Where was Gonneville's land? Did the French discover Australia? The Abbé Paulmier's Mémoires touchant l'établissement d'une mission chrestienne dans le Troisième Monde, autrement appellé la Terre australe, méridionale, Antarctique & inconnuë: the French and the Terres australes

Where was Gonneville's land? Did the French discover Australia? The Abbe Paulmier's Memoires touchant Vetablissement d'une mission chrestienne dans le Troisieme Monde, autrement appelle la Terre australe, meridionale, Antarctique & inconnue: the French and the Terres australes In this the five-hundredth anniversary year of Columbus's discovery of the Americas w e are led toreflectprincipally on the east-west symmetry conditioning early voyages of discovery: the balancing of the old world of Europe against the new world of the Americas. M y paper is concerned rather with the north-south axis, and the possibility that roughly a decade after Columbus'sfirstvoyage, a new land was discovered in the South. The discoverer hi this case would be Binot de Gonneville, a sea captain from Normandy, during a voyage which took place in 1503-05. This voyage, not mentioned anywhere for one hundred andfiftyyears after it was made, became one of the inspirations for the renewed determination in the searches for the South Land which characterized the eighteenth century. Since the mid-seventeenth century many suggestions have been made as to the location of the land discovered by Gonneville, but no wholly satisfying answers have yet been given. In this paper, w e shall reopen the question by starting with the seventeenth-century rewriting of Gonneville's land by the Abb6 Paulmier, himself a descendant of a native w h o m Gonneville brought back to France. In 1654 the Abb6 Paulmier, a French cleric, set out a proposition for establishing a Christian mission in the Terres australes: Traits (subsequentiy called Mimoires) touchant Vetablissement d'une mission chrestienne dans le Troisieme Monde, autrement appelli la Terre australe, miridionale, Antarctique & inconnue} Paulmier, w h o was canon at Lisieux in 1 Scottish Catholic Archives, Edinburgh, M S 3/6. I am indebted to Dr Elizabeth Bonner,firstof all for her generosity in drawing m y attention to the existence of this manuscript, and then for her invaluable help, as m y research assistant, in collecting material. P A R E R G O N ns 12.2 (January 1995) U 6 M. Sankey Normandy, followed this by another version in 1659.2 These two manuscript versions were followed by two printed editions, the first, unauthorized, in 1663, and the second, authorized in 1664.3 The project used as its centrepiece an extract from Gonneville's account of his journey. Its call for financial support for the establishment of a mission was submitted to the king of France and the Pontifical Court in R o m e and aroused a certain amount of interest and controversy. It was finally to be abandoned, however, in 1667. Paulmier believed that the Terres australes had been discovered in 1503, 150 years previously, by the French ship's captain Gonneville, and that, although then existence was a fact, then location was as yet an object of uncertainty. W e will lookfirstat the bases for the Abb6 Paulmier's belief, and will proceed to a close examination of Gonneville's account of his journey on which Paulmier bases his ideas. W e will then discuss theories as to the identity of Gonneville's land from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries and show why it is necessary for this question to be readdressed. The links joining Paulmier to Gonneville explain the reasons for Paulmier's interest in the Terres australes. Paulmier considers himselftobe the great grandson of a native of the unknown land discovered by Gonneville and, as such, he is all the more anxious that its inhabitants be converted to the one true religion. It is honic that two chance factors have been responsible for the knowledge of Gonneville's voyage. If there had not been the disaster of the attack by pirates and the consequent loss of L'Espoir, occasioning the report to the admiralty, there would perhaps have been no record of this voyage. That this record itself survives is due only to its revival and use by the Abb6 Paulmier.4 ^ Archives des Missions Etrangeres, Paris, M S 357. 3 The 1663 edition was published (by Claude Cramoisy), with a dedication to Pope Alexander V U , supposedly without the authorization of their...