The incident, however, supplies another link in the chain of evidence as to the completeness of Napoleon's oriental policy, and yields another proof of the vigour of our great proconsul at Calcutta, by whose foresight our Indian Empire was preserved and strengthened.[213] Bonaparte's enterprises were by no means limited to well-known lands.
The unknown continent of the Southern Seas appealed to his imagination, which pictured its solitudes transformed by French energy into a second fatherland.

Australia, or New Holland, as it was then called, had long attracted the notice of French explorers, but the English penal settlements at and near Sydney formed the only European establishment on the great southern island at the dawn of the nineteenth century.
Bonaparte early turned his eyes towards that land.

On his voyage to Egypt he took with him the volumes in which Captain Cook described his famous discoveries; and no sooner was he firmly installed as First Consul than he planned with the Institute of France a great French expedition to New Holland.

The full text of the plan has never been published: probably it was suppressed or destroyed; and the sole public record relating to it is contained in the official account of the expedition published at the French Imperial Press in 1807.[214] According to this description, the aim was solely geographical and scientific.

The First Consul and the Institute of France desired that the ships should proceed to Van Diemen's Land, explore its rivers, and then complete the survey of the south coast of the continent, so as to see whether behind the islands of the Nuyts Archipelago there might be a channel connecting with the Gulf of Carpentaria, and so cutting New Holland in half.