Nicolas Baudin
See also: Baudin
Nicolas Thomas Baudin (February 17th 1754 with Saint-Martin-of-D, Ile de Ré - September 16th 1803 with the Mauritius, Ile de France at the time) was a sailor, captain and exploring French.
It engages at the fifteen years age in the merchant navy and at twenty years in the Compagnie of the Eastern Indies. It is useful in the the Antilles during the Guerre of independence of the United States of America.
As captain transporting of the Austrian botanists in the peaceful Indian Oceans and it learns the Botanique and how to maintain in life the plants and the animals on board.
In 1792, France and Austria are in war and it tries without success to integrate the navy of French war. With Antoine de Jussieu for the national Muséum of natural history it goes on a profitable journey to the Antilles to bring back plants, birds and insects.
The Voyage to the Southern Lands (1800 - 1804)
In October 1800, it is selected to lead a forwarding on the coasts of the Australia with two ships, the Geographer and the Naturalist , for nine zoologists and botanists, including Jean Baptiste Leschenault of the Tower.It reaches Australia in May 1801 and in April 1802 it meets Matthew Flinders close to the island Kangaroo, also drawing the maritime zone, with bay of the meeting Encounter Bay. There makes stopover with the British colony of Sydney for its supply, then remains one month in Tasmanie before going towards north to Timor.
Forwarding was to give form to most of this ground remained up to that point ignored. Today still, much from places, on the Australian coasts, bear the name whose Baudin and its intrepid crew had baptized them. Forwarding proved to be also one of the greatest scientific voyages from all times: to its return in France, it brought back tens of thousands of specimens of unknown plants, 2.500 samples of minerals, 12 paperboards of notes, observations and notebooks of voyages, 1.500 drafts and paintings. These important descriptions for the naturalists and the ethnologists are accompanied by geographical maps of almost all the southern and western part of Australia as well as Tasmanie.
However, the Baudin captain had adopted curious practices like selling, for his own account, which it could at the time of the stopovers like provisions, medical device, equipment scientists and chemicals.
The forwarding during which Pierre François Keraudren, first doctor of the Navy officiated in particular as surgeon, cost the life many explorers, thus that of Nicolas Baudin itself which died of Tuberculose the September 16th 1803 with the Mauritius on the way of the return. The exploits of Baudin remained largely ignored.
In 1807, imperial Printing works publishes the first volume of the account of this voyage written by François Péron, as well as a splendid atlas of forty engravings according to the drawings of Small and Lesueur. The death of Péron delays the publication of the second volume (1816). In 1824, an 2nd edition will present a more complete atlas of sixty boards.
Jacqueline Bonnemains, preserving of the Natural history museum of natural history of Le Havre, published the crew newspaper of the commander Baudin and the HMSO ensured the impression and the diffusion of it. A model of the Géographe , which one can see the photograph below, was produced by a very back-small nephew of Nicolas Baudin, in particular starting from the description of the ship provided in the crew newspaper of the commander Baudin and engraving in heading of the writing paper of forwarding.
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