The ships of Nicolas Baudin’s expedition to Australia, “Géographe” and the “Naturaliste”, at Kupang, Timor. State Library of South Australia

In April 1801 French navigator Nicolas Baudin’s expedition was sailing off the south coast of what is now Western Australia. In the spirit of the age, Baudin was making a voyage of scientific investigation, as well as discovery. He was, of course, also spying on the British colony of New South Wales, though that was not verified until much later.^[1]

The voyagers hoped not only to find new places and chart new coastlines but also to make contact with any Indigenous inhabitants they encountered. Equipped with his flagship  Géographe and Naturaliste, under the command of Jacques Félix Emmanuel Hamelin, he was originally accompanied by a large group of scientists, artists and gardeners, though many of these became too ill to complete the voyage, five dying. Many of Baudin’s sailors were also at various stages of the extended expedition. One was lost in the large expanse of the Indian Ocean Baudin named Geographe Bay. 

Or was he?

Timothée Armand Thomas Joseph Ambroise Vasse was born into a bourgeoise family in Dieppe, France in 1774. He grew up and was educated between Rouen, where his father was a legal official, and Dieppe, where members of his extended family lived. During the French Revolution he joined the army, was wounded and later discharged. After a few years as a civil servant, he vanished and joined Baudin’s expedition as a junior assistant helmsman on the Naturaliste. Vasse was in trouble by the time Naturaliste reached Isle de France. Captain Hamelin planned to dismiss him there but lost so many other sailors through desertion that he was forced to keep the troublesome twenty-seven-year-old aboard his ship.

On 30 May 1801, the voyagers encountered what is now Geographe Bay. They landed in small boats and set up camp while the scientists conducted their investigations of the flora and fauna in the area. A few days later, one of the boats was sunk at the Wonnerup Inlet and had to be abandoned. The shore party was rescued but some equipment was left behind. 

Three days later, Vasse was aboard a small boat attempting to recover the equipment. But once again the small boat was swamped by the surf. The crew were washed ashore and only saved by a heroic sailor from another boat who swam ashore through the dangerous waters carrying a rope by which the castaways were able to haul themselves into the other boat. 

Except for Timothée Vasse. Said to have been drinking, he lost his grip on the lifeline and sank into the surf. With no further sign of him, Vasse was presumed drowned and Hamelin made sail, apparently without bothering to confirm the fatality.

The fate of Timothée Vasse would have been simply another footnote in the long history of lost sailors if not for the rumours. Soon after the return of Baudin’s expedition to France in 1803 Parisians began hearing stories that Vasse had not drowned but had survived and been cast away on a strange and very distant shore. Baudin himself was dead by now, but the official expedition account, written by the zoologist on the expedition Francois Peron, discounted the possibility that Vasse had survived. But the rumours persisted and were published in European newspapers. According to these accounts, Vasse lived with the local people for some years then walked hundreds of kilometres of coast to eventually be picked up by an American whaler, handed to the British and subsequently imprisoned in England.

No other Europeans are known to have visited Geographe Bay until after the foundation of the Swan River colony in 1829. When early settlers came into contact with the Wardandi (Wardanup and other spellings) people of the southwest region they began to hear other stories. In 1838 George Fletcher Moore was told while visiting the Wonnerup area that Vasse did not drown. With the help of the local people, he lived for several years and died of natural causes somewhere between present day Dunsborough and Busselton. 

He seems to have remained almost constantly upon the beach, looking out

for the return of his own ship, or the chance arrival of some other. He pined away gradually in anxiety, becoming daily, as the natives express it, weril, weril (thin, thin.) At last they were absent for some time, on a hunting expedition, and on their return they found him lying dead on the beach, within a stone s throw of the water’s edge.

They describe the body as being then swollen and bloated, either from incipient decomposition, or dropsical disease. His remains were not disturbed even for the purpose of burial, and the bones are yet to be seen.^[2]

There were other versions of the tale. In one, Vasse was thought to have eventually been murdered. A ‘society in Paris’ was said to be offering a reward for the recovery of his bones – ‘the natives know where they are’, wrote one of the Swan River colony’s early settlers, Georgiana Molloy, in 1841.^[3] In another, based on European features observed among Indigenous people around Geographe Bay, it was suggested that Vasse had fathered children with Wardandi women.^[4]

Some attempts have since been made to resolve these conflicting possibilities. Among several books and articles on the subject^[5] is one written by a descendant of Timothée Vasse. According to Alain Serieyx, family tradition holds that the lost sailor did survive and eventually return to France.^[6] The book is a speculative fiction based on this belief but adds another thread to a fascinating tale. 

Whether or not Timothée Vasse lived, pined, and died as a lone white man on a distant continent will never be known for sure. Whatever his fate, his memory is preserved in the name of the Vasse River and of the Vasse region of southwestern Australia.

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^[1] Jean Fornasiero and John West-Sooby (transl. and eds.), French Designs on Colonial New South Wales: François Péron’s Memoir on the English Settlements in New Holland, Van Diemen’s Land and the Archipelagos of the Great Pacific Ocean, The Friends of the State Library of South Australia Inc., Adelaide, 2014. 

^[2] The Perth Gazette and Western Australian Journal 5 May 1838, p. 71.

^[3] Alexandra Hasluck, Georgiana Molloy: portrait with background, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1955.

^[4] Oldfield, Augustus. “On the Aborigines of Australia.” Transactions of the Ethnological Society of London, vol. 3, 1865, pp. 215–98. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/3014165. Accessed July 2023, P. 219. Oldfield mistakenly thought Vasse was one of Baudin’s scientists, but his opinion was based on his own observations of the Geographe Bay area.

^[5] Thomas Brendan Cullity, Vasse: An Account of the Disappearance of Thomas Timothée Vasse, 1992; Edward Duyker, ‘Timothée Vasse: A Biographical Note’, Institute for the Study of French-Australian Relations, https://www.isfar.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/51_EDWARD-DUYKER-Timoth%C3%A9e-Vasse-A-Biographical-Note.pdf, accessed July 2023; 

^[6] Alain Serieyx, Wonnerup: the sacred dune, Abrolhos Publishing, Perth, c2001, translation [from the French] by David Maguire.