicts, mapping the settlement and examining what he decided to be the ideal route for attack. He wrote in his journal: 

 “I don’t guarantee that that my observations are complete but I can assure you that they are accurate … I was able to gain the confidence of the governor, his secretary, the lieutenant governor, of most of the civil and military officers, the colonial doctors, the protestant ministers and the nature of my work, my double title of doctor and naturalist, made me less suspect and allowed me to ask a mass of questions, which coming from anyone else would have been badly received. I have visited most parts of the colony, I have visited the flocks, the countryside, questioned the farmers etc, to obtain exact information which may be useful to the interests of my country.” 

 After five months in Sydney, Baudin’s ships left port in November 1802 and Le Geographe arrived in Port Louis, Mauritius the following August. 

    A lot had happened in that nine months. Napoleon had sold Louisiana to the Americans for $15 million, and had used part of the money to finance an invasion of Switzerland. Britain declared war (yet again) on France objecting to this violation of the Treaty of Amiens. Also under this 1801 treaty, Great Britain agreed to restore to the French Republic and its allies all conquests made during the recent wars (including those in India) except Trinidad and Ceylon. 

     Charles Mathieu Isidore Decaen was such an accomplished, gallant and charismatic military leader that he aroused Napoleon’s suspicions and insecurities and his friendship with Moreau whom Bonaparte considered even more of a rival drove the French leader to consider that such a person is best kept far away. So Napoleon commissioned Decaen to lead the French colonies in India - which Britain was bound to soon return under the Treaty of Amiens. 

     Decaen sailed from Brest in February, 1803, tasked with going to Pondicherry on India’s east coast to take charge of the former and soon-to-be--again French possessions there and from there to control Ile-de-France (Mauritius) which the English had not taken during the war. But when Decaen arrived at Pondicherry, the British flag still fluttered with graceful authority over the Government buildings. Also – more ominously – the French vessel, La Belle Poule – which had been sent in advance - was at anchor, sandwiched between two British ships of war. 

    Decaen soon grasped that the flag wasn’t coming down any time soon and the two enemy ships weren’t double parked on his frigate because nowhere else was available. A few hours after his arrival, another French ship arrived carrying orders for Decaen to evacuate this hopeless situation and head for Ile de France where he was to assume the governorship of the island. 

     On August 15th, tail firmly between his military legs, Decaen landed at Port Louis, Ile-de-France, appointing himself governor the following day. Just eight days later, Capt Nicolas Baudin, with François Péron aboard, steered his Le Geographe into Port Louis. Any friendly camraderie between the pair was short-lived, because, well, because Baudin was also short-lived. Less than a month after arriving he joined the ranks of so many casualties of his voyage and succumbed to tuberculosis. As popular in death as in life, not a single member of his crew attended the captain’s funeral. C-est la vie! 

     Péron, the master of ingratiation stepped up after his unpopular leader's death and provided Decaen – who was no doubt still smarting from the rebuff from the Brits up in Pondicherry – with a detailed report on an invasion plan for the settlement on Sydney. He retained a copy and Péron took another when Le Geographe finally left port bound for France on December 14th. 

     Péron later expanded his invasion plan but the shorter version certainly didn’t lack detail or vehemence. After classifying Cook’s actions of 1788 as ‘a ridiculous transfer of sovereignty’ and an ‘absurd Act of Possession’, Péron argued that Britain’s actions on the east coast of New Holland constituted a threat to the global balance of power and urged that France should:

    “strike a blow at this international bogeyman at all costs, otherwise world trade will be in England’s hands. One of the cruelest blows we can deliver her is to overthrow her nascent empire in the Southern Lands (ie Sydney).” 

 Referring to convicts as ‘slaves’ he argued that an alliance might easily be forged by the French with Irish convicts as they harboured: “the most implacable hatred of England and…should an attack take place, France can count on their unswerving devotion” (He was right on the money here. Less than three months after he departed Port Jackson, Irish convicts and disaffected settlers mounted the only armed insurrection in Australia’s history – the Battle of Vinegar Hill at Rouse Hill.) 

     Peron’s plan was for a fleet laden with marines and soldiers to sail into Broken Bay, north of Port Jackson, then up the Hawkesbury River to Windsor, join with the Irish and attack the settlement from the west. Not 24 hours after Le Geographe                      

The Naturaliste and Geographe

left port for France on December 24th, Decaen, now fully conversant with military spies working under the cover of discovery and scientific purposes, and bolstered with a plan to revenge his rebuff in India through and invasion of Port Jackson, watched as a small cutter limped - (not sure that a boat can limp but you get the picture) - into Port Louis. 

     Its name was the Cumberland, and it was captained by the man who’d made all his charts and findings freely available to the Baudin expedition and who’d made sure the French were treated honourably and favourably during their five-month stay in Sydney – a man who was a pure navigator and explorer - Matthew Flinders. 

     Flinders had a number of reasons for stopping at the French port: His small 29 tonne boat was failing fast and needed replacing, or at bare minimum extensive repairs; he had letters from Governor King for General Magellon (whom Decaen replaced as the island’s commander); he sought more knowledge of the winds and weather of the area. 

He also had another major consideration: He wrote in his journal that with: 

 “the possibility of another war having taken place, in which case touching the French colony, for which I have a passport, the necessity of stopping at the Dutch settlement at the Cape, for which I have no passport, could be avoided, for I could take in a sufficiency at Mauritius to carry on to St Helena.” (emphasis added) 

 Relaxed due to his possession of the French-issued passport for safe passage, Flinders was also prescient in anticipating the loss of the Cape to the Dutch. Unknown to him, the peace between Britain and France had failed and they been once again at war, since the previous May. 

     Decaen, meanwhile was fully aware of the state of war and in no mood for any compromise. In the trail of tribulations stemming from the demise of the Investigator to the destruction of the Porpoise, the 12 day return to Port Jackson in Hope and the re-provisioning of the Cumberland, Matthew Flinders had overlooked a crucial detail. 

     Passports were issued to individuals in connection with specific vessels and Flinders’s was for him as captain of the Investigator whose filleted hulk lay in the mud of Port Jackson.
Years before, and half the world away, Nicholas Baudin had not even inspected Flinders’s passport when it was proffered but Decaen was of different stock. He checked the visitor’s documents, found them deficient and had Flinders arrested. 

     Despite appeals from numerous intermediaries including Joseph Banks, Decaen kept Flinders under various forms of house arrest for six years five months and twenty seven days. In March 1806 when Napoleon ordered the release of Flinders, Decaen refused to comply. (“Merde, Emperor, it’s a bad line, I can’t hear you!”) 

Decaen

     But the wheels of history were slowly churning. In 1808 Commodore Josias Rowley led a blockade of Île Bonaparte and Isle de France, both of which had naval bases under the command of Jacques Hamelin, who’d been Baudin’s captain of the Naturaliste. In May the following year a small British expeditionary force seized Rodrigues Island to the east of Mauritius from the French and a month later, on the orders of Admiral Albermarle Bertie, commanding officer of the Cape of Good Hope naval base, the Royal Navy began a blockade of Mauritius itself. 

     Flinders had used his time to compile and edit his journals and to also chart and map the township and harbour and in January 1809 he managed to secret a letter and likely maps of the island and its harbour addressed to Admiral Bertie aboard a departing ship. 

     With the Royal Navy gaining ascendency in the Indian Ocean, the conniving Decaen finally released Matthew Flinders on March 28th 1810 and he left the island bound for India exactly 11 weeks later.

     Rowley now invaded Ile Bonaparte, Mauritius’s closest island neighbour to the west, quickly restored its name of Ile Bourbon before audaciously capturing Île de la Passe just east of the entrance to Mauritius’s harbour and attempting to blockade the entrance to Grand Port. 

     But the French weren’t done quite so easily and when four of their ships broke the blockade, the British fleet commander, Capt Samuel Pym ordered his four ships to give chase. It wasn't a great decision. Two soon became trapped in the shallow channels and were burned by the French, a third was defeated and destroyed whilst the other failed to get within firing range but was seized and laid waste. 

British ships burn at the Battle of Grand Port

     It was the Britain’s worst naval defeat of the entire Napoleonic Wars but Rowley now moved against the French in open sea and in September captured Commander Hamelin and his flagship Venus. (By God you should have seen us!) 

     Down at the Cape, Bertie had received the maps, plans and insights from Flinders and assembled a force of 7,000 men in 70 vessels and had them land at Grand Baie just north of the Mauritian capital in late November. With the port blockaded by Rowley the French force of just over 1,500 were outnumbered and without hope of reinforcement. 

    French captain, Jean Dornal de Guy who was in charge of four frigates in the harbour, ordered his men from their onboard work of preparing his ships for a different campaign, to strengthen the town garrison. But it was to no avail. The British, thanks to Flinders’s maps and intel, were intimately au fait with the lay of the land and overwhelmed the French who agreed to a ceasefire on December 2nd. Decaen surrendered the following day. 

    Amongst the spoils of war, the British confiscated de Guy’s four frigates moored in the harbour: the Manche, Astrée, Bellone and Minerve. They were partially loaded and just days from sailing. Their mission was an implementation of the reports of François Péron – the invasion of Port Jackson, New Holland. Now, like the island’s most famous bird, the dodo, these plans were extinct. 

     Matthew Flinders had succeeded almost by accident at a task which his rival Baudin had planned carefully but failed: he’d provided the intel and the information that facilitated the invasion and takeover of a rival’s strategic colony. Quelle ironie! 

 And with this success based as it was on the plans of Flinders, the infelicitous death of Timothy Vasse on a far-off coast morphed from tragic to pointless. 

    So as you raise a glass at the stunning restaurant at Tom Cullity’s vineyard, and as you roll that mouthful of nectar over your tongue by all means honour the memory of Timothée Thomas Joseph Ambroise Vasse. 

     But as you open your lips and breathe in the wine - be it the flagship Cullity Cabernet Sauvignon, their Heytesbury Chardonnay or any other excellent drop - savour too the vineyard’s founder and importantly the tenacity and skill of Matthew Flinders who didn’t just save country, but secured a beautiful island.