ce, as soon as
he should hear of the outbreak of war in Europe; but by secret and
skilful measures all the French ships, except one transport, escaped
to their appointed rendezvous, the Ile de France. Enraged by these
events, Decaen and Linois determined to inflict every possible injury
on their foes. The latter soon swept from the eastern seas British
merchantmen valued at a million sterling, while the general ceased not
to send emissaries into India to encourage the millions of natives to
shake off the yoke of "a few thousand English."

These officers effected little, and some of them were handed over to
the English authorities by the now obsequious potentates. Decaen also
endeavoured to carry out the First Consul's design of occupying
strategic points in the Indian Ocean. In the autumn of 1803 he sent a
fine cruiser to the Imaum of Muscat, to induce him to cede a station
for commercial purposes at that port. But Wellesley, forewarned by our
agent at Bagdad, had made a firm alliance with the Imaum, who
accordingly refused the request of the French captain. The incident,
however, supplies another link in the chain of evidence as to the
completeness of Napoleon's oriental policy, and yields another proof
of the vigour of our great proconsul at Calcutta, by whose foresight
our Indian Empire was preserved and strengthened.[213]

Bonaparte's enterprises were by no means limited to well-known lands.
The unknown continent of the Southern Seas appealed to his
imagination, which pictured its solitudes transformed by French energy
into a second fatherland. Australia, or New Holland, as it was then
called, had long attracted the notice of French explorers, but the
English penal settlements at and near Sydney formed the only European
establishment on the great southern island at the dawn of the
nineteenth century.

Bonaparte early turned his eyes towards that land. On his voyage to
Egypt he took with him the volumes in which Captain Cook described his
famous discoveries; and no sooner was he firmly installed as First
Consul than he planned with the Institute of France a great French
expedition to New Holland. The full text of the plan has never been
published: probably it was suppressed or destroyed; and the sole
public record relating to it is contained in the official account of
the expedition published at the French Imperial Press in 1807.[214]
According to this description, the aim was solely geographical and
scientific.