22 
Vancouver, Flinders and King, all of which brought back to Eng- 
land accumulative and definite information concerning the western 
coast of New Holland. Even with this information, however, in its 
possession, the British Government took no steps towards the foun- 
dation of a settlement on any part of this wide area. In all likeli- 
hood this was owing to the unsatisfactory reports on the new terri- 
tory brought hack by the navigators, who, confining themselves to 
the more or less uninviting coast line appear to have made little 
or no examination of the interior, and so to have missed the more 
fertile districts further inland. Another contributing cause may have 
been the fact that, the population of the old country, depleted by 
the long Napoleonic Avars, had not reached that congested state 
which made it necessary for the Government to further the estab- 
lishment of new colonies as outlets for the surplus people. At the 
same time, private enterprise Avas scarcely likely to be attracted 
to the new country, as the only inducement in those days to leave 
the comforts of civilisation Avas the almost certain knowledge that 
fortunes, great in extent and rapidly gained, were to he secured bv 
a few years exile. 
All these excuses for the non-fulfilment of her destiny on the 
part of Great Britain appear to have, however, gone by the hoard 
when the suspicion entered into the minds of the British people 
that other nations, and more particularly the French, were contem- 
plating new settlements in the South seas. It is impossible to ascer- 
tain how those suspicions arose, as an exhaustive examination of the 
policy of Napoleon fails to reveal any suggestion in his mind of Aus- 
tralian colonisation, and although during the long years of his cap- 
tivity on St. Helena, Napoleon discussed very freely his projects, 
as well as his successes and failures, Avitli those around him, no men- 
tion appears ever to have been made of any project of that char- 
acter. 
That the suspicion existed in the minds of the members of the 
British Government there is, however, ample evidence, and this sus- 
picion had also communicated itself to the Directors of the East India 
Company one of whom, the Hon. C. F. Greville, wrote to Brown, 
the naturalist of the “Investigator,” in 1802, a letter in which he 
said: “I hope the French ships of discovery Avill not station them- 
selves on the coast of New Holland.” 
In his “Recollections, Lord Russell states that during his tenure 
of the Colonial Office, a member of the French Embassy called upon 
him and asked what portion of Australia was claimed by Great 
Britain, to which he replied, “the whole.” As Lord John Russell 
was Secretary of State for the Colonies from 1839 to 1841, it seems 
strange that that question should haA T e been asked at that late 
period, but possibly the scientific researches of French navigators 
at the beginning of the century may have been present in the French- 
man’s mind. 
