Excerpt from The North American Review, Vol. 26
But in comparing the review of D"Entrecasteaux"s Voyage with that of the Russian expedition, a certain graduation of the jealousy and prejudice against strangers may easily be discerned. England was at war with Prance; the Quarterly Review, if possible, was still more at war with everything connected, however remotely, with that country. Its hostile feeling could only be soothed by the casual circumstance, that some leading character connected with the enterprise, had previously sustained some relation or other to England.
The papers of D"Entrecasteaux had fallen into the hands of the English government. M. de Rossel, one of the most distinguished officers of the expedition, had passed some time in England, and had, it seems, even been employed by the Admiralty, in some professional works, before he returned to his own country, where he shortly afterwards was admitted again into the French navy, and commissioned to draw up an account of his voyage. Nothing apparently but a short residence in England could have shielded M. de Rossel against the ill will of the reviewer; a misfortune which attended the next French maritime expedition. The hardships and sufferings, which befell those who were engaged in it, were almost entirely the result of the carelessness, covetousness, and stupidity of the commander. Baudin was a merchant captain. This circumstance alone would not have been a sufficient motive for lessening the anticipation of the service he might render to science. Eustache Bruix, one of the most distinguished ministers of the French naval department, at least among those who were professional men, began his naval career in the mercantile line. Marchand"s voyage has been the source of many useful data in navigation and geography; and the most recent example in England, of distinguished services performed by the captain of a merchant vessel, is Weddel, the immediate object of whose voyage towards the South Pole was to procure a cargo of seal skins, who has furnished valuable information on the islands and seas at the southern extremity of this continent, and whose discovery of the group called by him Orkney Islands, has not, we believe, yet been contested. In our own country, the military navy has drawn some of its most distinguished officers from among the commanders of mercantile ships.
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