Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
land grants and cheap convict labour enabled rough pioneers to be-
come estate owners of substance. Western entrepreneurs fixed their
eyes on the virtually closed economies of China and Japan: surely
some way could be found to force these haughty orientals to trade
with Europe and the USA. The western seaboard of America also
had commercial potential. The local people were experienced trap-
pers eager to exchange the skins of bears, beavers and sea-otters for
cheap manufactured goods. As more and more ships travelled to the
Pacific coasts and islands, circumnavigation ceased to be the pre-
serve of explorers and adventurers. More and more merchant cap-
tains braved the Horn, the Roaring Forties and the empty Pacific.
But national pride was still a major factor. The heirs of La Pe-
rouse were just as eager as the heirs of Cook to claim their share of
the commercial results of exploration:
The English have too long taken advantage of our silence; too
long have they had the honour of those discoveries in which we have
anticipated them: what! because unfortunate circumstances, too well
known to the whole world for me not to spare myself the mortification
of repeating them, and the reader that of reading them, have presen-
ted insurmountable obstacles to the publication of the voyage of our
countryman, at the time that it ought to have appeared, must we suf-
fer, without complaining, that this unfortunate navigator should not,
after his death, enjoy his immortal labours? Ah! if his destiny has not
allowed us to engrave them on his tomb; at least, in claiming this in-
heritance, let the feeling and just nation, for which he sacrificed his life,
for ever consecrate in the annals of history, his services, his death, and
its gratitude!
2
So wrote Monsieur Charles Fleurieu in his exceedingly pom-
pous account of Etienne Marchand's circumnavigation of
1790-1792.
