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Search for ‘holy grail’ of scientific collections

Napoleon had sent the Frenchmen on the expedition. Photo: Getty

Napoleon had sent the Frenchmen on the expedition. Photo: Getty

Finding the missing scientific collection gathered during French explorer Nicolas Baudin’s expedition to Australia has become the “holy grail” for a group of researchers, more than 200 years since his ship arrived at Cape Leeuwin.

Baudin reached the West Australian coast on May 27, 1801, and named Geographe Bay after his vessel and Cape Naturaliste after the other ship in his party.

Napoleon Bonaparte, the new ruler of France, had sent the expedition, in part, to find out whether or not a large sea divided the Australian continent and to chart the largely unknown southern coast.

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During their three years away, scientists on the two ships gathered about 100,000 specimens.

But by the time they returned to France, the Emperor had lost interest and was instead focused on his wars of conquest in Europe.

Napoleon had sent the Frenchmen on the expedition. Photo: Getty

Napoleon sent the expedition. Photo: Getty

The vast collection of early Aboriginal artefacts, plants and minerals has almost completely disappeared.

Now a trio of French researchers and writers have set about trying to find the specimens, as part of a multi-media project called Terra Australis, examining Baudin and the parallel expedition of English navigator Matthew Flinders.

“We don’t know where they are,” said Alizee Chasse, who is overseeing the anthropological aspects of the project.

“They might have been wrongly labelled, they might have been lost, they might actually be in an antiques shop. They could be anywhere.

“It’s my holy grail.”

No clues as to lost collection’s fate

The team has a good idea of what was in the collection because the French scientists drew almost everything: shields, spears, boats, baskets, necklaces, and flora and fauna.

Much of the collection was initially sent to Bonaparte’s wife Josephine, who collected plants brought back from her husband’s overseas military campaigns and by explorers like Baudin.

Many of the 100,000 specimens have since been lost. Photo: Nicolas Perpitch

Many of the 100,000 specimens have since been lost. Photo: Nicolas Perpitch

“The fantastic herbarium vanished,” said Patrick Llewellyn, the main writer on the Terra Australis project.

The specimens were lost after Josephine’s death, he said, and could now be somewhere in the French archives, sold or languishing unidentified in a museum.

Ms Chasse said “we were just so sloppy with everything”.

“If we can bring these items, the French items… they will be the anthropological artefacts of this time,” she said.

“From that time, the first contact, that’s why it’s so precious, it’s the first contact.”

Flinders was less focused on collecting specimens.

The English were concerned Baudin could claim the west of the continent for France.

So while Flinders’ men gathered only about 4,000 items, they were carefully catalogued on their return to England and immediately studied by botanist Robert Brown.

“And during the 100 years after that when some scientists had to study the botany of Australia, the only reference they had was Brown, never the Baudin collection,” Mr Llewellyn said.

And it seems Bonaparte is still stymieing efforts to finally bring the Baudin collection to light.

“It’s still super hard to get into the institutions in France because of the bureaucracy created by Napoleon,” Mr Llewellyn said.

-ABC

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