I leave commentary on this passage to the conclusion and turn to my brief third history of incidents during Baudin's six-week sojourn in southeastern Van Diemen’s Land in January–February 1802. Since I have discussed the episode in some detail in other papers,^[54] I limit myself here to a few relevant points.

Baudin arrived in Van Diemen’s Land with favourable preconceptions about the people he would meet, derived from the Cook and d'Entrecasteaux voyage reports, and bound by both his instructions and his inclinations to avoid violence against them except in extreme self-defence. He wrote at the outset that “the people of this country do not appear to be savage, except when provoked”.^[55] His contemporary journal gives a dispassionate empirical account of frequent, mostly amicable relations with local people, broken by two sudden, unexplained assaults on shore parties by men at Bruny Island who had been amicably interacting with the French and been “loaded with presents”: the first time, a single spear wounded a midshipman in the neck; the second time, a “hail of stones” wounded Baudin “fairly sharply” on the hip.^[56] Despite these contretemps, the tone of the journal is matter-of-fact and even-handed about the indigenous people, including the attackers. In sharp contrast, in an official report written later in the year, Baudin emphasized the violence of the encounters and deplored the “fickleness” of “primitive men of nature…at the furthest degree possible from civilization”, whose unpredictable mood shifts back and forth from amity to aggression made it impossible to form “a clear idea of their character” and left sailors dangerously exposed.^[57]

However, even Baudin’s report is relatively restrained and empirical in comparison to the exaggerated language of the official voyage narrative written by Péron, the expedition’s zoologist and anthropologist. Before the voyage, he had professed a qualified primitivist idealization of people “closer to nature”, contrasting “degenerated and debased man of [civilized] society” to the “robust majesty of natural man”.^[58] In the event, any residual primitivism was rapidly dispelled in fears provoked by trying experience of so-called “natural man” in Van Diemen’s Land. Within a few pages, the rhetoric of Péron’s narrative shifts from romantic approval of the “affectionate” and “frank” demeanour of “our good Diemenlanders” to vilification of “these fierce men”. Within the text, this discursive shift is a direct response to the spear- and stone-throwing incidents and suggests a tortuous passage from referents to signifiers. “Men of nature” are no longer “good and simple” but “wicked”. “After all we have seen”, he proclaimed, “one cannot sufficiently mistrust men whose character has not yet been softened by civilization.” He wrote subsequently of the people of Maria Island, with whom Baudin had found no fault, that “all their actions bore the stamp of treachery and ferocity”. These actions goaded him to a diatribe on “the difficulties faced by travellers in communicating with savage peoples, and the impossibility of overcoming the natural ferocity of their character and their prejudices against us”.^[59] Péron’s ambivalence and outrage were epitomized in his reaction to the man the French knew as Bara-Ourou, whom Péron praised as “the handsomest man in the band” but also damned as the most threatening (see Figure 1).^[60]

Figure 1: Barthélémy Roger after Nicholas-Martin Petit, ‘Terre de Diémen. Bara-Ourou’, stipple engraving, 31.8 x 24.2 cm, in Charles-Alexandre Lesueur and Nicholas-Martin Petit, Voyage de découvertes aux terres australes exécuté par ordre de S.M. l’Empereur et Roi. Partie Historique. Atlas (Paris : Imprimerie impériale, 1807): plate 8.