Grands
Records - Voyage Aux Terres Australes (2/2)
25
March 18:30
Today,
Thursday 25 March, the men on board the Cap Gemini
Ernst & Young and Schneider Electric trimaran
are continuing to make good progress towards Cape
Horn.
The
(completely theoretical) stability of the conditions
now surrounding Olivier de Kersauson’s trimaran
gives us the opportunity to continue our account
of the “Voyage aux Terres Australes”
(begun at 09:30 this morning).
After an eventful voyage through the unknown waters
of the Southern Ocean and an enforced stopover
in Timor to avoid the rigours of the southern
winter, Baudin’s expedition encountered
many practical problems. It proved difficult for
the ship’s boats to get ashore in these
raging seas. Once there, the country seemed uninhabited,
sterile and bleak; there was no fresh water and
the rivers they did catch sight of turned out
to be swamps.
Worse
still, on 18 April 1802, Baudin, having put into
Timor and explored Tasmania, came face to face
with the English explorer Matthew Flinders at
a spot now known as Encounter Bay. Having learned
of the French expedition and its many reverses,
Flinders had set sail from England eight months
after Baudin, but following a different route,
had arrived off Australia’s south coast
before the Frenchman. It would therefore be he
that would map it and prove that Australia was
a single continent.
Decimated
by dysentery, malaria and scurvy, the “Voyage
aux Terres Australes” cost the lives of
many seamen and explorers, including Nicolas Baudin
himself, who died in 1803 on the voyage home.
Nevertheless, the expedition remains one of the
greatest scientific voyages of all time, having
returned to France with tens of thousands of new
plant specimens, 2,500 mineral samples, 12 cartons
of notes, observations and travel logs and 1,500
sketches and paintings.
It was not until several years later that Georges
Cuvier pronounced the result of the expedition
to be a “doubling of scientific knowledge”.
And yet these exploits remain largely unknown,
except amongst geographers themselves.
The
coasts of mainland Australia and Tasmania still
bear 250 different place names given them by Baudin
and his crew.
Geronimo's
latest news are on http://www.trimaran-geronimo.com
