Talking of red light districts (OK, I wasn't, but let that go), Nicolas Baudin left Le Havre
in France in 1800 with two ships, intent on mapping the Australian coast, but
it was largely a scientific expedition.
Mind you, it wasn't all fun carrying scientists, and he wrote to his
friend, the NSW governor, also a naval man:
“I must say here, in passing, that those captains who have
scientists, or who may some day have them aboard their ships, must, upon
departure, take a good supply of patience. I admit that though I have no lack
of it, the scientists have frequently driven me to the end of my tether.”
One of those on board one of the ships, Charles-Alexandre
Lesueur, was an artist when he left Le Havre, but he worked with the
scientists, and as disease knocked out most of the scientists, he shifted
across and took on-the-job training as a biologist.
While many specimens were collected in 19th century
Australia, the scientific work and later storage all happened in Europe. Older
Australian type specimens are generally to be found in European countries.
We know now that for the sake of accurate science, and for
the sake of records, collections made in Australia are better studied and
stored in peaceful Australia, but that notion would not take hold for almost
another century. It was still the age of the pillaging visitor-expert who came
to fetch, rather than to study. One Scot went back to Cambridge in the 1880s
with 1300 pickled echidnas, and having married an Australian heiress, did no
further research on them.
Over time, that attitude to specimens would change, but it
would be a perilously slow change, and back then, I was interested in when the
changes happened. The Good Guys were the Germans, the Bad Guys were the British
and the French. The Germans wanted their specimens kept in Australia, the
French and the Brits took everything away with them.
After his voyage, Lesueur wrote up his work and then moved
to New Harmony in Indiana in 1815 (with his specimens). While he was there, he pursued his trade of
naturalist-artist, but in 1837, he returned to France and settled in his native
Le Havre, taking his collections of specimens with him. And so Australian
specimens came to be in the Natural History Museum in the French port city of
Le Havre in 1944.
Europe is currently experiencing its longest-ever period
free from war in recorded history, but it hasn’t always been so. Florence, the
resting place of French botanist Julienne Houtou de La Billardière’s Australian
type specimens, was damaged in World War II and London’s Natural History Museum
was badly damaged in the Blitz in 1941.
Ports are natural targets in modern warfare, and in that
year, the Musée d’Histoire Naturelle du Havre was badly damaged by bombing and
fire. Anyhow, for good and valid
reasons, I needed to get to Le Havre, and in 2004, Chris and I walked around Cyprus,
then had a fortnight based in Paris, and we allowed one day to visit Le Havre.
We always set out early when we are headed for towns with
unusual museums. This helps us avoid crowds, but the plan can have its
drawbacks. We expected to wander the station,
take in the sights, have a coffee and a sweet item or two, and then take a slow
train, just in time for the museum opening at 2 pm.
The snag was that the efficiently helpful SNCF (railway)
staff at Gare Saint-Lazare railway station in Paris took us in hand and bundled
us onto a speedy train earlier than the slow service we had planned to catch.
The combined result of an early start and a fast train was that we arrived in
Le Havre, three hours before our target museum opened.
It was a chilly, windy and rainy day in late April, more
winter than summer. We wandered,
buffeted this way and that, through a town where unseen (we did not dare look
up!) workers above us scrubbed a winter’s supply of seagull excrement from
buildings and awnings. To dodge the
wind-blown spray of lime-rich, fish-stinking splatters, we took refuge in a
tavern.
We were drawn to one tavern because it was on the intersection of Rue Lesueur and Rue Laperouse, and we decided to wait there for the museum to open so we could see Lesueur’s Australian collections, relatively unspattered. Rue Lesueur was clearly appropriate, but unless you are Australian, I need to explain that Laperouse was an early French voyager to Australia.
We were drawn to one tavern because it was on the intersection of Rue Lesueur and Rue Laperouse, and we decided to wait there for the museum to open so we could see Lesueur’s Australian collections, relatively unspattered. Rue Lesueur was clearly appropriate, but unless you are Australian, I need to explain that Laperouse was an early French voyager to Australia.
It was, we decided a Sign (or Signs?) from on high, so we went in and met an odd sight. The occupants of this
small tavern resembled the chorus of pimps and madames from Irma La Douce,
but we just took them to be quaint rural folk, and they made Chris and I welcome. We must
have seemed equally exotic to them, but we chatted in franglais, and got along
for an hour or so, before we went out, through the drizzle of dilute
bird-droppings that was still splashing down, to examine some stuffed
Australian animals.
Later, I learned that our refuge was at the epicentre of the
town’s red light district. The other customers were almost certainly
professionally qualified for roles in the film, but they had welcomed us as fellow
humans on a cold day.
I will always recall rainy windswept, chilly Le Havre, on a
spring day where winter struck back, as the shop awnings dripped stickily after
their annual scrubbing to redistribute the guano deposits contributed by the
hardy seagulls. I probably learned more at the Musée de la Marine in Paris, but
Le Havre, the port so many French explorers departed from, has fonder memories
for me.
And being able to say, honestly, “when we were in the red
light district or Le Havre…” is a good way of getting attention at a dinner,
almost as good as “when I used to light a bushfire each afternoon…”
But that’s another story…
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