Voyage of a painter

To the French sailors and scientists aboard Le Geographe and Le Naturaliste in March 1804, how welcoming and familiar France must have seemed after a three-and-a-half-year expedition to the little-known shores of Australia and Tasmania. The voyage had been dogged by disaster. Rifts between the crew and Captain Nicolas Baudin had caused defections. The rigors of the journey. had led to deaths. And the expedition had not succeeded in its mission to chart Australia's coast. The public, preoccupied by the Napoleonic Wars, had ignored the entire undertaking.

Nevertheless, the two ships returned with a vast collection of natural history specimens, including live wombats, kangaroos, and emus. Also aboard the ships was a great treasure: the preparatory drawings of Charles-Alexandre Lesueur, who, at the age of twenty-two, had signed aboard Le Geographe as an assistant gunner and had taken over as expedition artist when the official artists jumped ship in Mauritius. From these drawings, he would eventually produce a series of exquisitely rendered watercolors on vellum, which were published between 1807 and 1816 in the expedition's official report, Voyage de Decouvertes aux Terres Australes.

Unsung throughout most of the English-speaking world and little known even in his native France, Lesueur is a familiar name only to those who have studied the early history of exploration in Australia. A remarkably complete archive of his letters, papers, and paintings is kept in his hometown of Le Havre, at the Museum d'Histoire Naturelle, which he was instrumental in establishing. What has been documented about Lesueur's life - the journey to Australia, the return to France, a long spell living in the United States, and a final homecoming to Le Havre, where he died in 1846 - is due largely to the efforts of Jacqueline Bonnemains, an archivist at Le Havre's natural history museum. Yet for all Bonnemains's work, Lesueur remains a shadowy figure. He has acquired little of the fame of John James Audubon, Joseph Wolf, or Edward Lear, yet his pictures of the early Australian scene are among the most historically important and beautiful records of nineteenth-century zoological discovery.

The impact of the strange Australian fauna on early explorers may not always be appreciated today. They found birds whose tails were shaped like lyres. They found mammals that laid eggs, carried their young in pouches, and were armed with poisonous spikes. As the eighteenth century turned to the nineteenth, creatures such as kangaroos, koalas, and wombats, unique to Australia, were like nothing Europeans had encountered before. The animal wonders of Africa, Asia, and the Americas were already fairly well known, but Australia was only just beginning to give up its secrets, and they were sometimes difficult for the European mind to accept. When the first stuffed duck-billed platypus arrived in England, it was famously condemned as an imposter; the beak of a duck was thought to have been skillfully and undetectably stuck to the body of an unknown, ratlike creature with a stumpy tail.

A decade or two earlier, seamen who had sailed with Captain James Cook had found it difficult to describe an encounter with a kangaroo; certainly their description was very basic. The first report came back of an animal that was "as large as a greyhound, of a mouse colour and very swift."

Later, the great naturalist Sir Joseph Banks tried to pen a clearer description but found himself at a complete loss: "To compare it to any European animal would be impossible as it has not the least resemblance of any one I have seen." The celebrated first painting of a kangaroo by George Stubbs, the famous English animal painter, looks as if the specimen he worked from had been pumped up like a football, which is, apparently, just what happened.

Lesueur's great achievement lay in his ability to convey the wonder that he felt in his encounters with such curious creatures. His compositions are unsophisticated and painstakingly honest. Some critics have suggested that they lack all lifelike quality, but Lesueur was operating at a time when the camera was not available to make clear the fleeting postures assumed by living creatures. He could only paint the creature that he saw in front of him. Sometimes this happened to be only a dried or crudely mounted specimen.

Lesueur produced all of his highly finished paintings in Paris after the expedition's return home, working from preserved specimens and the drawings that he'd brought back from the journey. A letter he wrote on October 27, 1817, gives some insight into the appearance of his studio: "If you see my room, it's a topsy-turvy world: the skins of fishes, spirit bottles, fossils, shells . . . and tortoises in the middle of all this." Many of Lesueur's drawings are preserved in Le Havre, alongside the watercolors on which his reputation largely rests.

Now, almost 200 years later, the voyages of Le Geographe and Le Naturaliste are chiefly remembered because they supplied Europe with a vast fund of scientific information. Captain Baudin's mission added immensely to knowledge of the Australian fauna and those places the expedition explored. The mission brought back 40,000 preserved animals, filling thirty-three large packing cases aboard Le Naturaliste, together with a similar quantity of botanical specimens. Altogether, there were upward of 100,000 dried or preserved organisms, 2,500 of which were undescribed species.

Many of these last were invertebrates and plants, but there were also a number of more spectacular discoveries, including the banded hare wallaby (Lagostrophus fasciatus). Lesueur's painting of this animal is one of his most memorable. First found by the expedition at Shark Bay in Western Australia, the species was widespread in the southwest corner of Australia at the time. Today its range has contracted, and it can be found only on two small islands in the same bay where Captain Baudin's men originally found it.

Another creature brought to the public's attention by the expedition is now extinct. On January 6, 1803, the ships landed on Kangaroo Island, a large island just off the coast of southeastern Australia, and found huge flocks of a peculiar dwarf form of emu that has been classified as Dromaius demenianus. The scientists and crew managed to capture several of these birds alive and loaded them onto Le Geographe. At least two survived the long journey back to France and were sent to the residence of the Empress Josephine, where they are said to have lived until 1822.

So quickly were the remaining emus on Kangaroo Island exterminated that these two surviving exiles were possibly the very last of their kind. One of the emus brought back to France was sent to the Jardin des Plantes (of the National Museum of Natural History) in Paris, where it remains as a stuffed specimen. This particular individual may have been captured on King Island, where the emu population vanished about the same time as the one on Kangaroo Island. Strangely, of all the thousands of specimens brought back, this is one of the few that remain intact - or, at least, that can be positively identified. Specimens were distributed to a number of museums and collections, but most records have been lost. Even specimens deposited in the museum at Le Havre are gone, destroyed during World War II.

Other living creatures were also stowed aboard the expedition's ships, and getting them all safely back to Europe was a high priority with Captain Baudin. But three days' sailing from Kangaroo Island, the captain found, to his dismay, that two of his kangaroos had died, presumably from the dampness. As a remedy, Baudin had two ship's officers removed from their cabins so that the remaining kangaroos could be kept in drier quarters.

Worn out by responsibility and effort, Captain Baudin fell seriously ill as Le Geographe headed for home via Mauritius. Barely two weeks after the vessel's arrival there, he died.

As for Lesueur, he was to enjoy many more productive years, yet the work he did for the Baudin expedition undoubtedly represents the high point of his career. Although he spent the most important periods of his life away from his native city of Le Havre, the French port pulled him back in the end; he returned there from America in 1837, after an absence of twenty-one years. During his last two years, Lesueur lived in his family home close to the sea and became director of Le Havre's newly founded museum of natural history.

The most recent book by painter, writer, and boxing buff Errol Fuller is The Lost Birds of Paradise (Voyageur Press, 1995). Research for an upcoming book on the great auk has taken him to museums all over the world, including Lesueur's Museum d'Histoire Naturelle in Le Havre.

COPYRIGHT 1998 Natural History Magazine, Inc.
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