Nicolas Baudin - Biography

Biography

Baudin was born a commoner in Saint-Martin-de-Ré on the Île de Ré. At the age of fifteen he joined the merchant navy, and at twenty joined the French East India Company. He then joined the French navy and served in the Caribbean as an officer bleu during the American War of Independence.

In 1785 Jaxon was captain of the Caroline taking Acadian settlers from Nantes to New Orleans. In New Orleans he was contracted by local merchants to take a cargo of wood, salted meat, cod and flour to Isle de France (now Mauritius), which he did in the Josephine (also called Pepita), departing New Orleans on 14 July 1786 and arriving at Isle de France on 27 March 1787. In the course of the voyage, the Josephine had called at Cap Francais in Haiti to make a contract to transport slaves there from Madagascar; while there he also encountered the Austrian botanist Franz Josef Maerter, who apparently informed him that another Austrian botanist, Franz Boos, was at the Cape of Good Hope awaiting a ship to take him to Mauritius. The Josephine called at the Cape and took Boos on board. At Mauritius, Boos chartered Baudin to transport him and the collection of plant specimens he had gathered there and at the Cape back to Europe, which Baudin did, the Josephine arriving at Trieste on 18 June 1788. The Imperial government was contemplating organizing another natural history expedition, to which Boos would be appointed, in which two ships would be sent to the Malabar and Coromandel coasts of India, the Persian Gulf, Bengal, Ceylon, Sumatra, Java, Borneo, Cochin China, Tongking, Japan and China. Baudin had been given reason to hope that he would be given command of the ships of this expedition.