European Exploration of Australia - French Eighteenth-century Explorers

French Eighteenth-century Explorers

. 1756 - The French King Louis XV sent Louis-Antoine de Bougainville to look for the Southern lands. After a stay in South America and the Falklands, Bougainville reached Tahiti in April 1768, where his boat was surrounded by hundreds of canoes filled with beautiful women. "I ask you," he wrote, "given such a spectacle, how could one keep at work 400 Frenchmen? He claimed Tahiti for the French and sailed westward, past Samoa and Vanuatu, until his passage was blocked by a mighty reef. With his men weak from scurvy and disease and no way through he sailed north. When he returned to France in 1769, he was the first Frenchman to circumnavigate the globe and the first European known to have seen the Great Barrier Reef.

· 1772 - Two French expeditions set out to find Terra Australis. The first, led by Marc-Joseph Marion Dufresne, found an named the Crozet Islands, and, in Blackman's Bay claimed Van Diemen's land for France. He was the first to set foot there since Tasman and the first to make contact with the islands Aborigines. He sailed on to New Zealand where he and some crewmen were killed by Maori warriors. The survivors retreated to Mauritius. He visited Van Diemen's Land in 1772 and was the first to encounter the Tasmanian Aborigines (who had not been seen by Abel Tasman).

· 1772 - the second French expedition, of two ships, were separated by a storm. The leader turned back but the second in command, Louis Aleno de St Aloüarn, sighted Cape Leeuwin and followed the coast to Shark Bay. He landed on Dirk Hartog Island and claimed the land for the French king.

. 1788 - Jean-François de Galaup, comte de La Pérouse visited Botany Bay.Bruni d'Entrecasteaux discovered Esperance in Western Australia and the D'Entrecasteaux Channel and the Derwent and Huon Estuaries in Van Diemen's Land. His expedition also resulted in the publication of the first general flora of New Holland.