Exploration art: skewed reality, or flawed perceptions?

Article | Updated 7 years ago

Michael McCarthy
Curator
Department of Maritime Archaeology
Western Australian Museum

Talk of the Great Southland inevitably causes Shark Bay, its Indigenous people and the ‘strangers on their shore’, the European explorers to enter the scene, taking us to their voyages, their written records and to their artist’s depictions. Why Shark Bay above all other places? Because it is the place, in the wake of Dirk Hartog, where Dutch, British and French explorers came, for it was the safest known haven on New Holland’s west coast. It was also where the whaling, sandalwood, guano and pearling industries initially flourished as the Swan River Colony in the south stagnated.

In 1699, just over a decade after he landed at what is now Cape Leveque near modern day Broome, and just three years after Willem de Vlamingh recovered his Dutch predecessor’s pewter plate and left behind one of his own, the English pirate, privateer, buccaneer and hydrographer William Dampier landed on the north east shore of Dirk Hartog Island. There prolific sea life caused him to name those vast sheltered waters ‘Sharks Bay’. Continuing his journey north and across the top towards the east coast of New Holland—intending to land near present day Sydney—he continually collected and described what he saw, justly earning the title ‘Australia’s first natural historian’¹. In truly earning that accolade Dampier was well ahead of all other claimants including Joseph Banks, who travelled with James Cook RN to New South Wales a full 70 years later. When Dampier’s Voyage to New Holland was duly published, the naïve, yet charming depictions of the flora and fauna by his unknown artist, joined those of de Vlamingh’s artist adding visual colour to their leader’s written records and logs². Arguably with these two ‘greats’ of the Great Southland’s exploration era the lasting artistic depictions of Australia commenced.

Dampier’s Voyage to New Holland joined his earlier New Voyage Round the World as yet another bestseller, produced in many languages, to be carried and consulted by mariners well into the 20th century³. Despite the extraordinary range of his achievements, for Australians the latter work contains a major literary slip, one that has caused him to be remembered in some circles today, solely for having described the inhabitants of New Holland as ‘the miserablest People in the world’⁴.

Just over a century later, the low-born and very cautious ‘officer-of-the-blue’, Nicolas Baudin’ led an immensely successful scientific voyage to New Holland (including Shark Bay), Van Diemen’s Land, New South Wales. Its products were legion, its cartography superb, and it was with Flinders’ simultaneous explorations that New South Wales and New Holland became on the map joined into one. For Baudin & Hamelin the new island-continent was to become France Australe and for Flinders Australia⁵. Yet Baudin was both literally and figuratively buried by his more ‘noble’ colleagues, to be belatedly resurrected and rescued from the perfidy of the ‘anthropologist’ Francois Peron and the vile machinations of Sub Lt. Louis de Freycinet, who in their writings strove to diminish his achievements at every turn.

In reading Baudin’s words

To my way of thinking, I have never been able to conceive that there was justice or even fairness on the part of Europeans in seizing, in the name of their governments, a land seen for the first time, when it was inhabited by men who have not always deserved the title of savages, or cannibals, that has been freely given them⁶,

and in viewing the artwork of his voyage, it is evident that he was the personal embodiment of the voyage’s ethos Liberté & Égalité and that his artists Nicolas-Martin Petit and Charles-Alexandre Lesueur⁷, who feature in ‘The Art of Science: Baudin’s Voyagers 1800-1804’ exhibition, were similarly imbued. Then the lovers de Freycinet, Rose and Louis came to Shark Bay, he for the second time, she for the first. He, the supremely talented cartographer under Baudin’s second-in-charge Hamelin who had been promoted as commander of the Sydney-built goélette (schooner) Le Casuarina with the brief to continue exploration and charting. In that role he produced detailed charts of France Australe that are, with his red ink corrections and the odd stain, arguably ‘industrial art’—an unintended, exquisite by-product of a labour in which he both excelled at and clearly loved. On the other hand, charged with finalising the accounts of the Baudin voyage, after Peron’s death he was also the nemesis of his leader Nicolas Baudin, as seen in these words on a letter to his brother⁸:

… the name of our infamous commander will not appear in this work. His memory and his name will never corrupt this glorious work which was achieved in spite of him and his perversity which surfaced at every step⁹.

Newly-married, unwilling to be separated from her husband, now captain of L’Uranie an exploration corvette bound for a voyage round the world, she was the famous stowaway-circumnavigator whose commentary on the Uranie voyage remains to this day unsullied by any but a desire to recount to her friend what she saw from 1817-1822. Her commentary then is without a view to personal advancement, or official opprobrium. Herein lies its purity. While her unintended literary and anthropological legacy is immense, Rose de Freycinet’s take on Shark Bay and its people is entirely negative. So too is that of the expedition artist Jacques Arago in both his art and in his words, on the voyage as well as in his memoir. Produced decades later the appropriately entitled Memories of a Blind Man contains extremely disparaging descriptions that are unworthy of reproduction here¹⁰. When comparing his vile depictions and descriptions with those of Lesueur, Petit and Baudin the question that can be taxed is: why? Had Rose de Freycinet and Jacques Arago come to view New Holland and its inhabitants—far too readily—in a negative light. Was this as a result of them both losing sight of what drove the earlier Age of Enlightenment, and then Liberté & Égalité after France had emerged triumphant from its in-famous revolution’s manifest horrors? Were they reflecting Dampier’s published negativity—thereby joining an equally disparaging Dutch in skewing perceptions of New Holland and its people, sight unseen for hundreds of years? After all was it not Joseph Banks who, when alongside James Cook on the deck of HM Bark Endeavour, wrote

…five people who appeared through our glasses to be enormously black; so far did the prejudices which we had built on Dampier’s account influence us that we fancied we could see their colour when we could scarce distinguish whether or not they were men¹¹.

At the time I also wondered whether the stark comparison between Petit and Lesueur’s ‘vision’ and that of Rose de Freycinet and Jacques Arago when viewing Australia and its people was the product of the undeniably harsh environment at Shark Bay compared with the south eastern seaboard. The contrast seemed stark, especially when comparing the Shark Bay depictions with those of Tasmania, which are invariably beautiful, their subjects almost classical in presentation and form. Or was it the result of the shock caused by the initially unwelcoming Malgana warriors brandishing spears, threatening all their lives until Arago drew his castanets, playing to obvious delight. This resulted in the first artistically recorded cultural exchange on New Holland’s shores for a corroboree was staged in reply. Even then Arago was incapable of recognizing what he had just seen, later penning another disparaging account. Or were there underlying social and political forces that served to affect the French visitors’ psyche and to colour their perceptive lenses, producing commentary and images so different to those of Baudin, Lesueur and Petit? Or was it a phenomenon totally divorced from those considerations? Whatever the case, it needed to be known and over years of burgeoned study at Shark Bay other examples had to be investigated.

At sea on one exploratory voyage that took just under an astounding 10 years Henry Mangles Denham RN, was justifiably knighted for his prolonged and proficient services to global hydrography. His visit to Shark Bay in 1858 was in an era when the Pax Britannica was sealed by a global force majeure allowing Britain to found the Swan River and King George’s Sound colonies in blatant disregard of the French Annexation of the coast of New Holland in 1772. Unchallenged after Napoléon’s demise, the British then made their power doubly manifest by military expeditions and prolonged explorations like Denham’s. But of that very lengthy voyage—a remarkable, yet relatively pedestrian one in the context of our questions—one item remains an indelible legacy. A simple watercolour, ‘Native of Shark Bay’ produced by Denham’s artist James G. Wilson in its ‘plein air’, strong form and simple, yet beautiful, nuanced tones reflects those of Baudin’s Petit and Lesueur when depicting Australia’s Indigenous inhabitants. Like Petit and Lesueur, Wilson’s Malgana man is gentle, yet striking, and his pose gathered and supremely serene¹². It appears that Wilson’s watercolour, following Arago’s negative assessments was an uplifting and entirely positive work, proving that it was not the Indigenous people themselves who were incapable of being the subject of a complimentary 19th century depiction and description. Thus Wilson and Denham closed a visual and literary quest that began when seeking answers after Dampier one and a half centuries earlier visit at Cape Leveque. Beautiful images of Indigenous people were not confined to the benign east coast and were not solely produced by those imbued with the enlightened social and philanthropic philosophies of 18th century and early post-revolutionary France.

Skewed Records

While continuing research into the Shark Bay explorers, we (the Maritime Archaeology Department of the Western Australian Museum) successfully located one of St Aloüarn’s 1772 French Annexation bottles; and Denham’s grounding site in Shark Bay located using contemporary descriptions, charts and art. We also located Rose and Louis de Freycinet’s Uranie in the Falklands, using art—but in this case soon learned as we sat on the freezing Falkland shores trying to locate the wreck using contemporary views—that it was clearly skewed. It was depicting what was there certainly, including the wreck, but in attempting to fit an entire vista onto one canvas visual verisimilitude was abandoned¹³. Rounding out our Shark Bay research Dampier’s elusive Roebuck was finally located at Ascension Island. This resulted (as was the case with Louis and Rose de Freycinet) in a detailed analysis of the author(s), their ships, journals and subsequent books¹⁴. Throughout these studies, it became increasingly apparent, that there are so many forces at work in producing any explorer’s pictorial records that we could not depend on them as true records, or as pointers to their author’s mindsets and nor can we trust them in many cases as a reliable written record¹⁵.

In his book A New Voyage Round the World, for example William Dampier records that on after landing in the Cygnet under Captain John Read on 4 January 1688 on the northern tip of present day Cape Leveque, north of Broome, that

… the inhabitants of this country are the miserablest people in the world. The Hodmadods of Monomatapa, though a nasty people, yet for wealth are gentlemen to these¹⁶.

Few know, though it will be obvious to those who are geographically aware that Monomatapa is in South Africa, that this cannot be what Dampier wrote in his journal on which the best selling and very influential New Voyage is based. While it has been argued that his vile utterance was echoed as a self-justification by the land-takers two centuries later; of importance in any analysis of Dampier—whom Coleridge described as of ‘exquisite mind’—and the Indigenous folk he described (perhaps the Bardi people) are the words he wrote in his journal on which this account is based; which reads:

… the people of this country have no houses nor any thing like a house neither have they any sort of grain or pulse, flesh they have not nor any sort of cattle not so much as cat or dog for indeed they have no occasion of such creatures unless to eat them for of that food which they have they leave no fragments. They are people of good stature but very thin and lean I judge for want of food…¹⁷

How did Dampier get from ‘people of good stature but very thin and lean I judge for want of food’ to ‘miserablest People in the world’. What is now known is that the discrepancies between his journal and the published are explained partly in the process of publishing where James Knapton a prominent London bookseller at St Pauls, a man who had an eye for a good story and having good business sense, apparently helped mould Dampier’s account into what would best sell in markets hungry for knowledge, yet still imbued with a sense of British superiority, especially over ‘coloured’ folk. According to one modern commentator, Dampier does not show animosity in his writings toward Indigenous peoples at all, he actually held rather enlightened views toward native cultures for his time, and portrays a compassionate concern for oppressed peoples. Prejudice, to this scholar was not a trait of Dampier’s. He predominantly displays a dispassionate and objective quality to his observations, which clearly distinguished him from his contemporaries¹⁸ . Notwithstanding, the few disparaging and quite uncharacteristic words, William Dampier allowed to be published under his name will be forever attributed to him and to his eternal detriment.

Possibly aware of the experiences of the unfortunate Matthew and Ann Flinders before them and his long incarceration in Mauritius, Rose and Louis de Freycinet’s subterfuge in smuggling her on-board his exploration ship was successful, inadvertently providing us with an account of the Uranie voyage in the form of private letters to her friend Caroline Baronne de Nanteuil.

Contrary to his orders to proceed first to the southwest coast of New Holland to examine its suitability, de Freycinet proceeded first to Shark Bay on the mid-west coast and in September 1818 brought L’Uranie to anchor with Dirk Hartog Island in sight. The next day a boat was despatched to the island specifically to recover the de Vlamingh plate. Of direct interest in the context of this assessment of the verisimilitude of exploration art and contemporary anthropological descriptions are depictions of a camp de Freycinet established in Shark Bay for scientific purposes. In Alphonse Pellion’s Baie des Chiens-Marins: Observatoire de l’Uranie, Rose appears alongside Louis at work on his calculations at a table outside a very distinctive circular tent. It is similar to campaign tents in the Napoleonic era and carried on board and was designed to allow Rose to dress in comfort and with decorum when ashore. In the version published in the official report, while the tent remains, Rose has been omitted. Similar occurs in the depictions of the arrival at Timor, with the official version, a studiously composed image portraying pomp and circumstance, all rendered a blatant lie by the unofficial, light-hearted simultaneous depictions of Jacques Arago. Was he an iconoclast, pathologically driven to present regardless of the subject, the underlying reality. Was this also his underlying ethos in his often stark and mocking depictions of the Aborigines of Shark Bay? Rose de Freycinet and Jacques Arago describe the land and record a meeting with Aboriginal people in a manner that was to reflect the negative opinions of Dampier and the Dutch.

Jacques Arago

The coast from the moment we first saw it, exhibited nothing but a picture of desolation; no rivulet consoled the eye, no tree attracted it; no mountain gave variety to the landscape, no dwelling enlivened it: everywhere reigned sterility and death. (Letter LIII)⁴.

Rose de Freycinet

12 September … at 5 o’clock we anchored at the entrance of Shark Bay, near Dirck Hartog’s Island . . .we saw the low and arid coast of New Holland; there was nothing in the sight to ease our minds, for we knew we would find no water in this miserable land… …I went ashore with Louis and we spend several days sleeping under a tent. That stay on land was not a pleasant one for me, the country being entirely devoid of trees and vegetation…²⁰

For Rose de Freycinet, the land and its peoples were frightening and inhospitable and she wrote to her mother advising that it was ‘without a single regret’ that she departed from ‘that hell on earth’. Viewing her comments as the product of her daughter’s acknowledged fears, Rose’s mother was to advise her to ‘look at the drawings in Baudin’s voyage… and you will have a true idea of these people’²¹. Viewers of Petit’s and Lesueur’s work and readers of Baudin’s words will surely agree.

Flawed Perceptions

In reflecting on the fact that while an artist’s motivations, philosophical underpinnings and psyche are forces we need take into account (but will never fully understand), it is the unique mindset of each viewer that is the final lens through which the works will eventually be assessed. While Rose de Freycinet’s admonishing mother is one example, it must be admitted in that context that of all the explorer’s depictions of Indigenous people it is ironically one of Jacques Arago’s depiction of a Malgana man in 1818 that remains the most interesting. Though, almost mocking, wild, contrasting markedly with the beautifully-composed, simple beauty and serenity of the 1858 Native of Shark Bay—another Malgana man—by Wilson, Captain Denham’s artist, one can view in that dappled face and wayward hair, a reflection of onself.

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Footnotes

^{1. A. George, William Dampier in New Holland: Australia’s first natural historian, Hawthorn, Bloomings Books, 1999.↩}

^{2. W. Dampier, A Voyage to New Holland &c in the year 1699, London, James Knapton, 1703 & P. Playford, Voyage of Discovery to Terra Australis: by Willem de Vlamingh. WA Museum. Perth, 1998.↩}

^{3. W. Dampier, A New Voyage Round the World, London, James Knapton, 1697.↩}

^{4. Dawn Casey, ‘Being Collected’. Lecture given at the University of Sydney on 28 August 2006. Reproduced in http://sydney.edu.au/museums/whatson/webcasts/lecture_beingcollected.shtml. ↩}

^{5. Brown, A.J. Ill-starred captains: Flinders and Baudin. 2000, Crawford House, Adelaide.↩}

^{6. Baudin to Governor King, 23/12/1802: Quoted in Hunt., S. and Carter P., 1999, Terre Napoléon: Australia through French Eyes. 1800-1804. Sydney: 5. ↩}

^{7. Bonnemains, J., Forsyth, E., & Smith, B., (eds.) Baudin in Australian Waters: the artwork of the French voyage of discovery to the southern lands 1800-1804. Melbourne, OUP, 1988. & Hunt, S., and Carter, P., Terre Napoléon: Australia through French eyes, 1800-1804, Sydney, 1999.↩}

^{8. M. McCarthy, Who Do You Trust? Discrepancies between the ‘Official and Unofficial Sources Recording Explorer’s Perceptions of places and their people. In A.M. Scott, A Hiatt, C. McIlroy & C. Wortham. European Perceptions of Terra Australis.Ashgate, Surrey, 2013, pp. 185-210.↩}

^{9. Louis Claude de Saulces de Freycinet to his brother Henri de Saulces de Freycinet. 30 October 1806, Original in the possession of the Woodside Valley Foundation.↩}

^{10. Jacques Arago. Souvenirs d’un aveugle: voyage autour de monde, 1886. Paris : 197-200.↩}

^{11. Joseph Banks, April 22, 1770. In the Endeavour Journal of Sir Joseph Banks. Source Project Gutenberg Australia. http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks05/0501141h.html#apr1770. ↩}

^{12. A. David. The voyage of HMS Herald to Australia and the South-west Pacific 1852-1861 under the command of Captain Henry Mangles Denham.1995. Miegunyah Press, Melbourne.↩}

^{13. McCarthy, M., 2005. Rose de Freycinet and the French Exploration corvette L’Uranie, (1820): A Highlight of the ‘French Connection’ with the ‘Great Southland’. The International Journal of Nautical Archaeology, 34. (1): 62-78. ↩}

^{14. McCarthy, M., 2008, Rose and Louis de Freycinet in the Uranie, an illustrated research essay for the WA Museum’s Journeys of Enlightenment exhibition, Report – Maritime Archaeology Department WA Museum, No. 236.↩}

^{15. See McCarthy, Who do you Trust?↩}

^{16. See Dampier, New Voyage.↩}

^{17. The MS is reproduced in Adrian Mitchell. Dampier’s Monkey: A Reading of the South Seas Narratives of William Dampier, Adelaide: Wakefield Press, 2010.↩}

^{18. See articles by M. McCarthy & G.C. Williams, in The Great Circle: Journal of the Australian Association for Maritime History, Vol1, 2015.↩}

^{19. Arago, J., 1823, Narrative of a Voyage Round the World, in the Uranie and Physicienne corvettes, London (facsimile edition 1971, Amsterdam). ↩}

^{20. See publications on the topic by Basset and Riviere.↩}

^{21. Quoted in Bassett, M., 1962, Realms and Islands: The world voyage of Rose de Freycinet (1817–1820). London:92.↩}