Welcome to our WA French Explorations' section. We have collected information from Wikipedia and Dorothy Reid thesis (available here). We are not experts, neither historians, only some French people leaving in Perth and interested in WA history in relation to France.
We have broken down the French exporators in WA facinating story into the following chapters:
French Navigators
WA French Explorations (1505-1829)
Possible first WA discovery (1505)
French maritime activity along the coast of WA possibly had its origins as far back as 1505. This early account was made by French navigator Binot Paulmier de Gonneville sailing in the Espoir, who claimed to have arrived at a land east of the Cape of Good Hope (South Africa). He thought he had chanced on the fabled Terra Australis Incognita, a vast southern land mass long postulated as a necessary balance to the continents in the northern hemisphere.
He named this unknown country “Terre Australe”, and stayed there with his crew for six months. In a stroke of bad luck, he lost his ship and journals in a pirate attack on the French Atlantic coast during the journey home. He could only verbally report his findings to French naval authorities.
Modern historians have proposed he landed on the island of Madagascar. The coast of WA is still a good fit with Gonneville’s description of the journey.
Binot Paulmier de Gonneville
Seventeenth and Eighteenth centuries
The Dutch have been sailing around the western coast of the Australian continent during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Dirk Hartog was the first confirmed European to see WA, reaching it in his ship, the Eendracht. On 26 October 1616, he landed at Cape Inscription on the very northernmost tip of the island. Before departing, Hartog left behind a dinner plate, nailed to a post and placed upright in a fissure on the cliff top.
Carstensz (1623), Thijssen (1627), Abel Tasman (1642 & 1644) and Willem de Vlamingh (1697) had landed and charted much of the north, west and south coasts of what afterwards became known as New Holland.
The amount of energy and cost expended by the Dutch during their exploratory voyages in the seventeenth century did not produce any desire or indeed any attempt to claim for Holland any part of WA on which they set foot. The Dutch sailors had recoiled in horror from an arid barren and wild land.
Dirk Hartog plate
William Dampier also had a hand in the exploration of New Holland and he records landing on the north west coast in 1688/1699. He and his colleagues were the first Britons to land there. Dampier’s view was that the land in WA was unproductive, arid, and mostly lifeless.
in 1697, the Dutch sea captain Willem de Vlamingh discovered Dirk Hartog's plate with the post almost rotted away. He removed it and replaced it with another plate which was attached to a new post. The original plate was returned to the Netherlands, where it is still kept in the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam.
Vlamingh plate
Bouvet de Lozier conducted the first major French voyage of exploration to WA in 1738. His mission was to search for Gonneville’s lost land, as the French believed that Paulmier de Gonneville had in fact discovered “Terre Australe”. Bouvet de Lozier only found the barren island that now bears his name.
The victories of English over the French holdings in India – Arcot in 1751, Plessey in 1757 and Pondicherry in 1761 – could have influenced the French to delay their plans for exploratory visits to the Australian continent to search for commercial interests to replace those lost in India.
Bouvet de Lozier
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