THÉODORE LESCHENAULT DE LA TOUR, BOTANIST OF THE BAUDIN EXPEDITION

Article | Updated 6 years ago

Paul Gibbard
Senior Lecturer in French
The University of Western Australia

Leschenault on board the Géographe - Charles-Alexandre Lesueur, Pencil on pape

Leschenault on board the Géographe - Charles-Alexandre Lesueur, Pencil on paper – 9 x 15 cm
Image copyright Muséum d’histoire naturelle, Le Havre – n° 13 033

Charles-Alexandre Lesueur’s sketch of Théodore Leschenault de la Tour, drawn aboard the Géographe when the subject was around 27 years old, provide us with many details and intimations – unavailable elsewhere – about the appearance and personality of the young man who rose to the position of chief botanist on the Baudin expedition. For all Leschenault’s professional achievements, there are few contemporary accounts, which touch on his character or his traits, in contrast with his much better known colleagues, Nicolas Baudin and François Péron. Lesueur’s sketch of Leschenault complements a lithograph of him produced some twenty-odd years later by Langlumé – a portrait of the established botanist in middle-age, thick-set and serious in aspect, sporting in his button-hole a ribbon of the Legion of Honour. The youthful Leschenault, on the other hand, appears at his ease as he stretches out by the ship’s rail, his figure slender and long-legged, his attention occupied by the book in hand, his face partly obscured beneath his cap. A trait connecting these portraits in age and youth – a head of curls: escaping in unruly fashion from the youthful figure’s headgear; ordered, but not completely tamed, in the later image.

Leschenault was recruited for the Baudin expedition on the recommendation of the eminent botanist Antoine-Laurent de Jussieu, who was involved in organising the scientific side of the expedition. Leschenault had been studying medicine in Paris, and in the course of his degree had attended lectures on botany at the Museum of Natural History. As part of his application to join the expedition, Leschenault explained how he would go about observing and describing a plant and identifying the features, which were important for classification. He had sufficient technical skills to draw plants and to preserve specimens, he stated, and, moreover, at the age of ‘twenty-seven’ (he was in fact still twenty-six), had a ‘well-developed character and enough philosophy to support the monotony and hardship of a long and difficult voyage’ 1. Leschenault was one of seven botanists and gardeners who set out with the expedition from Le Havre, but in its course rose to prominence as others abandoned it or met their ends – the senior botanist André Michaux, along with two gardeners and a junior botanist, disembarked at Mauritius, the head gardener, Anselme Riedlé, died in Timor, and another junior gardener died at sea. By the time the expedition arrived in Van Diemen’s Land in January 1802, Leschenault was its chief botanist by default, and was accompanied by the only surviving gardener, Antoine Guichenot.

The instructions compiled by the French government for the botanical element of the expedition placed an emphasis on discovering plants that had a practical and economic value. While a place was allotted to the advancement of botanical knowledge for its own sake, the government was particularly eager for the botanists to uncover new species, which could be transplanted to France or its colonies, where they might be exploited commercially. It was important therefore for the botanists to observe the way that the indigenous peoples made use of plants and the properties they attributed to them. The expedition took place at a time when the divisions between the branches of the sciences were not as clear-cut as they were later to become, and, accordingly, the naturalists did not limit themselves to one narrow area of investigation. Although his principal area of expertise was botany, Leschenault also took a keen interest in zoology, geography, mineralogy and anthropology.

It is clear from Leschenault’s letters that when he set foot on the coast of New Holland in places as yet unexplored by Europeans he found the experience disorienting and overwhelming. In a letter to his mentor Jussieu, written from Sydney in November 1802, he described the feelings that flooded through him:

the study of nature […] is a source of great delight. It is only with difficulty that I may depict for you the sensations I felt the first time I went ashore on an unknown coast. I felt a confused pleasure, which filled my mind, everything kindled my interest, pebbles, shells washed up on the beach, plants. I collected everything with incomparable eagerness but was soon obliged to abandon a portion of these riches I had recklessly amassed.2

These new vistas crowded Leschenault’s senses, and the wealth of material available to examine and collect left him unable to exercise his judgement. He describes something akin to a state of ecstasy – an eruption of scientific joy. This uncontrolled zest to explore the new, which affected Péron even more than Leschenault, exasperated Baudin, who deplored the way in which the naturalists put their lives at risk and refused to keep to agreed schedules.

Leschenault landed on New Holland for the first time on 2 June 1801, at Geographe Bay. He recorded in his journal his observations of the plant life and the aspect of the land, filtered through his sensibility:

Citizen Péron and I landed on the eastern side of the gulf. A very fine, white sand, possessing, I believe, the same vegetative qualities as that found along the Leeuwin coast, forms a escarpment forty to fifty feet high, and nearly twice that in width. The slope, which faces the sea, is quite steep, and the plants growing on it lack in vigour.

A species of creeping Mesembryanthemum with white flowers and thick triangular leaves grows there – might it be edule? Several species of undershrub are also found there, among which I observed one from the Orache family – an Atriplex whose leaves and stem are very downy, and which has a salty taste.

When I reached the top of the escarpment I gazed admiringly across a flat country, which is covered with very large trees, forming a magnificent forest. A gentle slope leads down to the plain. Although it is also composed of sand, the far side of the escarpment possesses a fertility, which is lacking on the seaward side. Part of the ground is covered with bushes, around twelve to fifteen feet tall. A beautiful species of Genista with dense, reddish wood grows there.3

Leschenault carefully studied the characteristics of the plants he found, taking care to taste their leaves, as was fitting for an empirical naturalist. Even as he paid attention to such detail, he was not strictly acting as the detached and impersonal observer that modern science usually demands – he also recorded his emotional responses to the things he saw, and seemed to count these as valuable information about them. In addition to keeping a narrative journal of the voyage, Leschenault also compiled notebooks about the plants he collected, sketching their forms, and supplying detailed Latin descriptions of important features. He also took pains to collect and dry specimens of plants, which were to be sent back to the Museum of Natural History in Paris for further study. In describing and classifying plants, Leschenault conformed to the principles established by his mentor Jussieu in his influential work Genera plantarum secundum ordines naturales disposita juxta methodum in Horto Regio Parisiensi exatarum (‘The genera of plants, arranged in natural orders, according to the method demonstrated in the King’s Garden of Paris’) (1789). Moving away from Carl Linnaeus’ ‘artificial system’ of ordering plants on the basis of a small number of predetermined features – primarily the number and position of a plant’s stamens and pistils, Jussieu instead advocated a ‘natural method’– by which plants were arranged into groups on the basis of a wide variety of features – including the seed, the number of seed leaves (or cotyledons), the fruit, flower, root form, stem, leaves, and so on – according to relationships which, Jussieu claimed, appeared self-evident in nature.

By the time the expedition reached Port Jackson, Leschenault had already sketched 150 species of plant, described many more, and collected an even greater number of specimens. He complained to Jussieu however that he was overwhelmed by work, being the sole remaining botanist on the expedition – having nothing like the resources enjoyed by Flinders’ botanist Robert Brown.4 After Port Jackson, Leschenault sailed with the Géographe once more to the west coast of New Holland, and by the time he left the expedition at Timor, due to illness, had gathered, according to Jussieu’s estimate, some 600 new species, which included new genera and orders.5 In later summaries of his impressions of the plant life of New Holland, Leschenault said that he had not discovered in its sandy soil any cereal crops or other plants capable of affording significant nourishment – even if the indigenous peoples ate certain roots and bulbs. Some plants had useful properties, offering timber, aromatic oils, gums and resins, dyes, medical remedies, or material for rope. He encountered only a small number of genera, almost all of them new, but these genera contained large numbers of new species. The ‘natural families’, which dominated in New Holland, were, he said, the Proteas, Heathers, Compositae, Leguminosae and Myrteaceae (which included the eucalypts). Leschenault believed that his observations supported Jussieu’s overarching theory, as they showed ‘how far the system of natural families is in accordance with the march of nature, which rarely isolates species, but on the contrary almost always places them together in large numbers in the same soil and in the same climate’.6 The extent of Leschenault’s achievement as a botanist in New Holland has never been fully assessed by historians of the expedition, which is due in part to the fact that Leschenault left the expedition in Timor in June 1803, and took a further four years to make his way independently back to France, via the Dutch East Indies, French Guyana and the United States. The samples Leschenault collected in the southern lands arrived in France aboard the Naturaliste and the Géographe in 1803 and 1804, and were deposited in the Museum of Natural History, without ever being fully catalogued. And, unlike Robert Brown, Leschenault never published complete descriptions or illustrations of the plants he discovered – despite hopes Brown expressed in his Prodromus. It is only relatively recently that researchers have begun to make detailed studies of the botanical work of the expedition7, and to sort through the vast collections of plant samples it collected which lie in the Museum in Paris.8

If Leschenault explored and collected in regions equivalent to five of the six modern mainland Australian states (never making it to what would become Queensland), his afterlife is curiously concentrated in the west of the continent. In fact, Leschenault is commemorated more thoroughly in Western Australia than anywhere else in the world, including his hometown of Chalon-sur-Saône in Burgundy.

The most significant geographical feature named after the botanist lies around 150 kilometres to the south of Perth. When Louis de Freycinet explored Geographe Bay in 1801 he discovered the mouth of an inlet, which was only investigated further when the expedition returned to the west coast in March 1803. The large shallow estuary that lay behind the dunes was named ‘Port Leschenault’ in honour of the botanist,9 and, now known as ‘Leschenault Inlet’, stretches around fourteen kilometres in length.10 In a journal entry of 1802, Leschenault had discussed the hydrography of the region, speculating that, in the absence of major rivers, the waters that ran off the hills ‘must gather in vast lakes’ in the interior – and this discovery confirmed his view to a degree.11 Further geographical features were named by the expedition for Leschenault, including a headland, which lies about 100 km north of Perth, and an island in Shark Bay. Settlement around Leschenault inlet has led to further popularisation of his name: it has been used to denote a district, an electoral zone and a catchment area, is attached to a conservation park, a caravan park and a leisure centre in the region, and has given rise to numerous street names across the state.

Leschenault is also commemorated in the wildflower genus Lechenaultia, named for him by Robert Brown in his Prodromus Florae Novae Hollandiae et Insulae Van Diemen (‘Preliminary account of the plants of New Holland and Van Diemen’s Land’) of 1810. Brown collected species belonging to this genus, which forms part of the Goodeniaceae family, in the south-west of New Holland. Having first met Leschenault aboard the Géographe in Encounter Bay, Brown got to know the Frenchman in Port Jackson, and they botanised together amicably in that region. In the Prodromus, Brown lauds his friend as a ‘celebrated voyager and skilled botanist’, of whom he expects great things.12 Brown seems to have supplied his aberrant spelling, which omits the ‘s’ from the Frenchman’s name, in the conviction that this was the correct form – it is a mild error when compared with the wild variations which appear in the journals of Leschenault’s French colleagues. Brown’s act of naming has come to stand as an almost exclusively Western Australian tribute to the French botanist: of the twenty-four species of Lechenaultia that have been found in Australia and New Guinea, twenty of them are endemic to the south-west region of the western state.13

In parts of Australia, Leschenault’s name has suffered greater effacement than the simple loss of an ‘s’. When Henry Mangles Denham surveyed Shark Bay aboard HMS Herald in 1858, he ignored the name given by the French to Leschenault Island, and instead rebaptised it Salutation Island, to commemorate a friendly meeting with local Malgana people. Further to the south, near Cape Leschenault, a small settlement had taken on the name of the botanist. However, as the district of Leschenault, on the banks of the Leschenault Inlet in the south-west of the state, grew more prominent, the inhabitants of the more northerly town decided on a change of name. Not wishing to sever their link with the Frenchman, they renamed their town ‘Chalon’, in honour of Leschenault’s native town. However, by 1968 the inhabitants of this southern Chalon felt disenchanted enough with the name to make another change: they renamed the town Seabird, after an old pastoral lease in the region, itself named after a nearby shipwreck.14 Coastal erosion has started to undermine the beachfront road in Seabird, but has not destroyed its remaining French connections – which endure in ‘Leschenault Street’ and ‘Chalon Avenue’.

In France, however, there is little to commemorate Leschenault’s achievements. It was only in the late nineteenth century, after a campaign by Abel Jeandet, one of the botanist’s distant descendents, that Leschenault was accorded recognition there. Jeandet gave talks about Leschenault, published a brief biography on him, and inundated the mayor of Chalon-sur-Saône with letters. At last, in 1889, a new street was christened the ‘rue Leschenault de la Tour’. On its flank now stand, perhaps appropriately enough, several centres of learning: an infant school, a secondary school and an art college. Omitting the pseudo-aristocratic flourish ‘de la Tour’, added to his name by Leschenault himself, Australian street-namers have, unknowingly perhaps, stuck with a more laconic, democratic form of his surname.

For Australians who are familiar with Leschenault only as a faceless name on a street sign, or as the shadowy inspiration for a tricky-to-spell wildflower name, Lesueur’s sketch serves a useful function: the name is given a form – that of a rather easy-going, curly-haired young man, on the threshold of his botanical career.


Footnotes

1. [Théodore Leschenault de la Tour to Antoine-Laurent de Jussieu, undated [prior to 14 September 1800], cited by Michel Jangoux in Le Voyage aux terres australes du commandant Nicolas Baudin: genèse et préambule (1798-1800) (Paris: Presses de l’Université Paris-Sorbonne, 2013), p. 162.]

2. [Leschenault to Jussieu, Sydney, 11 November 1802, cited in Viviane Desmet and Michel Jangoux, ‘Un naturaliste aux terres australes: Jean-Baptiste Leschenault de la Tour (1773-1826)’, Etudes sur le Dix-huitième Siècle 38 (2010), p. 229. All translations are my own.]

3. [Paris, Archives Nationales: série Marine, 5JJ56, Leschenault’s journal, pp. 8-9.]

4. [Leschenault to Jussieu, 11 November 1802, cited by Desmet and Jangoux, ‘Un naturaliste aux terres australes’, p. 230.]

5. [See Antonie-Laurent de Jussieu, ‘Notice sur l’expédition à la Nouvelle-Hollande, entreprise pour des recherches de géographie et d’histoire naturelle’, Annales du Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle, 5 (1804), p. 8.]

6. [See Théodore Leschenault de la Tour, ‘Notice sur la végétation de la Nouvelle-Hollande et de la Terre de Diemen’, in François Péron and Louis de Freycinet, Voyage de découvertes aux terres australes, Historique, vol. 2 (1816), p. 363.]

7. [See, for example, R. M. Barker, ‘The botanical legacy of 1802: South Australian plants collected by Robert Brown and Peter Good on Matthew Flinders’ Investigator and by the French scientists on Baudin’s Géographe and Naturaliste’, Journal of the Adelaide Botanic Gardens 21 (2007), pp. 5-44.]

8. [See Jean Fornasiero, Peter Monteath and John West-Sooby, Encountering Terra Australis: the Australian Voyages of Nicolas Baudin and Matthew Flinders, 2nd edition (Adelaide: Wakefield Press, 2010), p. 348.]

9. [Péron and Freycinet, Voyage de découvertes aux terres australes, Historique, vol. 2, p. 189.]

10. [On this estuary, see Sandra Wooltorton, ‘A Sense of Home: a Cultural Geography of the Leschenault Estuary District’, www.leschenaultproject.org.au, consulted 15 January 2016.]

11. [Leschenault’s journal, p. 32.]

12. [Robert Brown, Prodromus Florae Novae Hollandiae et Insulae Van Diemen (London, 1810), p. 581: ‘Dixi in honorem amici aestimati – Lechenault, peregrinatus celebris, botanici periti, cuius illustrationes plantarum orae occidentalis praesertim Novae Hollandiae, nec non Insularum Javae et Timor avide expectantur’ (‘I have named it in honour of my esteemed friend – Lechenault [sic], a celebrated voyager and accomplished botanist whose plant illustrations, especially from the west coast of New Holland, as well as the islands of Java and Timor, are eagerly awaited.’).]

13. [See David A. Morrison, ‘Taxonomic and nomenclatural notes on Lechenaultia R.Br. (Goodeniaceae)’, Brunonia 9 (1986), p. 2.]

14. [See the Shire of Gingin website, www.gingin.wa.gov.au, consulted 15 January 2016.]