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History of Ecological Sciences, Part 61C: Marine Biogeography, 1690s–1940s

2019; Ecological Society of America; Volume: 100; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1002/bes2.1486

2327-6096

Frank N. Egerton,

Alexander von Humboldt Studies

Oceans cover two-thirds of the world, yet the vast majority of studies in biogeography and paleobiogeography have concerned terrestrial subjects, since they were more accessible than marine subjects. In 1957, the Geological Society of America published as its Memoir 67, a 2-volume encyclopedia—Treatise on Marine Ecology and Paleoecology—the culmination of planning and work that began in 1940, sponsored by the National Academy of Sciences. Marine biologist Joel Hedgpeth, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, edited volume I: Ecology (viii + 1296 pages); geologist Harry Ladd, U.S. Geological Society of America, Washington, D.C., edited volume II: Paleoecology (viii + 1077 pages). Hedgpeth wrote a historical introductory chapter and chapter 13 on marine biogeography. Ladd's Paleoecology (1957) is likely the first synthesis of this subject. He edited it and wrote chapters 1–2 and co-authored chapter 3. In this part 61C, marine biogeography includes aspects of island life, since oceanic birds, the seal family, sea turtles, a species of iguana (a vegetarian, reported by Darwin), and crabs eat marine life, but come ashore to reproduce, as do species in the Laticauda genus of marine snakes. Before humans became sea-borne, coconut palms spread from island to island by coconuts falling or washing into the sea and coming ashore elsewhere by floating on the sea. Mangrove species also spread by their seeds floating to other places. Breadfruit, however, was spread by humans. Until late in the 1800s, naturalists who wanted to study marine biogeography were carried through oceans on government ships. Four surveys of ocean exploration expeditions are valuable for providing information on relevant voyages: Ernest Dodge, Beyond the Capes: Pacific Exploration from Captain Cook to the Challenger, 1776–1877 (1971); Jacques Brosse, The Great Voyagers of Discovery: Circumnavigators and Scientists, 1764–1843 (1985); Tony Rice, Voyages of Discovery: Three Centuries of Natural History Exploration (1999), which is an account of British museum collections, from Hans Sloane's exploration of Jamaica, 1687–89, down to the Challenger Expedition, 1872–76; and Glyn Williams, Naturalists at Sea: Scientific Travelers from Dampier to Darwin (2013). Both the Brosse and Rice volumes, large format, have many illustrations in color of plants and animals collected. American art historian Barbara Maria Stafford's well-illustrated Voyage into Substance: Art, Science, Nature, and the Illustrated Travel Account, 1760–1840 (1984), is indirectly relevant as background information for this study, though her viewpoint is very different from mine. J.R.H. Andrews, The Southern Ark: Zoological Discovery in New Zealand, 1769–1900 (1986), is a well-illustrated (many in color) and well-documented survey, beginning with naturalists on James Cook's first voyage and ending with London immigrant entomologist George V. Hudson (1867–1946). Jacqueline Bonnemains et al. edited Baudin in Australian Waters: the artwork of the French Voyage of Discovery to the Southern Lands, 1800–1804 (1988), with Charles-Alexandre Lesueur's zoological collections and observations well represented, and also studies of aborigines. There is a strong emphasis upon Pacific Ocean exploration in this survey (Dunmore 1965–69, Dodge 1971, 1976, Barclay 1978, Frost 1988, Spate 1988, Jones 2006, 2014, Williams 2013), due largely to that ocean covering a third of the earth's surface and having 25,000 islands—far more than elsewhere. British naturalist Andrew Mitchell provided a readable glimpse of a good part of that ocean in The Fragile South Pacific: an Ecological Odyssey (1990). Human history in the Pacific is relevant for background for this essay; relevant books include: Peter Buck, Vikings of the Sunrise (1938), Hartley Grattan, The Southwest Pacific to 1900 (1963), The Southwest Pacific since 1900 (1964), Maurice Shadbolt and Olaf Ruhen, Isles of the South Pacific (1968), Amos Leib, The Many Islands of Polynesia (1972), and Paul Theroux, The Happy Isles of Oceania: Paddling the Pacific (1992). More recently, Matt Matsuda has concisely explored France and the Pacific (2005) and a history of Pacific seas, peoples, and cultures (2012). It is very interesting to know that many leaders of voyages of exploration became quite involved in facilitating the collection of specimens of plants and animals. This survey is selective, not encyclopedic. We begin with an unlikely Englishman, William Dampier (1651–1715), whose father was a tenant farmer at East Corker, county Somerset (Laughton 1888, Lloyd 1966, Desmond 1977:171, Baer 2004, Preston and Preston 2004, Williams 2013:7–31). The house in which he began life is still there. His mother died in 1665 (probably from plague) and his father died when he was seven. From father or another tenant, he learned qualities of different soils "and knew what each would produce, viz. wheat, barley, beans, peas, oats, flax or hemp; in all which I had more than usual knowledge for one so young, taking a particular delight in observing it" (quoted in Lloyd 1966:16). He received an early education, until he persuaded his guardians to apprentice him to a shipmaster in Weymouth. His earliest voyages were to France and Newfoundland. The latter when the climate was cold, which turned him against voyages beyond the tropics. He soon sailed to Java and became fascinated with distant travels. In 1673, he was swept into the navy during Britain's third war with the Netherlands and saw action on 28 May and 4 June, but became sick before their third battle. He soon returned to sea trade, with Jamaica and the West Indies, and in 1679 joined a ship of privateers, who thought robbing the Spanish of their wealth, whether at ports or at sea, was merely being patriotic, following in the footsteps of Sir Francis Drake. In 1685, he joined a ship that reached Guam in 1686 and continue to the Philippines, where part of the crew, with Dampier aboard, departed for China, leaving the captain and 36 crew members behind. However, he and three others and some prisoners wanted off and were deposited on an island where they bought a canoe and provisions and trusting Dampier's judgment, paddled to Sumatra. His subsequent career reads like an adventure novel, and he succeeded in publishing accounts of his adventures in seven very popular memoirs, 1697–1709. The fame from publishing his first book, A New Voyage round the World (1697, edition 5, 1703, Dutch, French and German translations), perhaps persuaded the British Admiralty to grant his request to borrow a ship to explore New Holland (Australia). His childhood lesson that different crops do well in different kinds of soil seems to have sparked a life-long fascination with the workings of nature. It was that quest that sent him around the world three times, during which he carefully collected observations that add interest to his books. He was the first Englishman to collect Australian plants, about 40 of which survive (Osborn and Gardner 1939). The book Alex George wrote on Dampier's natural history in Australia (1999) can serve as an excellent sample of his works in general. He made his plants available to English botanists to publish descriptions, but he used his books to describe the animals himself (and illustrated some animals but no plants). He was also a capable cartographer and the first pioneer to write a Discourse of Winds, Breezes, Storms, Tides and Currents (1699), based upon his observations. He apparently was first to notice that winds cause ocean currents and that tides at remote islands are not as high as at islands close to mainland (Deacon 1971:171). Ladd and Gunther (1957:67) identified the earliest treatise relevant to marine paleoecology as Italian scholar-diplomat and military engineer Luigi Ferdinando Marsigli (1658–1730), who after his education in Bologna, travelled in the Ottoman Empire (Stoye 1994, Mills 2001), after which he published a very perceptive study on the currents in the Bosphorus Channel at Constantinople (1681, 1978). Having served as an officer in 1703, during the War of the Spanish Succession, he surrendered his force and later was court-martialed for it. He afterward settled on the Mediterranean Coast of France. His 1711 treatise was later translated as Histoire physique de la mer (1725, 1999) and "includes the first bottom profiles, serial temperatures, and observations on winds, currents, and surface conditions to be made in a comprehensive manner…[and] dredging for coral in the Mediterranean." An Italian successor, Professor Vitaliano Donati (1717–62), focused on sea floor life in his Della storia natural marina dell' Adriatico (1745, French, 1758). Both Marsigli and Donati used oyster dredges in shallow water to retrieve specimens. Donati saw that the living organisms on the sea floor were similar to those in deposits below them and also to those in some strata above sea level. He also argued that coral is not a plant, but the product of marine "insects." Both men also measured temperatures of sea water at surface and at a depth (Duyker 2006:60). The first scientific paper that we can call paleoecological was by French naturalist Jean-Étienne Guettard (1715–86); it compared fossil and living shells (1759), according to Ladd and Gunther (1957:68; Rappaport 1972). Continuing the work of Marsigli and Donati was Catholic abbot and mathematics professor Ambrogio Soldani (1736–1808), who first published studies on small marine fossils, beginning in 1780 (Ladd and Gunther 1957:68, Rodolico 1975). Soldani believed studying living fauna helped one understand fossils. Meanwhile, Danish explorer for Russia, Vitus Bering (1681–1741), led two expeditions, 1727–29 and 1741, into the north Pacific Ocean and into what is now the Bering Sea (Frost 2003, Egerton 2012a,b:93–95, Egerton 2014). His second voyage included German naturalist Georg Steller (1709–46), who had a medical degree (Stejneger 1936, Egerton 2008:43–50, 2012a,b:94–96, Williams 2013:32–53). Steller described on the Kamchatka Peninsula over 30 species of fish and the life history of Pacific salmon Oncorhynchus. He saw that seals were better adapted than sea otters to hunt away from land. Otters stayed close to shore and lived on the east shore near islands leading to Alaska. At Kayak Island, near Alaska, he collected about a dozen plant species (Frost 1992:167–203, 1999). A jay he collected, now Steller's jay, resembled a picture he had seen of a blue jay from eastern North America, from which Steller assumed they had reached America. He found a variety of land and seabirds, and later, on what is now Bering Island, the expedition stayed 8.5 months, and Steller conducted the first thorough natural history of any island (Hintzsche and Nickol 1996). There he also discovered what is now named Steller's seacow, exterminated by Russian hunters a few decades later. A conflict between British and French colonies in America (incorrectly called in America, the French and Indian War), 1754–63, led to Europe's Seven Years War, 1756–63. British troops in America were losing battles until William Pitt became British prime minister and sent more resources to America than the French could, and so won the decisive (first) Battle for Quebec in 1759, which led in 1763 France ceding its American colonies east of the Mississippi River to Britain. That motivated the French to look for other possible colonies, and army officer Louis-Antoine de Bougainville (1729–1811), who had led the defeated French army out of Canada, was given command of a two-ship expedition around the world, 1766–69 (Bougainville 1964, Dunmore 1965–69:I, 57–113, Ross 1978, Brosse 1985:24–32). The most sensational discovery of that voyage was Tahiti, which Bougainville named La Nouvelle Cythere, named for the Greek island where Aphrodite was said to have arisen from the sea (Hammond 1970), appropriate, perhaps, since neither sex objected to Tahitian women having sexual intercourse with the Frenchmen. Philibert Commerson (1727–73) was doctor-naturalist on the smaller of Bougainville's ships and was his own natural history artist (Oliver 1909, Laissus 1971, Brosse 1985:25–30, Williams 2013:54–72). Commerson had been a precocious child who enjoyed showing off his knowledge, which made him unpopular. A widower, he brought along on the voyage a faithful assistant, Jeanne Baret, dressed as a boy (Dunmore 2002, Ridley 2010). Although some men aboard ship suspected the truth, her identity did not become public until she was surrounded by Tahitian men in 1768, who realized her sex, despite clothing. Neither Commerson nor Baret completed the voyage with the expedition, but disembarked on the return trip at Mauritius, and explored it and Madagascar for plants and animals. He died on Mauritius, attended by her, but after his death, his collections and records were taken by the Commissary of Marine (Bompas) to Paris (Oliver 1909:209). Commerson had written a will before embarking on the expedition, and he provided for Baret in it, with a hope she could "put in order the natural history collection" (Oliver 1909:85). His plant specimens and notes went to the Jardin des Plantes, and his fish specimens and notes from both a Mediterranean study and from this expedition went to Bernard-Germain Lacépède and were used in writing his Histoire naturelle des poisons (5 volumes, 1798–1803). Meanwhile, the remarkable James Cook (1728–79) commanded three voyages of discovery into the Pacific Ocean, sailing over 200,000 miles, and twice circumnavigating the world (Cook 1955–68, Moorehead 1966:3–119, Villiers 1971, Beaglehole 1971, 1974, Withey 1987, Hough 1995, Rice 1999:142–197, Thomas 2003, 2010:14–23, McLynn 2011). Two modern books explore some of his routes (Gray 1981, Horwitz 2002). The first expedition, 1768–71, was partly motivated by rivalry with Bougainville's expedition, but also focused on the Transit of Venus across the Sun (part of an effort to determine distance from Sun to Earth), to be observed at Tahiti (Brosse 1985:33–50). On his first voyage, 1768–71, Cook had as head naturalist the wealthy Joseph Banks (1743–1820), an enthusiastic botanist (Banks 1962, Desmond 1977:35–36, Andrews 1986:7–19, Withey 1987:index, Carter 1988, Knight 2004, Williams 2013:73–94), who brought along at his own expense two additional naturalists—Linnaeus' prize pupil, Swedish Daniel Solander (1733–82; Rauschenberg 1968, 1975, Desmond 1977:572–573) and Finnish Hermann Diedrich Spöring (1733–71)—two artists—including the talented Sydney Parkinson (1745–71; Lysaght 1974, Desmond 1977:480, Carr 1983), who, like Spöring, died in January on the return trip—and four servants. Banks and Solander returned with about 100 new plant families, 1,000 new plant species, 500 fish, 500 bird skins, and numerous insects (Rice 1999:142–169), and about 300 animal drawings by Parkinson (Whitehead 1969:163). The Danish entomologist Johann Christian Fabricius described some of their insects and crustaceans in his Systema Entomologiae (1775; cited from Andrews 1986:39–41). Banks was a man of action, not a scholar (De Beer 1960:32–41, 109–196, Gascoigne 1994, 1998); he subsequently became such a prominent scientist that he overshadowed the scholarly Solander, who Edward Duyker recently rescued from undeserved obscurity (1998, Duyker and Tingbrand 1995). These animalcules raise their habitation gradually from a small base, always spreading more and more, in proportion as the structure grows higher. The materials are a kind of lime mixed with some animal substance. I have seen these large structures in all stages, and of various extent. When they returned to Cape Town, Sparrman remained there (Gurney 1997:141), but later published an account of the birds he had observed on the voyage (1786–89). During 1777, Cook's two-volume account of the expedition appeared, as did Georg Forster's two-volume narration. Few of Georg Forster's 268 zoological illustrations were published (Whitehead 1969:164, 1978); Andrews (1986:23–30) published five of them in color. Perhaps partly due to a quarrel with Cook, Johann Forster's account appeared in 1778 (Andrews 1986:60–61, Rice 1999:170–197). His journal from the voyage survives and is now published in an informative edition (Forster 1982). There is also a modern edition of Forster's Observations Made during a Voyage Round the World (1996). The arid soil of New Caledonia, totally distinct from all others in the South Sea, produces nevertheless, a variety of plants, most of which form genera very distinct from those before known. A reef of coral rocks surrounds the shores here at a considerable distance, in the same manner as at the Society Isles, and the only cultivated parts of the country, are likewise some narrow plains. But it seems, that though the natives bestow great labour on them, yet they barely yield them a scanty subsistence, which probably, is the cause of their very inconsiderable number. …productions of this large island (the plains excepted) entirely resemble those of the coasts of New Holland [Australia], which are not far distant. In contrast, he discussed animals according to their classification: Quadrupeds, Cetacea, Birds, Amphibia [reptiles], Fishes, Insects, Shells, and other Vermes. In discussing people, he was interested in how numerous they were on different islands. Captain Cook's third voyage, 1776–1780, explored the north Pacific Ocean and searched for a northwest passage across Canada to the Atlantic (Cook 1967, Brosse 1985:63–74). An American adventurer, John Ledyard (1751–89), from Groton, Connecticut, was in London when the expedition was being provisioned, and he joined it, and became the first American to see Alaska and Hawaii (Halliday 1961, Crompton 1999). Afterward, he published his Journal of Captain Cook's Last Voyage (1783). Its only naturalist was surgeon William Anderson (died 3 August 1778), who had previously published "An Account of Some Poisonous Fish in the South Seas" (1776), which was actually about the effects of eating poisonous fish, written when he was aboard a ship in the West Indies (Desmond 1977:13, Williams 2013:122–149). On this voyage, Anderson did take notes on animals, which extend to 24 published pages (1967; summarized by Andrews 1986:34), and he described the Kerguelen cabbage, which soon became a valuable antiscorbutic vegetable (Gurney 1997:262). This voyage would have extended further and lasted longer than it did if Cook had not died in a conflict on the beach of Hawaii Island, 14 February 1779. Meanwhile, an amateur American scientist, Benjamin Franklin (1706–90), had heard in 1768 from his cousin, Timothy Folger, a Nantucket ship captain, why ships going from England to America took longer than ships going to England. Folger explained that it was due to the Gulf Stream, flowing from America toward England (Richardson 1980). Franklin obtained a chart of the Atlantic Ocean in the Northern Hemisphere and had Folger indicate the Gulf Stream. American seamen knew of it because Nantucket whalers learned that whales swam along its edge. Franklin had the chart published in 1769 or 1770 for the benefit of ship captains. Franklin, during a six-week voyage during spring 1775, returning from England, repeatedly recorded surface temperatures to distinguish Gulf Stream from other Atlantic waters, and he did so again, on two later returns from England during summers of 1778, and 1785, the last time recording depth temperatures in the Gulf Stream and other Atlantic waters. His trips lead to publication of progressively better maps of the Gulf Stream (Isaacson 2003:290, 437, Chapin 2006:196–200, 289–291, 319–322). Questions about currents and marine biogeography did not arise then, but would be a complexity for later study. France paused about 15 years after Bougainville's return before sending out four expeditions to the Pacific, 1785–1804 (Dunmore 1965–69:I, 250–341, Brosse 1985:76–107). In 1785, Louis XIV and French Secretary of Navy appointed Jean-François de Galaup de La Pérouse (1741–88) commander of a two-ship expedition around the world (Dunmore 1965–69:I, 254–282, Brosse 1985:75–83, Beidleman 2006:9–16, Williams 2013:150–164). La Pérouse sent his chief engineer, Paul Monneron, to London to learn Cook's anti-scurvy measures and to get advice from Cook's experiences. Sir Joseph Banks provided two inclining compasses that Cook had used. La Pérouse's large number of personnel included ten scientists, four being naturalists and three illustrators. They followed Cook's procedures to determine longitude and latitude. After visiting Hawaii, Alaska, and Monterey (California), La Pérouse sent naturalist Louis Dufresne (1752–1832) home in 1786, with collections and observations obtained by them. The expedition continued on to Macao, China (from which more specimens and observations were sent home), then to Kamchatka (Russia), Samoa, Sydney (Australia), and eastward from the northern tip of Australia into oblivion. Between 1791 and 2008, France sent out eight searching expeditions. The first searching expedition was under Antoine-Raymond-Joseph Bruny d'Entrecasteaux (1739–93) and departed France in 1791 (Brosse 1985:84–92, Williams 2013:164–178). Physician–naturalist Jacques-Julien Houtou de La Billardière (1755–1834) was on that expedition, and his latest biographer, Australian Edward Duyker, considered him to be a founder of botany, zoology, and ethnography in Australia (2003:1; also Dayrat 2003:196–201). In 1783, La Billardièré went to London and studied the Banks-Solander collections from Cook's first voyage (Duyker 2003:28–39). There were mixed testimonies on La Billardière's personality. Naval officer Alexandre d'Hesmivy d'Auribeau (1760–94) characterized him as "nasty and concealing" (Duyker 2003:3), and La Billardière's eulogist, Jean-Pierre Marie Flourens thought he was "sharp and austere." However, Paris zoologist Auguste de Saint-Hilaire thought he was "jovial and witty." The last characterization seems most compatible with his expression in Julien Léopold Boilly's portrait of him (1821). Judging him is complicated by the d'Entrecasteaux Expedition having occurred during the French Revolution, with naval officers being aristocrats and others aboard the two ships being republicans. After the very popular d'Entrecasteaux died, his successor, Alexandre D'Hesmivy d'Auribeau (1760–94), became very concerned about a possible conflict with republicans on the ships and persuaded Dutch authorities on Java to arrest them (Duyker 2003:194), including La Billardière, and his natural history collections were confiscated. His collection was later divided, with most of it going initially to England (De Beer 1960:45–68, Carr and Carr 1976). D'Auribeau did not survive the expedition, but La Billardière did, and he published an account of the expedition (1800, English, 1800, German, 1802) which Duyker (2003:1) thought was a classic of French travel literature and that his Novae Hollandiae Plantarum Specimen (2 volumes, 1804–07) was "magnificent." In 1825, Rear Admiral Thomas Manby RN went to Paris, and Le moniteur universel (page 1270) reported that he had news of a whaling vessel that visited an island between New Caledonia and New Guinea where a chief went on board wearing a cross as an ornament in one ear. Other islanders also had metal artifacts. The chief said that when he was young, a ship wrecked in a storm on a coral reef and all aboard had died (but see below; Duyker 2014:165–166). In 1826, an Irish captain, Peter Dillon (Duyker 2014:241–243), at one of the Santa Cruz Islands obtained artifacts from La Pérouse's ships, and he continued on to Vanikoro Island, from which the artifacts had come, where he saw more evidence of the lost ships (map: Dunmore 1965–69:I, 339). France eventually determined that the ships had been wrecked on different coral reefs at Vanikoro. Practically simultaneous with Humboldt and Bonpland's Spanish-American exploration were French expeditions to Egypt under Bonaparte, 1798–1801 (Alleaume 1999, Drouin 1999, Fischer 1999), and to Australia, 1800–03, under Nicolas-Thomas Baudin (1754–1803) (Dunmore 1965–69:II, 9–40, Horner 1987, Bonnemains et al. 1988, Fornasiero et al. 2004, Hill 2012, Williams 2013:205–221), and a British expedition to Australia under Matthew Flinders (1774–1814) (Rice 1999:198–229, Fornasiero et al. 2004, Hill 2012, Williams 2013:201–205, 221–231, Flinders 2015), 1801–03. Both Baudin and Flinders became interested in natural history collections, and on 8 April 1802, they accidentally met in a bay which Flinders named Encounter Bay. Although their countries were then at war, both had passports from the other's navy, and they exchanged news of their recent discoveries (De Beer 1960:112–120). Baudin was from an Atlantic coast island and went to sea as an adolescent on merchant ships and later joined the French Navy (Fornasiero et al. 2004:17–20). In 1780, he received command of a ship, only to have it later given to an aristocrat, which led to his resignation and his return to merchant shipping. At the Cape of Good Hope in 1787, he met a gardener who wanted to carry a botanical collection to the Austrian Emperor. Baudin's involvement in that project led to further botanical expeditions, one to the West Indies in 1796 being very successful. He rejoined the post-Revolutionary Navy and received support from botanist Antoine-Laurent de Jussieu for him to lead a scientific expedition around the world (Brosse 1985:93–107, Horner 1987). Baudin was a capable navigator (Jones and Jones 1980:449–452), but was very poor at managing men on the expedition, all of whom—sailors and scientists—he alienated. He was assigned two ships, renamed Géographie and Naturaliste, which departed Le Havre on 19 October 1800. He received more naturalists than he thought were needed. The expedition reached Ile de France (Mauritius) on 16 March 1801, and it took a month for Baudin to collect all the provisions needed to continue. Before departing, he had desertions from the expedition, including two botanists and two zoologists. Brosse (1985:96) accepted the deserters' claims of their departure as being due to illness, but Baudin visited the island's hospital and found none of them there. Jean Fornasiero, Peter Monteath, and John West-Sooby (2004:27) and Kingston (2007) judged Lieutenant Commander Pierre Guillaume Gicquel and zoologist Georges Bory de Saint-Vincent to be deserters. They later justified their desertion with slanders about Baudin, who died before returning to France. Those persisting slanders were discussed by Dunmore (1965–69: II, 11–13); Fornasiero et al. (2004) argued that slanders were unjustified. With the departure of two zoologists at the Ile de France and two others dying at sea, there was one zoologist left, François Péron (1775–1810), and painter-draftsman Charles-Alexandre Lesueur (1778–1846) became Péron's assistant (Wells 1973, Jovet and Mallet 1974, Fornasiero et al. 2004:index, Duyker 2006, Starbuck 2013:106–109). Péron and Lesueur brought back over 100,000 specimens that included 2,500 species new to science. Lesueur made over 1500 drawings, but Péron's died before publication of their findings was completed, and few of Lesueur's drawings were published until 1988, when Bonnemains, Forsyth, and Smith included many of them in their catalog of artwork from the Baudin expedition. Josephine Elliot and Jane Johansen's Charles-Alexandre Lesueur: Premier Naturalist and Artist (1999) focused on his time later at New Harmony, Indiana, but also contains a few plates from his voyage. Péron was appointed official narrator of the expedition because he went to Paris very soon after returning and campaigned for the right to do so (Horner 1987:326–344, Duyker 2006:209–220). No other expedition participant challenged him, and so he was accepted to write it. He then had access to Baudin's manuscript journal for writing that treatise, and he would, therefore, have read this comment: "Péron, the most thoughtless and most wanting in foresight of everyone aboard…" (Baudin 1974:509). Péron lived long enough to publish volume one of his Voyage de découvertes (1807), before dying from TB; volumes two, three, and atlas (1815–17) were finished by other members of the expedition (Duyker 2006:311). Matthew Flinders (1774–1814) explored Australia, 1795–1800, and Flinders Island and Flinders Ranges commemorate his efforts (Laughton 1889, Keast 1966:85, 88, Moorehead 1966:153–156, Brosse 1985:108–114, Estensen 2002). He recommended to Banks and the Royal Society that an expedition be sent to Australia to continue researches Banks had carried out on Cook's first voyage (Ross et al. 1933:80–86, Kates 1934:82–83). Baudin's expedition helped motivate Banks and the Navy to agree to Flinders leading such a British expedition. Commander Flinders pondered the Great Barrier Reef on Australia's northeastern coast, 1801–03. He realized that it was the greatest reef known, and he developed an insightful hypothesis on its growth (1814:II, 101–115, from 1966 reprint; Sponsel 2009:30). His geographic chart of the reef was still being used in the 1900s (McGregor 1975:29). Flinders was fortunate in obtaining Scotch botanist Robert Brown (1773–1858)—recruited by Banks (he was Banks' librarian)—and Austrian biological artist Ferdinand Bauer (1760–1826)—greatest traveling nature artist of 1800s—to describe expedition discoveries (Stearn 1970, Stafleu and Cowan 1976–2009:I, 364–370, Desmond 1977:47–48, 96, Mabberley 1985, 1999, 2004a,b, Rice 1999:198–229, Magnin-Gonze 2004:169, Lack 2015). Yet, Flinders was unfortunate in that the Navy provided a ship that even leaked on its initial voyage from England. In 1803, he had to land at Ile de France for repairs, where he was imprisoned until October 1810. Flinders could at least work on his expedition memoir during captivity. He had left Brown and Bauer in Australi