le important exceptions were the politico-scientific expedition
to Australia, the ostensible purpose of which insured immunity from
the attacks of English cruisers even in the year 1800, and the plans
for securing French supremacy in Egypt, which had been frustrated in
1801 and were, to all appearance, abandoned by the First Consul
according to the provisions of the Treaty of Amiens. The question
whether he really relinquished his designs on Egypt is so intimately
connected with the rupture of the Peace of Amiens that it will be more
fitly considered in the following chapter. It may not, however, be out
of place to offer some proofs as to the value which Bonaparte set on
the valley of the Nile and the Isthmus of Suez. A letter from a spy at
Paris, preserved in the archives of our Foreign Office, and dated
July 10th, 1801, contains the following significant statement with
reference to Bonaparte: "Egypt, which is considered here as lost to
France, is the only object which interests his personal ambition and
excites his revenge." Even at the end of his days, he thought
longingly of the land of the Pharaohs. In his first interview with the
governor of St. Helena, the illustrious exile said emphatically:
"Egypt is the most important country in the world." The words reveal a
keen perception of all the influences conducive to commercial
prosperity and imperial greatness. Egypt, in fact, with the Suez
Canal, which his imagination always pictured as a necessary adjunct,
was to be the keystone of that arch of empire which was to span the
oceans and link the prairies of the far west to the teeming plains of
India and the far Austral Isles.

The motives which impelled Napoleon to the enterprises now to be
considered were as many-sided as the maritime ventures themselves.
Ultimately, doubtless, they arose out of a love of vast undertakings
that ministered at once to an expanding ambition and to that need of
arduous administrative toils for which his mind ever craved in the
heyday of its activity. And, while satiating the grinding powers of
his otherwise morbidly restless spirit, these enterprises also fed and
soothed those imperious, if unconscious, instincts which prompt every
able man of inquiring mind to reclaim all possible domains from the
unknown or the chaotic. As Egypt had, for the present at least, been
reft from his grasp, he turned naturally to all other lands that could
be forced to yield their secrets to the inquirer, o