He anchored at a little island, and named the bold promontory in front of him Cape Queen Charlotte. He landed here, and, as he says, found the natives very civil and obliging. It is a million pities that he did not cultivate their friendship further, and learn something about their country. He would not then have described it as “inaccessible” and “unapproachable.”
Beyond the bay in which his boats landed he would have found a stretch of open country under the hills across which his men could have marched till they discovered what is now the Baie du Sud—another Sydney Cove in miniature. If he had only done this, Caledonia, with its enormous mineral wealth and its magnificent harbours, would have been British instead of French, a worthy appanage to that other Empire of the future, the new-born Commonwealth of Australia.
I discussed this with the Commandant as we walked back to Bonne Anse, and he told me the story of how on a much later occasion we also lost Caledonia.
Once upon a time, a little more than fifty years ago, there were two frigates lying in Sydney Harbour—one British and one French. We will call the British ship H.M.S. _Dodderer_. She was commanded by an old woman in naval uniform who ought to have been superannuated years before. The Frenchman, as events proved, was a man of a very different sort.
New Caledonia in those days was a sort of No-Man’s Land, but there were both Catholic and Protestant European missionaries working among the natives. The two warships received almost simultaneous orders to go and annex the island. They started the same day. The British frigate out-sailed the Frenchman, but her captain had got those fatal words of Captain Cook’s deep-rooted in his mind, and when he got near the dreaded reefs he began to take soundings. The Frenchman went ahead, neck or nothing. He gambled his ship to win a colony, and, taking only the most ordinary precautions, he kept on his course.
By great good luck he struck the broad passage through the reef which leads to the harbour of Noumea, and when H.M.S. _Dodderer_ eventually groped her way in she found the French frigate at anchor, and the Tricolour flying from a flagstaff on one of the hills, after which the French captain politely invited him and his officers to lunch and to an excursion on French soil; and here ends a short but exasperating chapter in our colonial history.