These are fantasized lands since Antiquity. Already the Greeks, then the Romans, had put forward the hypothesis of the existence of a mass of land located on the borders of the southern hemisphere, beyond the territories known to Man. A southern continent that would symmetrically balance the land mass of the northern hemisphere. “The Terra australis incognita continues to haunt the cosmographic conceptions of the Middle Ages, finally appearing on nautical charts from the Renaissance onwards, in the form of a vast land which sometimes extends from the Strait of Magellan to the Australia”, can we read on the TAAF website, the French Southern and Antarctic Lands.
From the end of the 16th century, Portuguese and Spanish navigators ventured ever further south to seek new trade routes and try to discover – less than 100 years after the discovery of the American continent by Christopher Columbus – new spaces to conquer. Soon, all the powers of Europe followed suit: English, Dutch, French… All sovereigns dreamed of attaching the famous southern continent to their crown.
A lord of Trémarec in the service of the king
Thus, in May 1771, King Louis XV commissioned a naval officer from Landudal, Yves-Joseph Kerguelen, lord of Trémarec, to launch an expedition to discover “a very large continent in the south of the islands of Saint-Paul and Amsterdam”, a “Third World” that France could populate, after the loss of Canada.
Leaving from Lorient, and after a stopover in the Ile de France (Mauritius today), the Breton and his crew – spread over two ships, La Fortune and Le Gros Ventre – set off in January of the following year to the search for these unknown lands. On February 12, 1772, Captain Kerguelen saw a strip of land, which he immediately considered to be this famous mythical third world. He took possession of this new territory in the name of the King of France. The latter turns out to be in fact the main island of an archipelago made up of 1,300 islets.
A Malouin and former member of the East India Company
Three weeks before that, another Breton navigator, Marc-Joseph Marion du Fresne, originally from Saint-Malo, also discovered new territories in the southern Indian Ocean. A former officer of the Compagnie des Indes, the sailor was on the Ile de France in 1771, when Pierre Poivre, intendant of this colony, instructed him to have the native Aoutourou brought to Paris by Bougainville in 1768 returned to Tahiti. In addition to this mission, Poivre gives him detailed instructions on the lands he must seek while sailing the southern seas. The ships Le Mascarin and Le Marquis de Castries cruise off an icy archipelago on January 24, 1772. Marion du Fresne lands her mate, Julien Crozet – another Breton, originally from Port-Louis – who seizes it, there again in the name of the French crown.
Mixed fortunes
The expedition then continued on its way, despite the death of the Breton captain, killed by Maoris during the next stopover in New Zealand. The two ships finally reached the Ile de France in May 1773. Crozet shared his discoveries with the king’s representatives and described arid, uninhabited and inhospitable lands, partly frozen. Enthusiasm is quite different on the side of Kerguelen. Just after seeing what he considers to be a new continent, baptized “Southern France” by himself, he resumes the direction of France to share his discovery with the king, without waiting for his second ship, lost sight of. during a storm! Welcomed as a hero on his arrival in Brest on July 16, 1772, he was soon nicknamed the “French Christopher Columbus”. In Louis XV, Kerguelen depicts this new territory as a land of plenty with great potential. A way for him to finance a new expedition the following year, which embarked settlers ready to populate this new territory. But the adventure is cut short, because the weather conditions and the relief are far from being as idyllic as claimed by the Breton captain…
To know more
Exhibition “Journey to Southern Lands: Crozet and Kerguelen 1772-2022”, from June 24, 2022 to March 5, 2023 at the Brest Navy Museum.
The French Southern and Antarctic Lands website: taaf.fr
“Extraordinary and unknown stories in the southern seas, Kerguélen, Crozet, Amsterdam and Saint-Paul” by Gracie Delépine, Ouest France editions – 2002.
250 years of French history
SR
On his return to France, it is the decline for Kerguelen, who will even be imprisoned for a time. For his part, Julien Crozet continues to sail in this part of the globe in the service of France. In 1776, he crossed paths with the Briton James Cook, with whom he shared his adventures. It is besides the English explorer who will name the archipelagos of the name of Crozet and Kerguelen in homage to the two men. Despite everything, the news of these discoveries spread very quickly in Europe and America, and prompted expeditions and even temporary settlements – heroic and often dramatic – to exploit the resources. Whales and elephant seals are hunted for their blubber, which is used to make the oil necessary for the mechanisms of the first machines of the industrial era and to operate street lights, and sea lions decimated for their fur, highly prized for manufacturing. clothing. Since the 1950s, these territories, which are home to scientific missions, have been a sanctuary for biodiversity…
It is this story, at the origin of the creation of the French Southern and Antarctic Lands, that the Brest Marine Museum offers to discover through the exhibition “Journey to Southern Lands: Crozet and Kerguelen 1772-2022” . In particular, visitors will be able to discover nearly 150 objects and documents, most of which have never been revealed to the public, some belonging to the TAAF and brought back by ship from Crozet and Kerguelen, after a journey of more than 12,000 km to Brest…
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